"Be not aghast of least nor most, In thee is conceived of the Holy Ghost, To save the souls that were for-lost. Letare."

Fifteenth Century.



PART TWO

CHAPTER III

THE ANNUNCIATION II

And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.

S. Luke I. 38

O God, who through the fruitful virginity of blessed Mary didst bestow on mankind the rewards of eternal salvation: grant, we beseech thee, that we may experience her intercession for us through whom we were made worthy to receive the author of life, even Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord.

Roman.

S. Mary's momentary hesitation had been due to the surprise that she felt at the nature of the angelic message and the difficulty that there was in relating it to her state of life. That she, a virgin, should bear a son was vastly perplexing; but the answer of S. Gabriel speedily cleared away the difficulty: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee."

Blessed Mary had no difficulty about the supernatural; she was not afflicted with the modern disease that there are no things in heaven and earth save such as are contained in our philosophy. She was not of those who "cannot believe what they do not understand," It was enough for her that a message had come from God: and no matter how little she was able to understand the mode of God's proposed action within her, she was willing to offer herself to be the instrument of the will of God. No doubt that was an habitual attitude and not one taken up on the spur of the moment. It is indeed very rarely that what seem spontaneous actions are really such; and S. Mary's first word was nearer spontaneity than the second. Her exclamation in answer to the angelic Ave was the natural expression of her surprise at so unexpected a message: its variance from all her thought about her life was the thing that struck her; and therefore her instinctive, "How can this be?"

In this second word we have a quite different attitude. Here is revealed to us the profound and perfect humility of the Blessed Virgin. This answer comes from the experience of her whole life. It is of such utterances that we say that they are revealing. What we at any time say, does in fact reveal what we are—what we have come to be through the experience of our past life. And no doubt it is these instinctive utterances which are called out by some unexpected occurrence that reveal more of us than our weighed and guarded words. Back of every word we utter is a life we have lived. We have been spending years in preparing for that word. Perhaps when the time comes to speak it, it is not the word we thought we were going to speak, it was not the prelude to the action we thought that we were going to perform; it reveals a character other than the character that we thought we had. How often the Gospel brings that before us! We see the young Ruler come running with his brave and perfectly sincere words about inheriting eternal life; and then we see him going away when the testing of our Lord demonstrated that he only partly meant what he said. It was not S. Peter's brave words, "Though I should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee," that revealed the truth about the Apostle; but the words that were called out by the accusation that he was of the company of Jesus: "Then began he to curse and swear, saying, I know not the man." We have no doubt that he knows himself better when he catches the eye of the Master turned upon him and goes and weeps bitterly. And it is true, is it not, that it is through words called out and thoughts stirred by the unexpected that we often get new insight into our real state. A sudden temptation reveals a hidden weakness, and we go away shamed and crushed, saying, "I did not suppose that I was capable of that."

But, thank God, the revelation is sometimes the other way; the testing uncovers unexpected strength. Of many a man, after some strong trial, we say, "I did not know that he had so much courage, or so much patience." The quiet unassuming exterior was the mask of an heroic will of which very likely not even the possessor suspected the true quality. The annals of martyrdom are full of these revelations of unsuspected strength. Here in the case of Blessed Mary the quality revealed is that of humility so perfect that it dreams not of revolt from the most searching trial. It reveals the character of our Mother better than pages of description can do. What we see in response to the bewildering messages brought by S. Gabriel is the instinctive movement of the soul toward God. There is utter absence of any thought of self or of how she may be affected by the purpose of God; it is enough that that purpose is made plain.

It seems well to insist on this instinctive movement of the soul in Blessed Mary because it is one item of the evidence that the Catholic Church has to offer for its belief in her sinlesssness. Any momentary rebellion, no matter how soon recovered from, or how sincerely regretted, against the will of God, would be evidence of the existence of sin. But where sin is not, where there is an unstained soul, there the knowledge of the will of God will send one running to its acceptance; there will be active acceptance and not just submission to God's will. Submission implies a certain effort to place ourselves in line with the will of God; it often seems to imply that we are accepting it because we cannot do anything else. But with Blessed Mary there is a glad going forth to meet God; the word "Behold" springs out to meet the will of God half-way. It is as though she had been holding herself ready, expectant, in the certainty of the coming of some message, and now she offers herself without the shadow of hesitation, as to a purpose which was a welcome vocation: "Behold the Handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." How wonderful is the humility of obedience!

And humility—we must stress this—is not a virtue of youth; it is not one of the virtues which ripen quickly, but is of slow development and delayed maturity. Modesty we should expect in a maiden, and lack of self-assertion; and perhaps obedience of a sort. But those do not constitute the virtue of humility. We are humble when we have lost self; and Mary's wondering answer reveals the fact that she is not thinking of herself at all, but only of the nature of the divine purpose. That that purpose being known she should at all resist it would seem to her a thing incredible, for all her life she had had no other motive of action. Her will had never been separated from the will of God.

This state of union which was hers by divine election and privilege, we achieve, if we achieve it at all, by virtue of great spiritual discipline. We are, to be sure, brought into union with God through the sacraments, but the union so achieved is, if one may so express it, an unstable union; it is union that we have to maintain by daily spiritual action and which suffers many a weakening through our infidelity, even if it escape the disaster of mortal sin. We sway to and fro in our struggle to attain the equilibrium of perfection which belonged to Blessed Mary by virtue of the first embrace of God which had freed her from sin. Our tragedy is that we have almost universally lost the first engagements of the Spiritual Combat before we have at all understood that there is any combat. The circumstances of life of child and youth are such that we become familiar with sin before we have the intelligence to understand the need of resisting, even if we are fortunate enough to have such an education as to awaken a sense of sin as opposition to God. There is nothing more appalling than the tragedy of life thus defiled and broken and put at a disadvantage before it even understands the ideals that should govern its course. When the vision of perfection comes and we face life as the field where we are to acquire eternal values, we face it with a poisoned imagination and a depleted strength. Our battle is not only to maintain what we have, but to win back what we have lost.

Under such conditions there is much consolation in learning that we do not fight alone but have the constant help and sympathy of those who are endued with the strength of perfect purity. Their likeness to us in that they have lived the life of the flesh assures us of their understanding, and it assures us too of their active co-operation. We cannot understand the saints standing outside human life and from the vantage point of their achievement looking on as indolent spectators. The spectacle offorded by the Church Militant must call out the active intercession of all the saints; but especially do we look for helpful sympathy from her who is our all-pure Mother, whose very purity gives her intercession unmeasured power. She is not removed from us through her spotlessness, but by virtue of her clearer understanding of the meaning of sin and of separation from God that it brings her, she is ready to fly to the help of all sinners by her ceaseless intercession.

The difficulty of our spiritual lives rises chiefly out of the clash of wills. A disordered nature, a tainted inheritance, a corrupt environment conspire to make the life of grace tremendously difficult. It is only in a very limited sense that we can be said to be free, and there is no possibility at all of overcoming the handicap of sin, except firm and careful reliance on the grace of God. That grace, no doubt, is always at our disposal as far as we will use it. Grace moves us, but it does not compel us; and we are free always to reject the offer of God. We have only to open our eyes upon the world about us to see how rarely is the grace of God accepted in any effective way. Even in convinced Christians the attempt to live the divided life is the commonest thing possible. It sometimes seems as though the prevalent conception of the Christian life were that it is sufficient to offer God a certain limited allegiance and that the remainder of the life will be thereby ransomed and placed at our disposal to use as we will. We find the theory well worked out in the current attitude of Christians toward the observance of the Lord's Day. It appears to be held that an attendance at Mass or Matins is a sufficient recognition of the interests of religion and that the rest of the day may be regarded, not as the Lord's Day, but as man's—as a day of unlimited amusement and self-indulgence. The notion of consecration is abandoned. The only possible outcome of such theories of life is what we already experience, spiritual lawlessness and moral degradation. I suppose that it will only be through social disaster that society will come (as usual, too late) to any comprehension that the will of God is what it is because it is only by following the road that it indicates that human life can reach a successful development. God's laws are not arbitrary inflictions; they are the expression of the highest wisdom in the guidance of human life.

