We, then, the Body of Christ in this place, offer the Sacrifice of Christ. What is the status of the priest? He is a differentiated organ of the Body, not created by the Body, but created by God in the creation of the Body. He is not separate from the Body, an official imposed upon it from the outside, nor is he a creation of the Body set apart to act upon its behalf. He is one mode of the expression of the Body's life—the Body could not perfectly perform its functions without him any more than a physical body can perfectly function without a hand or an eye. But neither has the priest any existence apart from the Body of which he is a function. The Sacrifice that he offers is not his on behalf of the Body, but the Body's own Sacrifice which is made through his agency.

But a complete body has a head; and of the Body which is the Church the Head is Christ. We, the members, have our life from Him, the Head; we are able at all to act spiritually because of our union with Him. He is our life; and the acts of the Body are ultimately the acts of the Head. The Sacrifice which the Body offers as the means of its approach to Divinity is One Sacrifice of the Head: and the priestly function of the Body has any vitality because it is Christ Who is its life, Who functions through the priest, Who is, in fact, the true Priest. He Himself is both Sacrifice and Priest; and that which is offered here is indentical with that which is offered there.

Our life flows from our Head, is the life of Christ in us. So closely are we associated with Him that we are called His members, the instrument through which His life expresses itself, through which He acts. By virtue of the life of Christ of which all we are partakers, we are not only members of Christ, but members one of another. Our spiritual life is not our own affair, but we have duties one to another, and all the members of the Body are concerned in our exercise of our gifts, have, in fact, claims on the exercise of them.

This mutual inherence of the members of the Body and these obligations to one another are in strict subordination to the Head; but they are very real duties and privileges which are ours to exercise. What we are concerned with at present is that from, this view of them that I have been presenting there results the possibility and obligation of intercession; the love and care of the members for one another is exercised in their prayers for one another. This privilege of intercession is one of the privileges most widely valued and most constantly exercised throughout the Church. Days of intercession, litanies, the offering of the Blessed Sacrifice with special intention, the constant requests for prayers for objects in which people are interested, all testify to the value we place on the privilege. Here is one action in regard to which there is no doubting voice in Christendom.

But curiously, and for some reason to me wholly unintelligible, there are a great many who think of this right and duty of intercession between the members of the One Body as exclusively the right and duty of those who are living here on earth; or at least if it pertain to the "dead" it is in a way in which we can have no part. One would think—and so the Catholic Church has always thought—that those whom we call dead, but who are really "alive unto God" with a life more intense, a life more spiritually clear-visioned, than our own, would have a special power and earnestness in prayer, and that a share in their intercessions is a spiritual privilege much to be valued. They are members with us of the same Body; death has not cut them off from their membership, rather, if possible, it has intensified it, or at least their perception of what is involved in it. They remain under all the obligations of the life of the Body and consequently under the obligation to care for other members of the Body. The intercession of the saints for us is a fact that the Church has never doubted and cannot doubt except under penalty of denying at the same time the existence of the Body. That certain members of the Church have of late years doubted our right to invoke the saints, to call upon them for the aid of their prayers, is true; but there seems no ground for rejecting the tradition of invocation except the rather odd ground that we do not know the mode by which our requests reach them! As there are a good many other spiritual facts of which we do not know the mode, I do not think that we need be deterred from the practice of invocation on that ground: certainly the Church has never been so deterred.

It is strange how little people attempt to think out their religion, and especially their obligation to religious practice. I have so often heard people say, when the practice of invocation of saints was urged: Why ask the saints? Why not go directly to God? And these same people are constantly asking the prayers of their fellow Christians here on earth! Suppose when some pious soul comes to me and asks me if I will not pray for a sick child, or a friend at sea, I were to reply: "Why come to me? Why not go directly to God?" I should be rightly thought unfeeling and unchristian. But that is precisely what the same person says when I suggest that the saints or the Blessed Mother of God be invoked for some cause that we have in hand! A person comes to me and asks my prayers, and I go to a saint and ask his prayers on precisely the same basis and for precisely the same reason, namely, that we are both members of the Body of Christ and of one another. We have the right to expect the interest and to count on the love of our fellow-members in Christ. We go to the saints with the same directness and the same simplicity with which we go to the living members of the Body, living, I mean in the Church on earth. If it be not possible to do that, then death has made a very disastrous break in the unity of the Body of Christ.