Our elementary duty therefore as sane persons is to find what is the will of God in any given circumstances; there should be no action until there has been an effort to ascertain that will. It were as sensible to set about building a house without ascertaining what strength of foundation would be needful, or without knowing the sort of material we were going to use. One has heard of a house being built in which it turned out that there was a room with no doorway, or floor to which no stair led up; but we do not commend such exploits as the last word in architecture, nor would we commend a farmer who planted his crops without attention to the nature of the soil. There are certain elementary principles of common sense which we pretty uniformly hold to in every matter with the exception of religion; that seems to be held to be a separate department of human activity with laws of its own, and in which the principles which govern life elsewhere do not hold. We do not profess this theory, of course, but we commonly act upon it, while we still profess to respect the will of God. It is strange too that after having habitually neglected that will, we are greatly disappointed, not to say indignant, when after a life of disobedience and scorn of God's thought for us we do not find ourselves in possession of the fruits of righteousness. If it were not so tragic it would be amusing to hear men declaim against the justice of a God whose existence they have habitually disregarded.

But, it is often said, it is not by any means easy to find out God's will. You talk about it as though it were as easy to know God's will as it is to know the multiplication table. Well, at least it can be said that one does not get to know the multiplication table without effort! What objections as to the obscurity of the will of God will seem to mean is that it does take effort to ascertain it. I do not know of any reason for regarding that as unjust. If the will of God is what religion maintains that it is, of primary importance to our lives, we might well be glad that it is ascertainable at all, at the expense of whatever effort.

An Almighty God has implanted within every human heart the knowledge that His will exists and is important; that is, He has endowed every man with a conscience which is the certainty of the difference between right and wrong, and the conviction that we are responsible for our conduct to some power outside ourselves; that we are not at liberty to conduct life on any lines we will. Having so much certainty, it surely becomes us to set about ascertaining the nature of the power and the details of the will. The very nature of conscience, as a sense of obligation, rather than a source of information, should create a desire for a knowledge of what God's will is in detail, that is, what is the content of the notion of right and wrong.

And while it is true that such content can only be ascertained by work, it is not true that the work is a specially difficult one. The Revelation of God's mind made through Holy Scripture and through the life of His Incarnate Son is an open book that any one can study; and to any objection that such study has led chiefly to difference of opinion and darkness rather than light, the answer is that such disaster follows for the most part only when the guidance of the Catholic Church is repudiated; when, that is, we pursue a course in this study which we should not pursue in relation to any other. If we were studying geology we should not regard it as the best course to scorn all that preceding students have done, and betake our unprepared selves to field work! But that is the "Bible and the Bible only" theory of spiritual knowledge. If we want to know the meaning of the Biblical teaching, we must make use of the helps which the experience of the Church has richly provided.

But the nature of the divine will and the particulars of our obligation are not merely, perhaps one ought to say, not chiefly, to be assimilated through our brains. The best preparation for the doing of the will of God and the progressive entering into His mind, is an obedient life. Purity of character will carry us farther on this path than cleverness of brains. Our Lord's own rule is: He that doeth the will shall know of the doctrine. In other words, we understand the mind of God and attain to the illumination of the conscience, through sympathetic response to the will so far as we have seen it. And each new response, in its turn, carries us to a deeper and clearer understanding of the will. That is to say, our conscience, by habitual response to God's will, so far as it knows it, is so illumined as to be able to make trustworthy judgments on new material submitted to it.

This is, of course, to be otherwise described as the working of God the Holy Spirit. He is the Spirit that dwelleth in us and directs us to right judgments if we will listen. Our danger is that self-will constantly crops up and complicates the case by representing that the line suggested by the Holy Spirit is not in reality in accord with our interests. This opposition between the seeming interests suggested by self-will, which indeed often contribute to our immediate gratification, and our true interests as indicated by the monitions of the Holy Spirit, constitutes the real struggle of the life during the period of probation. The will of God in every circumstance is usually plain enough; but it is silenced by the clamour of the passions and desires demanding immediate gratification: and we are all more or less children in our insistence on the immediate and our incapacity to wait. But I must insist again that it is not knowledge that is wanting but sympathy with the course that knowledge directs. We pursuade ourselves that we do not know, when the real trouble is that we know only too well. One feels that much that is put forward as inability to understand religion is at bottom merely disinclination to obey it.

Not that there is not room for genuine perplexity. Often it happens that we are not at all certain in this or that detail of conduct. In that case it is well to consider whether it is necessary to act before we can attain certainty through study or advice. But if act we must, we can at least act with honesty, not making our will the accomplice of our passions or interests.

I do not believe that there are many cases in which we shall go wrong if we make use of all the means at our disposal. A diligent doing of the will of God does undoubtedly bring light on unknown problems and unexpected situations in which we from time to time find ourselves. If our constant attitude has been one of free and glad obedience we need not fear to go astray. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord," Blessed Mary said; and such an attitude has never failed to meet the divine approval and call out the help of God. Just to put ourselves utterly at God's disposal is the clearing of all life. "Into Thy hands," is the solution of all difficulties.

I sing a maiden That is matchless; King of all kings To her Son she ches.

He came all so still To His Mother's bower, As dew in April That falleth on the flower.

Mother and maiden Was never none but she; Well might such a lady God's Mother be. English, Fifteenth Century.



PART TWO

CHAPTER IV

THE VISITATION I

And Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Judah; and entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elizabeth.

S. Luke I. 39, 40.

Grant, we beseech thee, O Lord God, to us thy servants, that we may evermore enjoy health of mind and body, and by the glorious intercession of blessed Mary, ever a virgin, be delivered from present sorrows and enjoy everlasting gladness. Through.

ROMAN.

Those who were faithful in Israel and were looking forward to the fulfilment of God's promises would be drawn together by close bonds of sympathy. It oftentimes proves that the bonds of a common ideal are stronger than the bonds of blood. It was to prove so many times in the history of Christianity when in accordance with our Lord's words the closest blood relation would be broken through fidelity to Him, and a man's foes be found to be those of his own household. But also it is true that the possession of common ideals becomes the basis of relations which are stronger than race or family. We may be sure that the members of that little group of which we catch glimpses now and then in the progress of the Gospel story found in their expectation of the Lord's deliverance of Israel such a bond. We feel that S. Mary and S. Joseph must have been members of this group and that they were filled with the hope of God's manifestation. Another family which shared the same hope was that of the priest Zacharias whose wife Elizabeth was the cousin of Mary of Nazareth. It is to their house in the hill country of Judah we now turn our thoughts.

It was a part of the angelic message to S. Mary that her cousin Elizabeth had "conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren." Overwhelmed as S. Mary was by the vocation which had come to her, perplexed as to what should be her next step, she may well have seized upon the words of the angel as a hint as to her present course. She must confide in some one, and that some one, we instantly feel, must be a woman. In her own great joy she would need some one with whom to share it. In her unprecedented case she would need a counselor, and who better could afford aid than her cousin whose case was in so many respects like her own, who was already cherishing a child whose conception was due to the intervention of God? We understand therefore, why it is that without waiting for the further development of events, Mary arises, and goes "with haste" to the home of her cousin.

It is just now a house full of joy. For many years there had been happiness there, but a happiness over which a cloud rested. The affliction of barrenness was their sorrow. To the Hebrew there was no true family until the love of the father and the mother was incarnated in the child; and through many weary days Zacharias and Elizabeth had waited until hope quite failed as they found themselves beyond the possibility of bearing a child to cheer them and to hand on their name. We may be sure that they were reconciled to the will of God, for it is written of them that they were righteous, and the central feature of righteousness is the acceptance of the divine will. But though one cheerfully accepts the divine will there may still remain a consciousness of a vacancy in life; and therefore we can understand the joy that came to Zacharias when the angel appeared to him in the temple when he was exercising the priest's office and offering the incense of the daily sacrifice with the message that he should have a son. It was a joy that would be unclouded by the God-sent dumbness which was at once a punishment for his lack of immediate faith and a sign of the faithfulness of God. It was a joy that would hasten his steps homeward with the glad tidings, a joy that would fill the heart of Elizabeth when she heard the message of God. Soon the consciousness of the babe in her womb would be a growing wonder and a growing happiness. There would be a new brightness in the house where the aged mother waits through the months and the dumb father with his writing tablet at his side meditates upon the meaning of the providence of God and upon the prophecies of the angel as to his child's future. But what that future would be he could hardly expect to witness; he was too old to live to the day of his child's showing unto Israel.

It is to this house that we see S. Mary hastening, sure of finding there a heart in which she can confide. She "entered into the house of Zacharias and saluted Elizabeth." We are not told what the words of her salutation were, but no doubt it was the customary Jewish salutation of peace. There could have been no more appropriate salutation exchanged between these two in whose souls was abiding the peace of a perfect possession of God. The will of God to which they had been accustomed to offer themselves all their lives was being accomplished through them in unexpected ways; but it found them as ready of acceptance as they had been in any of the ordinary duties of life wherein they had been accustomed to wait upon God. We may seem sometimes to go beyond Holy Scripture in our interpretations of feelings and thoughts which we are sure must have been those of the actors in the drama of salvation unfolded to us in the Scriptures; but are we not entitled to infer from God's actions a good deal of the nature of the instruments He uses? Are we not quite safe in the case of S. Mary in the deduction from the nature of her vocation of the spiritual perfection to attribute to her? Does not God's use of a person imply qualities in the person used? It is on this ground that I feel that we are quite safe in inferring the spiritual attitude of S. Mary and of S. Elizabeth from the choice God made of them to be the instruments of His purpose of redemption.

But we are not inferring, we have the record with us, when we think of the joy of the mothers transcended in the joy of the children. The unborn Forerunner becomes conscious of the approach of Him of whom he is to say later: "Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world"; and there is an instantaneous movement that can only be that of recognition and worship. The movement of the child is at once understood and translated by S. Elizabeth: "And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy."

In the presence of such joy and such sanctity we feel that our proper attitude is the attitude of adoring wonder that S. Elizabeth expresses. We worship our hidden Lord as the unborn prophet worships Him. We have no question to ask, nor curiosity at the mode of God's action. We are quite content to accept His action as it is revealed to us in Scripture; a revelation of the divine presense in humanity which has been abundantly verified in all the history of the Church. That verification in experience—a verification that we ourselves can repeat—is worth infinitely more than all the argument that the centuries have seen.

"Blessed art thou among women," S. Elizabeth cries; and in doing so she is but repeating the words of the angel of the Annunciation. This word, too, we presently hear S. Mary taking up, and under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost saying: "From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed."

And so they have. All generations, that is, that have been faithful to the Gospel teaching and have assimilated in any degree the consequences of S. Mary's nearness to God. When we speak of "Blessed" Mary we are but doing what angels and holy women have done, and it is great pity if in doing so we have to make a conscious effort, if the words do not spring spontaneously from our lips. Surely, we have not gone far toward the mastery of God's coming in the Incarnation if we have not felt the purity of the instrument through whom God enters our nature. The outward and visible sign of our understanding is found in our ability to complete the Ave as the Holy Spirit has taught the Church to complete it: "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death."

This reiterated attribution of blessedness to Mary our Mother calls us to pause and ask just what blessedness means. It is of course the characteristic Scripture locution for those who in some way enjoy the special favour of God. Blessedness is the state of those who have received special divine gifts of favour. A characteristic scriptural description of the blessedness of the righteous in contrast with the disaster of the unrighteous may be studied in the first Psalm. In the New Testament we naturally turn to the Sermon on the Mount where the Beatitudes give us our Lord's thought about blessedness. I think that we can describe the notion of blessedness there presented as being the state of those who have taken God at His word and chosen Him, and by that act of choice, while they have forfeited the world and the world's favour, have attained to the spiritual riches of the Kingdom of God. They are those to whom God is the Supreme Good, in whose possession they gladly count all things but loss. These are they who here in the pilgrim state have already attained to the enjoyment of God because they want nothing other or beside Him.

Supremely blessed, therefore, is Mary our Mother, who never for a moment even in thought was separate from God. From the earliest moment of her existence she could say, "My beloved is mine and I am His." We try to think out what such a fact may mean when translated into terms of spiritual energy, and it seems to mean more than anything else boundless power of intercession such as the Church has attributed to S. Mary from the earliest times. We see no other way of estimating spiritual power save as the power of prayer. It is through prayer that we approach God—for we remember that sacrifice is but the highest form of prayer. The blessedness of S. Mary, that peculiar degree of blessedness which seems signalized by the reiterated attribution of the quality to her, must for our purposes to be understood as "power with God," power of intercession. It means that our Lord has chosen her to be a special medium of approval to Him, and that through her prayers He wills to bestow upon men many of His choicest gifts. Naturally, her prayers, like our prayers, are mediated by the merits of her divine Son; nevertheless they have a peculiar power which is related to her peculiar blessedness in that she is the mother of Incarnate God, and by special privilege is herself without sin. Of all those to whom we are privileged to turn in the joys and tragedies of our lives for the sympathy which helps through enlightened, loving prayer, we most naturally resort to her who is all love and all sympathy, Mary, the Mother of Jesus, blessed among women forever.

Although we are told nothing of these days that S. Mary spent with her cousin Elizabeth, we do gather that she remained with her until her child was born and that she saw S. John in his mother's arms, and was a partaker in the joy of the aged parents. She was present when Zacharias, his speech restored, uttered the Benedictus in thanksgiving for the birth of his son. It was then, having seen her own Son's Forerunner that S. Mary went back to Nazareth filled more than ever with the sense that God's hand was in the events that were taking place, and of the approach of some crisis in her nation's history. It must have been that she talked intimately with Zacharias and Elizabeth and with them tried to imagine what was the future in which these two children were so closely concerned. When we consider the Magnificat and the Benedictus not as the "Gospel Canticles" to be sung in Church but as the utterances of pious Israelites under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, we feel how very vivid must have been their expectation of God's action in the immediate future, and with what intense love and interest they thought of the parts to be taken by their children in the deliverance God was preparing. How often they must have pondered the God-inspired saying: "He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David; and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end." "And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways; to give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins, through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the Dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace."

We think too of a more intimate sympathy that there would have been between these two women, drawn now so close together, not only by the blood bond, but by the bond of a common experience. What wonderful hours of communing during these three months! The peace of the hills of Judah is all about them and the peace of God is in their souls. What ecstatic joy, what ineffable love was theirs in these moments as they thought of the children who were God's precious gift to them. I fancy that there were many hours when they ceased to think of the mystery that hung over these children's destiny, and became just mothers lost in love of the coming sons.

As we try to think out their relation to each other it presents itself to us as a relation of sympathy. Sympathy is community of feeling; it is maimed and thwarted when there is feeling only on one side. We speak of our sympathy in their affliction for others whom we do not know and who do not know us, but that is a very imperfect rendering of the perfect thing. No more than love does sympathy reach its perfection in solitude. But here in this village of Judah we know that we have the perfect thing—sympathy in its most exquisite form.

This capacity for sympathy is one of the greatest of human endowments, and, one is glad to think, not like many human endowments, rare in its manifestation. In its ordinary manifestation it is instinctive, is roused by the spectacle of need calling us to its aid. There come to our knowledge from time to time instances of what seem to us very grievous failures in sympathy, but investigation shows that ignorance is very commonly at the bottom of them. When human beings are convinced of a need they are quite ready to respond. Indeed this readiness to respond makes them the easy victims of all sorts of impostures, of baseless appeals which play upon sentiment rather than convince the understanding. And just there lies the weakness of sympathy in that it is so easily turned to sentimentality. But the sentimentalist who gushes over ills, real or imaginary, can commonly be brought to book easily enough. For one thing the sentimentalist is devoted to publicity. He loves to conduct campaigns and drives, to "get up" a demonstration or an entertainment. I do not mean that he is a hypocrite but only that he loves the lime-light. When any tragedy befalls man his impulse is to organise a dance in aid of it. It is extraordinary how many people there are who will aid a charity by dancing to whom one would feel it quite hopeless to appeal for the amount of the dance tickets. And yet they are not wholly selfish people; there does lie back of the dance a certain sympathetic impulse. We easily deceive ourselves about ourselves, and it is well to be sure that we have true sympathy and not just sentiment. It is not so difficult to find out. We can test ourselves quickly enough by examining our giving. Do we give only when we are asked? Do we yield to spectacular appeals or only to those that we have examined and found good? Do we put the spiritual interests of humanity first? Is there any appreciable amount of quiet spontaneous giving which is known to no one? Do we prefer to be anonymous? Such tests soon reveal what we are like. One who never gives spontaneously, without being asked, we may be sure is lacking in sympathy.