And if we can count so without hesitation upon the love and sympathy and interest of the saints, surely we can count upon finding the same or greater love and sympathy in the greatest of all the saints, our blessed Mother, who is also the Mother of God. She in her spotless purity is the highest of creatures. She by her special privilege has boundless power of intercession; not power as I have explained before, because of any sort of favouritism, but power because her spiritual perfection gives her unique insight into the mind of God. Power in prayer really means that, through spiritual insight we are enabled to ask according to His will "And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us." That is why righteousness is the ground of prevailing intercession, because righteousness means sympathetic understanding of the mind of God.

And in none is there such sympathetic understanding because in none is there such nearness to God, as in Blessed Mary. To go to her in our prayers and to beg her to intercede for us is, of course, no more a trenching upon the unique mediatorship of our Lord than it is to ask my human friend to pray for me. We tend, do we not? to select from among the circle of our acquaintance those whom for some reason we feel to have what we call a special power in prayer when we seek for some one to pray for us in our need. Is it not wholly natural then that we should go to our Blessed Mother on whose sympathy we can unfailingly count and in whose spiritual understanding we can implicitly trust, when we want to interest those who are dear to our Lord in our special needs? We have every claim upon their sympathy because they are fellow-members of the same Body; and we know, too, that He Who has made us one in His Body wills that we should receive His graces through our mutual ministrations.

Mary, Maiden, mild and free, Chamber of the Trinity, A little while now list to me, As greeting I thee give; What though my heart unclean may be, My offering yet receive.

Thou art the Queen of Paradise, Of heaven, of earth, of all that is; Thou bore in thee the King of Bliss Without or spot or stain; Thou didst put right what was amiss, What man had lost, re-gain.

The gentle Dove of Noe thou art The Branch of Olive-tree that brought, In token that a peace was wrought, And man to God was dear: Sweet Ladye, be my Fort, When the last fight draws near.

Thou art the Sling, thy Son the Stone That David at Goliath flung; Eke Aaron's rod, whence blossom sprung Though bare it was, and dry: 'Tis known to all, who've looked upon Thy childbirth wondrous high.

In thee has God become a Child, The wretched foe in thee is foiled; That Unicorn that was so wild Is thrown by woman chaste; Him hast thou tamed, and forced to yield, With milk from Virgin breast.

Like as the sun full clear doth pass, Without a break, through shining glass, Thy Maidenhood unblemished was For bearing of the Lord: Now, sweetest Comfort of our race, To sinners be thou good.

Take, Ladye dear, this little Song That out of sinful heart has come; Against the fiend now make me strong, Guide well my wandering soul: And though I once have done thee wrong, Forgive, and make me whole. Wm. De Shoreham's translation from the Latin, or French of Robt. Grosseteste; C. 1325.



PART TWO

CHAPTER XXIII

THE DESCENT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

Acts II, 3.

Holy Mother of God, Virgin ever blessed, glorious and noble, chaste and inviolate, O Mary Immaculate, chosen and beloved of God, endowed win singular sanctity, worthy of all praise, thou who art the Advocate for the sins of the whole world; O listen, listen, listen to us, O holy Mary, Pray for us. Intercede for us. Disdain not to help us. For we are confident and know for certain that thou canst obtain all that thou wiliest from thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, God Almighty, the King of ages, Who liveth with the Father and the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever.

MS. Book of Cerne, belonging to Ethelwald, BP. of Sherbourne, 760.

"When the Day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place"—I suppose the "all" will be not merely the "twelve," but the "all" that were mentioned by S. Luke a few verses before. He mentions the Apostles by name and then adds, "These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren."

We think of our Lady as sharing in the Pentecostal gift. This was the first act of her ascended Son, this sending forth of the Holy Spirit whom He had promised. It was the fulfilment of the prophecy: "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams." I do not know of anything in the teaching of the Church to lead us to suppose that this gift was to the Apostles alone: rather the thought of the Church is that to all Christians is there a gift of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is imparted to the Church as such, and within the organisation He functions through appropriate organs. "There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit." Whatever the operations of God through the Body of Christ, the same divine energy is making them possible. "All these worketh that one and selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will."