But of course one does not mean that sympathy is so closely related to what we call charity as what I have just said, if left by itself, would seem to imply. That is indeed the common form assumed by sympathy which has to be called out. But the best type of sympathy is the expression of our knowledge of one another; it is based on our knowledge of human nature and our interest in human beings. Because it is based on knowledge it is not subject to be swept away by the sweet breezes of sentimentalism. To its perfect exercise it is needful to know individuals not merely to know about them. The ordinary limitations of sympathy come from this, that we do not want to take time and pains to know one another. That, for example, is where the Church falls short in its mission to constitute a real brotherhood among its members—they have no time nor inclination really to know one another, or they find the artificial walls that society has erected impassable. It is, in fact, not very easy to know one another, and it is impossible to develop the complete type of sympathy with a crowd. For one must insist that this highest type of sympathy requires, what the word actually does mean, mutual sharing in life, the participation in the lives of our fellows and their partaking in our lives.

So we understand why perfect sympathy is conditioned on spirituality. Unless we are spiritually developed and spiritually at one we cannot share in one another's lives fully. Where there are lives separated by a gulf of spiritual differences the completest sympathy is impossible. And we understand why Incarnate seems so much nearer to us than God unincarnate. It is true that "the Father Himself loveth you"; it is true that it is the love of the Blessed Trinity that is expressed in the Incarnation. The Incarnation did not create God's love and sympathy, it only reveals it. Yet it is precisely the Incarnation that enables us to lay hold on God's sympathy with a certainty and sureness of grasp that we would not otherwise have. The sight of "God in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself" is more to us in the way of proof than any amount of declaration can be. To be told of the sympathy of God is one thing, to see how it works is another.

Our personal need in this matter is to find the sympathy that will help us in something outside ourselves, outside the limitations of human nature. Much as we value human sympathy, precious as we find its expression, yet we do find that it has for the higher purposes of life serious limitations. It has very little power to execute what it finds needs to be done. A man may understand another's weakness and may utterly sympathise with it; he may advise and console, but in the end he finds that he cannot adequately help. The case is hopeless unless he can point the sufferer to some source outside himself on which he can draw, unless he can lead him to the sympathy of God. God can offer not only consolation, not only the spectacle of another life which has triumphed under analogous circumstances, but He can give the power to this present weak and discouraged life to triumph in the place where it is. He can "make a way of escape."

But there is another form of sympathy which we crave and need which is just the communion of soul with soul. We are not asking anything more or other than to show ourselves. We are overwhelmed with the loneliness of life. It comes upon us in the most crowded places, this sense of separation from all about us. Oh, that I might flee away and be at rest, is our feeling. It is here that we specially need our Lord. Blessed are we if we have learned to find in Him the rest we need for our souls, if we have learned to open the door that leads always to Him; or, perhaps to knock appealingly at that door which He will never fail to open. It is then that we find the joy of the invitation "Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest."

But Christ, the perfect Sympathiser, has associated others with Himself. If we can go to him, so can others; the Way is open to all. And those who go and are associated with Him are gathered into a family. Here among those who have followed the interests which are ours, and have pursued the ends that we are pursuing, and cultivated the qualities which we value, we feel sure of that sympathetic understanding of life which we seek. And especially among those members of the Body who have gone on to the end in fidelity to the ideals of the life which is hid with Christ in God shall we look for understanding and help. It is from this point of view that the Communion of Saints will mean so much to us. We value the strength of mutual support which inevitably grows out of associated life. We cannot think of the saints of God as having passed beyond us into some place of rest where they are content to forget the problems of earth: rather we are compelled to think of them as still actively sharing in those interests which are still the interests of their divine Head. Until, Jesus Himself cease to think of us who are still in the Pilgrim Way, and cease to offer Himself on our behalf, we cannot think of any who are in Him as other than intensely interested in us of the earthly Church, or as doing other than helping by prayer for us that we with them may attain our end. And especially shall we feel sure that at any moment of our lives we may turn to the Mother in confident expectancy of finding most helpful sympathy and most ready aid. Her life to-day is a life of intercession, of intercession which has all the power of perfect understanding and perfect sympathy. Let us learn to go to her; let us learn that as God is praised and honoured in His saints, as our Lord choses to work through those who are united to Him, so it is His will that great power of prayer shall be hers of whom He assumed our nature, that nature through which He still distributes the riches of His grace.

As I lay upon a night, My thought was on a Lady bright That men callen Mary of might, Redemptoris Mater.

To her came Gabriel so bright And said, "Hail, Mary, full of might, To be called thou art adight;" Redemptoris Mater.

Right as the sun shineth in glass, So Jesus in His Mother was, And thereby wit men that she was Redemptoris Mater.

Now is born that Babe of bliss, And Queen of Heaven His Mother is, And therefore think me that she is Redemptoris Mater.

After to heaven He took His flight, And there He sits with His Father of might, With Him is crowned that Lady bright, Redemptoris Mater.

English, Fifteenth Century.



PART TWO

CHAPTER V

THE VISITATION II

And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

S. Luke I. 46, 47.

Forasmuch as we have no excuse, because of the multitude of our sins, we plead through thee, O Virgin Mother of God, with Him whom thou didst bear.

Lo, great is thine intercession, strong and acceptable with our Saviour.

O Stainless Mother, reject not us sinners in thine intercession with Him Whom thou didst bear.

COPTIC.

Wonderful was this day in the little town of Judah where these two women, each in her way an instrument of God in the upbuilding of His Kingdom, met and rejoiced together. There is revealed to us something of the possibilities of our religion when we try to follow the thought of these two women. They are so utterly devoted to God that God can speak to them. I think that it is well for us to dwell on this fact for a moment. We are apt to look upon inspiration, what is described as being filled with the Holy Ghost, as somewhat of a mechanical mode of God's operation. Our mistaken view is that God takes control of the faculties of a human being and uses them for His own purposes.

But that is quite to misunderstand God's method. God uses the faculties of a man in proportion as the man yields himself to Him; and one who is living a sincere religion becomes in a degree the medium of God's self-expression. This possibility of expressing God increases as we increase in sanctity. Those who have completely yielded themselves to God in a life of sanctity become in a deep sense the representatives of God: they have, in S. Paul's phraseology, His mind. To be capable of so becoming the divine instrument it is necessary, not only to offer no opposition to God's purposes, but to make ourselves the active executants of them. Our Christian vocation is thus to be the instrument of God, to be the visible demonstrations of His power and presence. There is a true inspiration, a true speaking for God to-day, no doubt, as true as at any time in the Church's history, wherever there is sanctity. What is lacking to present day utterances of sanctity is not the action of the Holy Spirit, but authentication by the Church: that is given only under certain special circumstances and for special purposes. But there is no need to limit the inspiring action of the Holy Spirit to such utterances as for special reasons have received official recognition.

What we need to feel is the constant action of the Holy Spirit—that He wants to speak through every man. And it helps to clear our minds if we go to our Bibles with the expectation of finding here, not exceptions to all rules which obtain in common life, but types of the divine action. The isolation of Bible history has done much to create a feeling of its unreality. What has happened only in the Bible can, we are apt to feel, safely be disregarded in daily life in the twentieth century. But if what we find there is customary modes of divine action in life, exceptional in detail rather than in principle, the attitude we shall take will be wholly different. We shall then study them with the feeling expressed in S. Paul's saying, "These things are written for our learning," and we shall expect to find in us and about us the same order of divine action, we shall learn to look on our lives as having their chief meaning in the fact that they are possible instruments of God; we shall learn to regard failure as failure to show forth God to the world.

In a way we can read our facts backward: the fact that "Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost," and the fact that Mary under the same divine impulse gave utterance to the words of the Magnificat, is a revelation of the character of these two women which would satisfy us of their sanctity had we no other evidence of it. The choice of them by God to be His instruments is evidence of the divine approval; and that approval can never be false to the facts; what God treats as holy must be holy.

So we come to holy Mary's Song with the feeling that in studying it we shall find in it a revelation of S. Mary herself. She is not an instrument on which the Holy Spirit plays, but an intelligent being through whom He acts. She, like S. Elizabeth, is filled with the Holy Spirit—she had never been in the slightest degree out of union with God—but still the Magnificat is her utterance; it represents her thought; it is the measure, if one may so put it, in modern terminology, of her degree of spiritual culture. Much that we say about S. Mary, her simplicity, her social place, and so on, seems to carry with it the implication of the ignorance and spiritual dullness that we associate with the type of poverty we are accustomed to to-day. But the poor folk whom we meet in association with our Lord are neither ignorant nor spiritually dull; and it would be a vast mistake to think of Blessed Mary as other than of great intelligence and spiritual receptivity, or as deficient in understanding of the details of her ancestral religion. We have no reason to be surprised that she should sing Magnificat, or to think that the Holy Spirit was speaking through her thoughts which were quite beyond her comprehension. Inspired she was, but inspired, no doubt, to utter thoughts that had many times filled her mind.

Her spiritual attitude as revealed in the Magnificat is but the attitude which must have been hers habitually—the attitude that exalts God and not self. "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." That is the starting-place of all holy souls—the adoration of God. True humility is never self-conscious because self is lost in the vision of God. S. Mary was bearing in her pure body the very Son of God. Admit, if you will, that as yet she did not understand the full reach of her vocation; but she did know that she had been chosen by God in a most signal manner to be the instrument of His purpose. That which S. Elizabeth spoke under divine impulse,—"Whence is this that the mother of my Lord should come to me?"—must have had clear meaning for her. But the wonder of all that God is accomplishing through her only brings her to God's feet. That "He that is mighty hath done me great things," is but the evidence of His sanctity, not of her greatness.

One never gets through wondering at the beauty of humility; and it is one of the marks of how far we are from spiritual apprehension when we find this splendid virtue unattractive. It does indeed cut across many of the instinctive impulses of our nature; it can hardly be said to have dawned on humanity as a virtue until the Incarnation of God. Therein it has revealed to us God's attitude in His work and, by consequence, the natural attitude of all such as would associate themselves with God. It is not so much a self-denying as a self-forgetting virtue. It is ruined by the very consciousness of it. Such phrases as "practicing humility" seem self-contradictory—when one begins to practice humility it becomes something else. We do not conceive of our Lady as setting out to be humble, of thinking of what a humble person would do under such and such circumstances. She does not, as I was saying, think of herself at all, but thinks of God. The "great things" she has are His gift. That He has looked upon her low estate, and that in consequence of His visitation "all generations shall call her blessed," is a manifestation of the divine glory and goodness, not an occasion of pride to the recipient of God's gifts.

We who are so self-seeking, who are so greedy of praise, who are constantly wanting what we feel is our due, who hunger to be "appreciated," who are full of proud boasting about our accomplishment, will do well to meditate upon this point of view. We acknowledge the supremacy of God with our lips, but in our acts we are quite prone to assume that we are independent actors in the universe where whatever we have is due to our own creative powers. We claim a certain lordship over life, a certain independent use of it. We resent the pressure of religious principle as setting up a sort of counter-claim to control that which it is ours to dispose of as we will. Most of our difficulties come from this godless attitude which claims independence of life. It results in a religion which is willing to pay God tribute, but is not willing to belong to God. But the humble person has nothing of his own and moreover wants nothing; he wants simply that God shall use him, that he shall be found a ready instrument in God's hands.

It is this readiness that we find in Blessed Mary when she answered the astonishing announcement of the angel with her, "Behold the Handmaid of the Lord." It is that quality which we find in her here when she construes God's purpose in terms which go out far beyond her individual life and sees in her experience but one item in God's dealing with humanity in His age-long work of "bringing His wanderers home." We should have far less difficulty and find our lives far more significant if we could get rid of our wretched egotism and find it possible to lose ourselves in the work of God. We should then find the work important because it is God's work and not because we are associated with it. We should also find it less easy to be discouraged because we should not understand our failure to be the failure of God. Discouragement is but one of the aspects of egotism, and not the most attractive.

We cannot rise to anything like a passion of holiness unless we have found God to be all in all. Only so can we lose ourselves in God. And I must, at whatever risk of over-dwelling, stress the fact that we can only attain this point of view by dwelling on God and not on self. Let God be the foreground of our thought. Let our souls magnify the Lord. Let us dwell upon the "great things" God has done for us. In every life there is such a wonderful manifestation of the divine goodness—only we do not take time to look for it. It is well to take the time: to write out, if need be, our spiritual history. We shall then find abundant evidence of the goodness of God. It may be that it is a goodness that is seen chiefly in offers, in opportunities to be something which we have declined or have only imperfectly realized. Be that as it may, there is no life, I am quite convinced, that has not a spiritual history which is a marvellous history of what God at least wanted to do for it. It is also a history of what He actually has done: a history of graces, of rich gifts, of deliverances. It matters not that we have been so heedless as to miss most of what God has done. The facts stand and are discoverable whenever we care to pay enough attention to them to ascertain their true meaning. When we do that, then surely we shall be compelled to do, what blessed Mary never needed to do, fall at God's feet in an act of penitence, seeing ourselves, perhaps for the first time, in the light of God's mind.

The Magnificat, if we consider it as a personal expression, is a wonderful expression of selfless devotion, where the perception of the glory and majesty of God excludes all other thoughts. It is, too, a thanksgiving for the personal gift which is her vocation to be the Mother of the Saviour. Out of her lowliness she has been exalted—how highly she herself cannot at the time have dreamed. We can see what was necessarily involved in God's choice of her, and to-day we think of her as in her perfect purity exalted in heaven far above all other creatures. Mother of God most holy we call her, and in the words of her canticle ever repeat her thanksgiving as our thanksgiving, too, for the vocation that God sent her and for the gift which through her has come to us.

But there is a more universal aspect of the Magnificat. Essentially it is the presentation of the constant antithesis which runs through all revelation between the flesh and the spirit, between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of this world. It embodies the conception of God striving to save a world which has revolted from Him, and now at last entering upon that stage of His work which is the beginning of a triumph over all the powers of the adversary. In Mary's song the contrasted powers are still presented under the Old Testament terminology which was the natural form of her thought. The adversaries of God are the proud, the mighty, the rich; while those who are on God's side are the humble, the god-fearers, the hungry. The form of the thought and its essential meaning remain the same through the centuries, though our terminology changes somewhat. Presently in the pages of the New Testament we shall get the presentation as the contrast between the children of this world and the sons of God. We shall find the briefest expression of the latter to be the saints.

We no longer feel that rich and poor express a spiritual contrast. Nor do we, who are quite accustomed to the action of labour leaders, regard social position as being the exclusive seat of arrogancy. But we know that the spiritual values which are expressed in the varying terminology are constant; we know that the warfare between God and not-God is still the most important phenomenon in the universe. And it happens as we look out on the battlefield where the forces of good and evil contend, where before our eyes they seem to sway back and forth on the field of human life with every varying fortunes, that we not seldom feel that the battle is not obviously falling to the side of righteousness. There come moments when we are oppressed by what seems to us the lack of power in the ideals of righteousness. The appeal of the proud and of the rich is so dazzling; the splendour of the visible kingdom of the world is so intoxicating, the contagion of the crowd which follows the uplifted banner of Satan is so penetrating, that we hardly wonder to see the new generations carried away in the sweep of popular enthusiasm. Here is excitement, exhilarating enjoyment, the throb and sting of the flesh, the breathless whirl of gaiety, the physical quiet of satisfied desires. What is there to appeal on the other side? As the crowds troop past to the sound of music and dancing they for a moment raise their eyes, and above them rises a hill whereon is a Cross and on the Cross an emaciated Victim is nailed, and at the foot of the Cross a small group of discouraged folk—S. John, The blessed Mother, the other Mary—stunned by the grief born of the death of Son and Friend.

These two utterances stand in eternal contrast: "All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me": and, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." As yet the appeal made from an "exceeding high mountain" visibly seems to prevail against that made from "the place which is called Calvary."