That the Holy Spirit should manifest Himself in her life was, of course, no new experience for S. Mary. Her conscious vocation to be the Mother of God had begun when the Holy Ghost had come upon her, and she had conceived that "Holy Thing" which was called the Son of God. And we cannot think that the Spirit Who is the Spirit of sanctity had ever been absent from her from the moment of her wonderful conception when by the creative act of the Spirit she was conceived without sin, that is, in union with God. But as there are diversities of gifts, so the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost would have meant to her some new or increased gift of God.

For the Church as such this coming of the Spirit meant the entrance of the work of the Incarnation upon a new phase of its action. We may, I suppose, think of the work of our Lord during the years of His Ministry as intensive. It was the work of preparing the men to whom was to be committed the commission to preach the Kingdom of God. They had been chosen to be with Him, and their training had been essentially an experience of Him, an experience which was to be the essence of their Gospel and which their mission was to interpret to the world. "Who is this Jesus of Nazareth Whom ye preach? What does He mean?" was to be the question that they would have to answer in the coming years; and they would have to answer it to all sorts of men; to Jews who would find this conception of a suffering and rejected Messiah "a stumbling-block"; to the Greeks who would find "Jesus and the resurrection" "foolishness"; to all races of men who would have to be persuaded to leave their ancestral religions and revolutionise their lives, and before they would do so would wish to know what was the true meaning of Christ in whose name their whole past was challenged. As we watch the perplexity, the bewilderment, of these Apostles in the face of the collapse of all their hopes on the first Good Friday, as we see them struggling with the fact of the Resurrection, and attempting to adjust their lives to that; and then listen to their preaching and follow their action in the days succeeding Pentecost, we have brought home to us the nature of the action of the Holy Spirit when He came to them as the Spirit of Jesus to enable them to carry on the work that Jesus had committed to them.

We understand that the work of the Spirit was first of all the work of interpreting the experience of the last three years. During these years they had been with Jesus, and the result was an experience which, however wonderful, or rather, just because it was wonderful, was in their consciousness at present little more than a chaotic mass of impressions and memories. It was the work of the Spirit to enkindle and illuminate their understanding so that they could put the experiences of the last three years in order, if one may put it in that way. He enabled them to draw out the meaning of what they had gone through. We are at once impressed with the reality of the work of the Spirit when we listen to the sermon of S. Peter to those who have witnessed the miracle of Pentecost. Here is another miracle of which we have, perhaps, missed something of the wonder. This man who in answer to the mockeries of the crowd—"these men are full of new wine"—stands forth to deliver this exposition of Jesus is the same man who but a few days before had denied his Lord through fear; he is the same man who even after the Resurrection was filled with such discouragement that he could think of nothing to do but to return to the old life of a fisherman, who had said on a day, "I go a-fishing." If we wish to understand the meaning of the coming of the Spirit, let us forget for the moment the tongues of fire, which are the symbol, and read over the words of S. Peter which are the true miracle of Pentecost.

And this action of the Spirit is not sporadic or temporary. We follow the annals of the Church and we find the constant evidence of the Spirit's power and action in the Christian propaganda. The courage with which the Christians meet the opposition of Jews and Romans, in their resourcefulness in dealing with the utterly unprecedented problems they are called on to face, in the intellectual grip of the Apologists who have to meet the criticism of very diverse sets of opponents, in their rapidly growing comprehension of what the Incarnation means, and of all in the way of action that our Lord's directions involve,—all these, when we recall the antecedents of these men, lead us to a clearer apprehension of the nature of the Spirit's work in the Church. As our Lord had promised, He is bringing "all things to their remembrance" and "leading them into all the truth." If we need proof of the constant supernatural action of God in the Church, we get all we can ask in the preaching of Jesus by His followers in these opening years of their ministry.