And what have we to counteract the depression which is the natural reaction from the spectacle of the world-rejection of Christ? We have the truth which is embodied in Mary's Magnificat, we have the fact of Mary's vocation to be the Mother of God. The revelation of God's meaning and purpose is a basis of optimism which no promise of Satan can overthrow. When all is said, the view from the exceeding high mountain is a view of the Kingdom of this world only; from the place called Calvary you can see the Kingdom of God as well. From this point of vantage alone the permanent values of life are visible; and to the taunt flung at us, the taunt so terrifying to the young, "You are losing life," the enigmatic reply from the Cross is that you have to lose life to gain it; that permanent and eternal values are acquired by those who have the self-restraint and the foresight not to sacrifice the substance to the shadow, nor to mistake the toys of childhood for the riches of manhood. "In the meantime life is passing and the shadows draw in and you have not attained" so they say. True: we count not ourselves to have yet attained; but we press on toward the mark of our high calling in Christ Jesus our Lord. We are not in a hurry, because the crown we are seeking is amaranthine, unfading. We are not compelled to compress our enjoyment within a given time; we do not awake each morning with the thought that we may not outlast the daylight; we are not hurried and fevered with the sense of our fragility. The kingdoms of the world and the glory of them must be seized now: Satan cannot afford to wait because his kingdom has an end. But God can afford to wait because of His Kingdom there is no end.

We are content then with promises and with such partial fulfilment as we find on our pilgrim-way. We are content because we see the end in the beginning. To those who in the first days of the Church objected that though the promises were wonderful and abundant the fulfilment was small; to those who said we do not yet see the perfection of the kingdom; the answer of inspiration was: True, we do not yet see the accomplishment of all of God's promises, but we do see Jesus. And there is where we stand to-day. The work that God has to do in the spiritualising of the human race is tremendous; but we actually see its beginning in Jesus, and we are content to wait with God for the perfect accomplishment.

And we must remember when we think of the work of God in terms of time, that the length of time that is required to accomplish the spiritualisation of the human race is not to be estimated in terms of the divine will but in terms of the human will. It is not divine power but human resistance which is the determining factor, for God will not compel us to obey Him, nor would compelled obedience have any spiritual value. And we can estimate something of the human resistance that has to be overcome by concentrating attention upon one unit of that resistance. That is, we can learn from the study of our own life what is the resistance of one human being to the triumph of the will of God; and, taking oneself as a fair sample of the race can multiply our resistance to God's will by the numbers of the race. We are perfectly certain of the will of God: God wills that all men shall come to the knowledge of the truth and be saved. "This is the will of God, even your sanctification." So far as we are thwarting that will we are playing into the hands of the power of evil. But that power is of limited existence; it draws to its end. Its death knell was struck when the noon-day darkness lifted from Calvary.

Therefore the rejoicing of blessed Mary, whose Song reads the necessary end in the beginning, is well considered; and we rejoice with her and in her. It is our privilege—and it is a vast privilege—to rejoice in blessed Mary as the instrument of God in bringing the triumph of His Kingdom one stage nearer its accomplishment. And in especial we rejoice because we see in her one more, and the most marked, illustration of the divine method. "He hath regarded the low estate of His Handmaiden." "He hath exalted them of low degree." "He hath filled the hungry." The method of God is to work to His results through those who are spiritually receptive. The less of self there is in us the more room there is for God. "The Kingdom of God is within you," that is, the starting-point of God's work in the building of the Kingdom is within the soul of man. He must master the inner man, must win the allegiance of our souls, before His work can make any progress at all. The Kingdom of God cometh not "with observation," that is, from the outside in an exhibition of power; it must of necessity come from the inside in demonstration of the Spirit. "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God."

In blessed Mary we see the new starting-point in this last stage of the work of God. For the foreseen merits of her Son she is brought into union with God and spared the taint of sin, and becomes the second Eve, the Mother of the new race. Acting upon her pure humanity, the Holy Spirit produces that humanity which joined to the divinity in the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity becomes the Christ, the Son of the Living God. In Mary's rejoicing in this so great fact, the bringing of human redemption, we rightly share. It is with a right understanding of her Song that the Church throughout the ages has embodied it in its worship and through it constantly rejoices in God its Saviour. The actual detailed accomplishment of God's work in man's redemption is going on under our eyes. It is regrettable that human stupidity seems to prefer dwelling upon what seem God's failures, and are actually our own, rather than upon the constant triumphs of grace. But God reigns; and we can always find grounds of optimism if we can find that He is day by day reigning more perfectly in us. When we pray "Thy Kingdom Come," the field to examine for the fulfilment of our prayers is the field of our own souls.

Our Lady took the road To Zachary's abode; O'er mountain, vale and lea, Full many a league sped she Toward Hebron's holy hill, By God's command and will.

Full light did Mary, make Of trouble for his sake. God's Very Son of yore Within her breast she bore; And angels bright and fair, Unseen, her fellows were.

She, ere she took her way, An orison would say, That God her steps might tend Safe to their journey's end; And there, in manner meet, Her cousin she 'gan greet.

Elizabeth full fain Eft bowed her head again; She wist 'twas God's own Bride, As, worshipful she cried: 'O Lady, Full of Grace, Whence do I see thy face?'

O House and Home of bliss, O earthly Paradis— Nay, Heaven itself on ground Wherein the Lord is found, The Lord of Glory bright, In goodness great and might—

Clean Maiden thou that art, Come, visit this my heart; And bring me chief my Good, God's Son in Flesh and Blood; Bless body, soul; and bide For ever by my side.

From the Koeln Gesang-Buch. XVI Cent.



PART TWO

CHAPTER VI

S. JOSEPH

Joseph, her husband, being a just man—

S. Matt. I. 19.

O God, our refuge and our strength, look down in mercy upon thy people who cry to thee; and by the intercession of the glorious and immaculate Virgin Mary, mother of God, of St. Joseph her spouse, and of thy blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and of all saints, in mercy and goodness hear our prayers for the conversion of sinners, and for the liberty and exaltation of our holy mother the church. Through.

ROMAN.

When we read the Gospels, not simply as a record of events but as revelation of the method of God, we are constantly impressed with what we cannot otherwise describe than as the care of God for detail. There is a curious type of mind which finds it possible to think of God as Creator and Ruler of the universe, but impossible to conceive Him as interested in or concerning Himself with the minutiae of human life; who can conceive God as caring for a solar system or a planet, but not as caring for a baby. Surely it is a strange notion of God that thinks of Him as estimating values in terms of weight and measure: surely much more intelligible is the Gospel presentation of Him as concerned with spritual values and exercising that minute care over human life which is best expressed by the word Father. It is very significant that as the volume of revelation unrolls, the earlier notions of God as Ruler, Governor, King, give way to the notion of Father, until in our Lord's presentation of the character of God it is His Fatherhood which stands in the forefront. What our Lord emphasises in the character of God are precisely the qualities of love and care and sympathy which the word Father connotes.

And nowhere do we see this loving care of God which we call His Providence better set out for our study than in the detailed preparation which preceded and attended the birth of His Son into this world. There was that preparation of the Mother who was to be the source of the humanity of the Child Jesus which we have been dwelling upon; there was also the preparation for the proper guardianship of both Mother and Child during the years of Jesus' immaturity. There are certain things which are self-evident when once we turn our minds to them; and it is thus self-evident that the care of our Lord and of His Blessed Mother would require the preparation of the man to whom they should be committed. In the state of society into which our Lord was born, He and His Mother would need active guardianship of a peculiar nature. The man who should provide for our Lord's infancy must be a man, in the nature of the case, who was receptive of spiritual monitions and devoted to the will of God. It was a delicate matter to live before the world as the husband of Mary of Nazareth, and to live before God as the guardian of her virginity and as the foster-father of her divine Son. Only a very choice nature could respond to the demands thus made upon it, a nature which had been habitually responsive to the will of God and long nurtured by the richness of His grace.

We know very little of St. Joseph; but God's choice of him for the office he was to fulfil near the blessed Virgin Mary and her Son reveals the nature of the man. He is described to us as "a just man," one whose judgment would not be swayed by prejudices, but who would be open to the consideration of any case upon its merits: a man who would not view events in the light of their effect upon himself and his plans, but who can calmly consider what in given circumstances is due to others. Such men are rare at any time for their production is a matter of slow discipline.

We gather that both S. Joseph and S. Mary were of the same lineage, were descended from the same ancestor, David. We gather also that S. Joseph was much older than his bethrothed wife, for he had been already married and had a family. All the notices of these brothers and sisters of the Lord imply that they were considerably older than the Child of Mary, and that they felt that they had the sort of authority over Him which commonly belongs to the elder children of a family; the sort of doubt and criticism of His course which would be the instinctive attitudes of elders toward the unprecedented course of a younger. We have, I think, a right to infer from the terms of the narrative, that S. Joseph would have been well acquainted with S. Mary and was not taking a wife who was a stranger to him. Indeed, considering the actual development of the situation, I myself feel quite certain that those are right who maintain that the proposed marriage was intended to be merely a nominal union, the ultimate design of which was the protection of the virginity of Mary. I find it impossible to think of that virginity as other than of deliberate purpose from the beginning, and prompted by the Spirit of God for the purposes of God for which it served. There is, to be sure, no revelation of this in Holy Scripture, but there are facts which suggest themselves to the devout meditations of saints which we feel that we may safely take on the authority of their spiritual intuitions. Such a fact is this of Mary's purposed virginity which I am content to accept on the basis of its congruity with S. Mary's life and vocation. Of the fact of her perpetual virginity there can be no dispute among Catholic Christians.

To S. Joseph thus preparing himself to be the guardian of the blessed Virgin it could only come as a tremendous shock that she should be found with a child. Our character comes out at such times of trial as when something that we had taken quite for granted fails us, and we are left breathless and bewildered in in the face of what would have seemed impossible even had we thought of it. What was S. Joseph's attitude? The beauty and sanity of his character at once shows itself. Grieved and disheartened as he must have been, disappointed as he could not but be, he yet thinks at once of his bethrothed, not of himself. How far could he save her?—that was his first thought. He would at least avoid publicity. "Being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, he was minded to put her away privily." It is the quality that we express by the word benevolence—the quality of mature and deliberate wisdom. We feel that such a man could be trusted under any circumstances of life.

We feel, too, that God would not leave S. Joseph in doubt as to the course he was to pursue, or as to the character of Mary herself. There could no shade of suspicion be permitted to rest upon her. Hence "while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins."

It is not difficult to imagine the joy of S. Joseph at this angelic message. We all know the sense of relief which comes when, after facing a most trying situation, and being forced to make up our minds to act when action either way is almost equally painful, we find that we are delivered from the necessity of acting at all, that the whole state of things has been utterly misunderstood. It was so with S. Joseph; and in his case there was the added joy which springs from the nature of the coming Child as the angel explains it to him. He who had accepted the charge of Mary was now to add to that charge the charge of her Child: and the Child is the very Saviour whom his soul and the souls of all pious Israelites had longed for. "Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins." We cannot expect that S. Joseph would have taken in the full meaning of this message, but he would have understood that he was called to a wondrous co-operation with God in the work of the redemption of Israel.

As we think of S. Joseph it is this co-operation which is the significant thing in his life. As we study human life in the only way in which it is much worth while to study it, in the light of revelation, it becomes clear to us that there is purpose in all human life. Often we observe a purpose that we are not able to grasp, but in the light of what we know from revelation we do not doubt of its presence. Even lives that seem obscure and insignificant we feel sure must have a divine meaning; and the pathetic thing about most human life is that it never dreams of its own significance. We are consumed with the notion that God's instruments must be great, while it is on the face of revelation that they are commonly humble and of seeming insignificance. It is the work that is important, and the instrument becomes important through its relation to the work. We all at least have the common vocation of the Christian, and it would be difficult to exaggerate the spiritual significance of that. S. Joseph seems to us at once set apart by his vocation to be the guardian of the divine Child, to protect and to nurture the years of His human immaturity. This is no doubt a unique vocation, but is it quite so far separated from ordinary Christian experience as we assume? You and I are also constituted guardians of the divine Presence. This very morning, it may be, we have received within the Tabernacle of our breast the same Presence that S. Joseph guarded—the Presence of Incarnate God. In that Presence of His humanity our Lord abode with us but a few minutes and then the Presence withdrew: but He left behind Him a real gift, the gift of an increase in sacramental grace.

Was that a light thing: Was it indeed so much less than the vocation of S. Joseph? And how have we guarded this Presence? Those few moments after the reception of our Incarnate Lord at the altar—how do we habitually spend them? Do we spend them in guarding the Presence? There is much to be learned about the meaning and the value of guarding the Eucharistic Gift. Our thanksgiving after Communion is fully as important as our preparation for receiving it. I am more and more inclined to think that much of the fruitlessness of communions which is so sad a side of the life of the Church is due to careless reception and inadequate thanksgiving. It is the adoration of our Lord within the Tabernacle of our body and thanksgiving to Him for having come to us that is the appropriation of the Gift of the Sacrament. He comes to us and offers Himself to us with all the benefits of His life and death; and then having offered Himself "He makes as though he would go farther," and he does actually go, unless we are awake to our spiritual opportunity, and constrain Him, saying, "abide with us, for it is toward evening and the day is far spent."

We think of S. Joseph then, as with a relieved and rejoicing heart he enters upon his new realised vocation as the head of the Holy Family. The marriage which he had been upon the point of abandoning he now enters that he may give S. Mary and her coming Child his full protection.

So S. Joseph "took unto him his wife; and knew her not till she had brought forth her first-born Son." These words have been so misunderstood as to imply that the marriage of S. Joseph and S. Mary was consummated after the birth of our Lord. Grammatically they convey no such implication; the mode of expression is perfectly simple and well known by which a fact is affirmed to exist up to a certain time without any implication as to what happens after. And the meaning of the passage which is not at all necessitated by its grammatical construction is utterly intolerable in Catholic teaching. The constant teaching of the Church is the perpetual virginity of Mary—that she was a virgin "before and in and after her child-bearing." There was to be sure an heretic named Helvidius who taught otherwise, but he was promptly repudiated by all Catholic teachers and but served to emphasize the depth and clearness of the Catholic tradition. Upon this point there has never been any wavering in the mind of the Church, and to hold otherwise shows a lamentable lack of a Catholic perception of values and but a superficial grasp upon what is involved in the Incarnation.

The impression we get of S. Joseph is that of a man of great simplicity and gentleness of character—that childlikeness which was later praised by his foster Son. Such qualities do not produce much impression on the superficial observer, but they are of great spiritual value. They are the concomitants of a special type of open-mindedness. Open-mindedness is a quality much praised and little practiced. But the open-mindedness which is commonly praised is not the open-mindedness which is praiseworthy. What is at present meant by open-mindedness is in reality failure to have any mind at all upon a given subject. It is the attitude of doubt which never proceeds so far as to arrive at a solution. To have an open mind means to the contemporary man to hold all conclusions loosely, to consider all things open to question, to be ready to abandon what now appears to be true in favour of something which to-morrow may appear to be more true. In other words, we are invited to base life on pure scepticism.

Now no life can be so conducted. We live by a faith of some sort, whether it be a faith in God or no. The most sceptical mind has to believe something to act at all. It cannot even doubt without affirming a belief in its own intellectual processes. The open mind that never reaches any certainty to fill it is a very poor possession indeed. And it is not at all what we mean when we say of S. Joseph that he was open-minded. We mean that he was receptive of new spiritual impressions and capable of further spiritual development. There are minds, and they are not unusual among people of a certain degree of spiritual development, which we can best describe as having reached a given stage of growth and then shut up. Or, to vary the figure, they impress one as having a certain capacity, and when that has been reached, being able to contain nothing further. They come to a stop. From that point they try to maintain the position they have acquired. But that is impossible: they inevitably fall away unless they are going forward. When the power of spiritual assimilation is dead, we are spiritually in a dying condition.

What we mean by having an open and childlike mind, then, is that one has this power of spiritual assimilation and, consequently, a power of growth. The sceptic is afflicted with spiritual indigestion; he is an invalid who is quite certain that any food that is offered him is indigestible. His soul withers away through its incapacity to believe. The open-minded saint has a healthy spiritual digestion. This does not mean that, in vulgar parlance, he can, "swallow anything"; it does mean a power of discrimination between food offered him,—that he assimilates what is wholesome and rejects the rest. The sceptic is pessimistic as to the existence of any wholesome food at all; he starves his soul for fear that he should believe something that is not true. The saint, with the test of faith, sorts the food proposed to him, and grows in grace, and consequently in the knowledge and the love of God.