I said that our Lord's work in the time of His ministry was intensive, the preparing of instruments for the founding of the Kingdom. With Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit it passes into a new stage; it becomes extensive in that it now reaches out to gather all men into the Kingdom. To this end there is now a vast development of the machinery (so to call it) of the Gospel, a calling into existence of the means whereby Christ is to continue His action in men's souls. For there must continue a direct action of Christ or the Gospel will sink to the condition of a twice-told tale: it will be the constant repetition of the story of Jesus of Nazareth Who went about doing good: and it will have less and less power to be of any help to men as it receeds into the past. Without the means which are called into existence to produce continual contact between the Redeemer and the Redeemed we cannot conceive of the Gospel continuing to exist as power.

This is not a matter of pure theory: it is a thing that we have seen happen. We have seen the growth of a theory of Christianity which dispenses wholly or nearly wholly with the means of grace, and reduces the presentation of the Gospel to the presentation of the ideal of a good life as an object of imitation. When one asks: "Why should I imitate this life which, however good in an abstract way, is not very harmonious with the ideals of society at present?" one is told that it is the best life ever lived, the life that best interprets God, our heavenly Father to us. If one asks: "What is likely to happen if one does not imitate this life, but prefers some more modern type of usefulness?" the answer seems to be: "Nothing in particular will happen." In other words, the preaching of the Gospel divorced from the means of grace tends more and more to decline to the presentation of a humanitarian ideal of life which has little, and constantly less, driving power.

We see then as we study the history of the early days of the Church the constant presence and action of the Holy Spirit in the mode and means by which the Gospel is presented. We see it particularly in the development of the ministry and the growth of the sacramental system. It seems to me not very important to find a detailed justification of all the things that were done or established in explicit words or acts in the New Testament. If we are dealing, as we believe that we are, with an organism of which the life is God the Holy Ghost Who is the Vicar of Christ in the building and administration of His Kingdom, I do not see why we should not find in the action of the Kingdom as much of inspiration as we find in its writings. I do not see why we should accept certain things on the authority of the action of the early Christian community, as the baptism of infants and the communion of women, and reject others, as the reservation of the Blessed Sacraments and prayers for the dead. Nor do I see why we should draw some sort of an artificial line through the history of the Church and declare all the things on one side of it primitive and desirable, and all on the other late and suspect! Especially as no one seems to be able to explain why the line should be drawn in one place rather than in another.

If the Holy Spirit was sent by our Lord as His Vicar to preside in the Church, as I suppose we all believe, it was in fulfilment of our Lord's promise to be with it till the end of the world and that the gates of hell should not prevail against it. There is nothing anywhere in Holy Scripture indicating that the Holy Spirit was to be sent to the "primitive Church," even if any one could tell what the primitive Church is, or rather when the Church ceased to be primitive. The Holy Spirit is present as a guide to the Church to-day quite as fully as He was in the first century. His presence then was not a guarantee that all men should believe the truth or do the right, nor is it now. The state of Christendom is a sufficient evidence of the ability of men to defy the will of God, the Holy Spirit; but that does not mean that the Holy Spirit has withdrawn any more than the state of things at Corinth which called out S. Paul's two Epistles to that Church is a proof that God the Holy Ghost never came or did not stay with that primitive Christian community. The power of the Spirit is not an irresistible power, but a spiritual influence which will guide those who are willing to be guided, who will to be submissive to His will. But the will of God can always be resisted—and always is. Nevertheless the Holy Spirit is in the Church. He shaped and is shaping its beliefs and institutions: and to-day we trust that He is leading us back to His obedience that we may at length realize the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace.

The work of the Holy Spirit in the individual Christian is a constructive work; it has in view the growth of the child of God in holiness. He makes the soul of the baptised His dwelling-place and wishes to remain there as in His Temple, carrying on the work of its sanctification. The state of guiltlessness that follows absolution is not the equivalent of sanctity. Guiltlessness is a negative, sanctity is a positive state, and is acquired as the result of active correspondence with the will of God. In order that there may be this correspondence the will of God must be known, not merely as we know the things that we have learned by rote, but known in the sense of understood and appreciated. The will of God is knowable: that is, it has been revealed to man; but it needs to be effectively made known to the individual man. He must be convinced of the importance of divine truth to him. We know that just there is the supremely vital point in the teaching of the truth. Men assent to truth as true; but they are not thereby necessarily moved to act upon it: it may remain unassimilated. The vast majority of the people of this country, if they were questioned, would assert a belief in God; but a surprising number of them are unmoved by that belief, are led by it to no action. Or take the membership of any parish; they would all profess a belief in the efficacy of the sacraments: yet there is a surprisingly large number who do not frequent the sacraments. How many of you, for example, make your confessions and communions with the frequency and regularity that your theory about the sacraments implies?

Now it is the work of the Holy Spirit to effect the passage in life from theory to practice, from profession to action. He illuminates the mind that we may understand; He stirs the will that we may act. He aids us to overcome the intellectual and physical sloth which is the arch-enemy of Christian practice. He intercedes for us, and He pleads with us that we may act as the children of God that we believe ourselves to be. But all He can do is to entice the will; if we remain unwilling, unmoved, He is ultimately grieved and leaves us. We may hope that that despair of the Holy Spirit of a soul rarely happens because it is a spiritual disaster awful to contemplate. In most men and women we can see enough impulse toward God, enough struggle with evil, to encourage us to think that the Holy Spirit has not utterly abandoned them. And it is never safe for us to judge definitely of another's spiritual case; but we do see lives that are so given over to malignancy that our hope for them is an optimism which has small basis on which to rest.

In most we may be certain that there is going on a very active pleading of the Holy Spirit. He is interpreting the meaning of the truth we accept. He is present in a careful reading of the Bible, in meditation, in devotional study. He receives of Christ and shows it unto us. I am sure we ought to think more of this interpretative assistance of the Holy Spirit in the work of understanding the Christian Religion, especially in its application to the daily life. I am quite certain, and I have no doubt that the experience of some of you, at least, will bear me out, that it makes a vast difference in the results of our reading and study if we undertake it under the direct invocation of the Holy Spirit and with the conscious giving ourselves up to His guidance. We have to make a meditation, for example, and we begin with prayer to God the Holy Ghost for guidance and enlightenment. It is often well to let that prayer run on as long as it will. It may be in the end that instead of making the meditation we had planned we shall have spent the time in a prayer of union with the Holy Spirit and will find ourselves refreshed and enlightened as the result. There is need of that sort of yielding of self to the promptings of the Spirit. I think that it not infrequently happens that our rules get in the way of His action by destroying or checking in us a certain flexibility which is necessary if we are to respond quickly to the voice of the Spirit. As in the case just mentioned where the Spirit is leading us to communion with Him we are apt to think: "I must get on with my meditation or the time will be up and I shall not have made it," and we turn from the Spirit and stop the work that He was accomplishing.

He has so much to do for us, so many things to show us, so many grounds to urge for our more earnest seeking of sanctity. The true point of our Bible reading is that it is the opportunity of the Holy Spirit to exhibit truth to us so that in us it will become energetic. We already are familiar with the incidents of our Lord's Passion. If it be a matter of knowledge there is no need to-night to take up the Gospel and read the chapters which tell of the Crucifixion. There is not much point in reading through a chapter as a matter of pious habit. It is extraordinary how many there are who speak with contempt of "mediaeval prayers" such as the recitation of the Rosary, who yet "read a chapter" once a day in the shortest possible time and with the minimum of attention. We can think of all religious practices as opportunities that we offer to God the Holy Ghost. The few verses of Holy Scripture we read may well be the medium of His action upon us. He may give us new insight into their meaning, He may stir our wills to correspondence with their teaching, He may kindle our hearts by the evidence of the divine love that He presses home. Who does not remember moments when new meaning seemed to flash from the familiar pages, when we felt ourselves convicted of inadequate response to the knowledge we have, or when we felt our heart stir and send us to our knees in an act of thanksgiving and love?

Our constant need is the clear knowledge of ourselves. We may, we often do, see clearly God's will, and then we deceive ourselves as to the nature of our response. We think we are seeking for God when in reality we are seeking our own ends. We make our own plans and then seek to impose them on the will of God. Self-seeking, which we mistake for something else, is at the root of much spiritual failure. We try to believe that God's will is our will, and we succeed in a measure. We need therefore to be constantly examining ourselves by the revealed standard of God's will, to let in the light of the Spirit on our judgments and acts. For the struggle of the Spirit for control is a struggle with a resisting and sluggish will. We see, but we do not move; we know, but we do not act. The horrible inertia of spiritual sloth paralyses us, and the call of the Spirit is heard in vain. Like the man in our Lord's parable we plead the lateness of the hour, and our unwillingness to disturb others as our excuse for not rising at the Spirit's summons. But the Spirit, like the Friend at midnight, still knocks at the door, and the sound of the summons penetrates the quietness of the house and breaks in upon our slumbers. Well is it for us if in the end we rise and open to Him.

It is only as we thus become energetic by the yielding to God of our wills that He can go on to His desired work. The aim of God in dealing with our lives is creative. He wills that we bring forth fruit, and the fruit that He wills that we bring forth is the Fruit of the Spirit. The general notion of holiness analyses into these qualities which are the evidence of God's indwelling, of His actual possession of the soul. When the soul yields at last to the divine will and begins to follow the divinely indicated course of action, then it loses self and finds God, then the results begin to show in the growth of the character-qualities that we call fruits or virtues. The presence or the absence of these is infallible evidence of the Spirit's success or failure in His work in us. If we abide in Christ, then the natural results of such abiding must be forthcoming. "I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing."

A vine bears fruit because it assimilates the natural elements which are furnished it by the Providence of God through earth and air and water, and works them into the fruit which is the end, the meaning of its existence. Our Lord through the constant operation within us of the Holy Spirit gives us the spiritual power to work over the endowments of nature and the opportunities of life into the spiritual product which is holiness. We can just as well, and perhaps easier, work up the same natural elements into a quite different product. The result of our life's action may be that we can show the works of the flesh. But what is the will of the Spirit, S. Paul sets before us in these words: "For when ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness. What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now being made free from sin, and become the servants of God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Any adequate self-examination, therefore, bears not only on our sins, our failures, but on our accomplishment. A tree is known by its fruits; and fruits are things which are evident to all men. If indeed the work of the Spirit in us is love, joy, peace and the rest of the fruits, these qualities cannot be hid. Certainly they cannot be hid from ourselves. They are the evidence to us of precisely where we stand in the way of spiritual accomplishment. And we must remember that they are supernatural qualities, and not be deceived by the existence in us of a set of human counterfeits. Love is not good-natured tolerance; joy is not superficial gaiety, peace is not clever dodging of difficulties. The fruits of the Spirit are not of easy growth, but come only at the end of a long period of cultivation, of energetic striving. But like all the gifts of God they do come if we want them to come. "If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you." But when we ask our Lord for gifts we must remember that the giving is not a mechanical giving. What our Lord gives is the Might of the Spirit to effect what we desire. If a man ask of God a good harvest the prayer is answered if there be given the conditions under which a good harvest can be produced; it will not be produced without the appropriate human labour. And when we ask of God the Fruits of the Spirit the prayer is granted if the conditions are given under which this Fruit may be brought forth. But neither here may we expect Fruit without appropriate action on our part. God gives, but He gives to those who want.

I

others do of grace bereave, When, in their mother's womb, they life receive, God, as his sole-borne Daughter, loved thee: To match thee like thy birth's nobility, He thee his Spirit for thy Spouse did leave, Of whom thou didst his only Son conceive; And so was linked to all the Trinity. Cease, then, O queens, who earthly crowns do wear, To glory in the pomp of worldly, things: If men such respect unto you bear Which daughters, wives and mothers are of kings; What honour should unto that Queen be done Who had your God for Father, Spouse and Son?

II

Sovereign of Queens, if vain ambition move My heart to seek an earthly prince's grace, Show me thy Son in his imperial place, Whose servants reign our kings and queens above: And, if alluring passions I do prove By pleasing sighs—show me thy lovely face, Whose beams the angels' beauty do deface, And even inflame the seraphins with love. So by ambition I shall humble be, When, in the presence of the highest King, I serve all his, that he may honour me; And love, my heart to chaste desires shall bring, When fairest Queen looks on me from her throne, And jealous, bids me love but her alone.

III

Why should I any love, O Queen, but thee, If favor past a thankful love should breed? Thy womb did bear, thy breast my Saviour feed, And thou didst never cease to succour me. If love do follow worth and dignity, Thou all in thy perfections dost exceed; If love be led