Open-mindedness is sensitiveness to spiritual impressions, readiness for spiritual advance, even when such impressions cut across much that has seemed to us well settled, and such advance involves the upset of his established ways of thought. What distinguishes the evolution in the thought of the sceptic from that in the thought of the saint is that in the one case the result is destructive and in the other constructive. The sceptic is like a man who starts to build a house, and then periodically tears down what he has so far built and begins again on a new plan; the saint is like the house builder who broadens his plan in the course of construction, and who finds that within the limits of his general scheme there is room for indefinite improvement. The one never gets any building at all; the other gets a palace of which the last stages are of a more highly decorated school of architecture than he had conceived, or indeed, could conceive, when he began his work.

In S. Joseph's case nothing could be more revolutionary in appearance than the truth he was asked to accept. He was asked to believe in the virgin-motherhood of his bethrothed, and in the fact that the Child soon to be born was He Who was to save Israel from his sins. He was asked to accept these incredible statements and to act upon them by taking Mary to wife as he had proposed. And he did not hesitate to accept the evidence of a dream and act in accordance with it. How could he do this? Because the required action which seemed so revolutionary of all his previous notions was, in fact, quite in accordance with his knowledge of God and of the promises of God. Though a simple man, perhaps because he was a simple man, he would know something of the teaching of the prophets. That teaching would have given him thoughts about God which would have, unconsciously, prepared him for these new acts of God. Though we cannot see before how a prophecy is to be fulfiled, after the event we can see that this is what is intended by it. We were actually being prepared by the prophecy for what was to take place. And thus, no doubt, S. Joseph's mind, being filled with the teaching of the Scriptures which he had heard read in the Synagogue every Sabbath day, would find that this new act of God on which he was asked to rely was, in fact, but a new step in the unfolding of that Providence which had for centuries been shaping the history of his nation.

It is a quality to cultivate, this simple open-mindedness which is ready to respond to new spiritual impulses. It is precisely what prevents that deadly attitude of soul which proceeds as though religion were for us exhausted: as though we had reached the limit of expectancy. But to expect nothing is to receive nothing, because it is only expectancy that perceives what is offered. We move in a world which is thronged with spirtual impulses and energetic with spiritual powers. God is trying to lead us on to new spiritual experiences by which we may attain to a better understanding of Him. There is no assignable limit to our possible growth. But we fix a limit when we close our souls to further experiences by the practical denial that they exist. If we are childlike, we are always expecting new things of our Father; if we are open-minded we are alive to the activities of the spiritual world. We are conscious of possessing a growing religion, a religion truly evolutionary, constantly bringing to our knowledge unsuspected riches stored in the very principles whose meaning we had assumed that we had exhausted.

Perhaps one of the treasures of our religion of which we have not achieved full consciousness is God's choice of us to be the guardians of His revelation. It is our charge "to keep the faith." I suppose that this responsibility is commonly regarded as belonging to some vaguely imagined Church which hands it on from generation to generation, to us among others, but without imposing on us an obligation of any active sort. But we are the Church—members in particular of the Body of Christ. And in the dissemination of the faith the last appeal is to us, not to some outside tribunal. When the Church wishes to discover its faith and make it articulate, its place of search is in the minds and hearts of the faithful. Our responsibility is to testify to the Catholic Faith, not so much by positively asserting it as by making it active and vivid in our lives so that its presence and power can by no means be mistaken. You, for instance, in common with the rest of the faithful, are the custodians of this truth of the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It may seem a small matter, but it is not. That it is not is readily seen from this fact, that when the perpetual virginity of our Blessed Mother is denied then also the Incarnation of her Son is denied or is held only in a half-hearted way. The Church stresses such facts, not only because they are facts, but because by their character they form a hedge about the truth of the Incarnation of our Lord. And we who are Catholic Christians must feel an obligation to hold fast this fact. We ought actively to show our firm adherence to it. How? Chiefly by our attitude towards Blessed Mary herself, by the devotion that we show her. If we are quite indifferent to devotion to Blessed Mary, if we show her no honour, if we likewise fail in honour to her guardian, S. Joseph, is it not to be expected that our grasp upon the truths which are enshrined in such devotion will be feeble, and that we shall hold them as of small moment? The whole system of Catholic thought is so nicely articulated, so consistently held together, that failure to hold even the smallest constituent indicates a faulty conception of the whole. Catholics are constantly accused of over-stressing devotion to blessed Mary and the saints and thereby encroaching upon the honour due to our Lord. The answer to the reproach is to be found in the question: Who to-day are defending to the very death the truth of our Lord's Incarnation and the truths that hang upon it? Are they those who deny the legitimacy of invocation, or those in whose religious practise it holds an important and vital place?

A PANEGYRICK ON THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY.

I do not tremble, when I write A Mistress' praise, but with delight Can dive for pearls into the flood, Fly through every garden, wood, Stealing the choice of flow'rs and wind, To dress her body or her mind; Nay the Saints and Angels are Nor safe in Heaven, till she be fair, And rich as they; nor will this do, Until she be my idol too. With this sacrilege I dispense, No fright is in my conscience, My hand starts not, nor do I then Find any quakings in my pen; Whose every drop of ink within Dwells, as in me my parent's sin, And praises on the paper wrot Have but conspired to make a blot: Why should such fears invade me now That writes on her? to whom do bow The souls of all the just, whose place Is next to God's, and in his face All creatures and delights doth see As darling of the Trinity; To whom the Hierarchy doth throng, And for whom Heaven is all one song. Joys should possess my spirit here, But pious joys are mixed with fear: Put off thy shoe, 'tis holy ground, For here the flaming Bush is found, The mystic rose, the Ivory Tower, The morning Star and David's bower, The rod of Moses and of Jesse, The fountain sealed, Gideon's fleece, A woman clothed with the Sun, The beauteous throne of Salomon, The garden shut, the living spring, The Tabernacle of the King, The Altar breathing sacred fume, The Heaven distilling honeycomb, The untouched lily, full of dew, A Mother, yet a Virgin too, Before and after she brought forth (Our ransom of eternal worth) Both God and man. What voice can sing This mystery, or Cherub's wing Lend from his golden stock a pen To write, how Heaven came down to men? Here fear and wonder so advance My soul, it must obey a trance.



PART TWO

CHAPTER VII

THE NATIVITY

She brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

S. Luke II. 7.

It is very meet to bless thee who bore the Christ, O ever Blessed and Immaculate Mother of God. More wondrous than the Cherubim and of greater glory than the Seraphim art thou who remaining Virgin didst give birth to God the Word. Verily, do we magnify thee, O Mother of God. In thee, O full of grace, all creation exults, the hierarchy of angels and the race of men. In thee sanctified temple, spiritual paradise, glory of virgins, of whom God took flesh, through whom our God Who was before the world became a Child. Of thy womb He made a throne, and its dominion is more extensive than the heavens. In thee, O full of grace, all creation exults: glory to thee.

RUSSIAN.

We see a man and a woman on the road to Bethlehem where they are going to be taxed according to the decree of Augustus. Bethlehem would be known to them as the home of their ancestors, for they were both of the lineage of David. It was a painful journey for them for Mary was near the time of her delivery. We follow them along the road and into the village, as the twilight fades, and see them seeking shelter for the night. Bethlehem is a small place and the inn is crowded with those who have come on the errand with them, and the only place where they can find refuge for the night is a stable. But they are not used to luxury, and the stable serves their purpose.

It also serves God's purpose. One understands as one reads this narrative of the Nativity what is meant by the Providential government of the world. We see how various lines of action, each free and independent, yet converge to the production of a given event. The different characters in the drama are all pursuing their own courses and yet the result is a true drama, not an unrelated series of events. Caesar's action, Joseph's lineage, our Lord's conception, all working together, bring about the fulfilment of prophecy by the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem. There is in the universe an over-ruling will which works to its ends by co-operating with human freedom, and not destroying it. We are not the sport of chance, not the slaves of fate, but free men; and yet through our freedom, through our blunders and rebellions and sins as well as through our obedience, the work of God is moving to its conclusion. Man did all that he could to defeat the ends of God and to thwart God's purpose of redemption. Yet on a certain night in Bethlehem of Judea the light of God overcame the human darkness, and the voices of God's angels pierced the human tumult, and Jesus Christ was born. "God of the substance of his Father begotten before all worlds, man of the substance of his mother, born in the world; perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting."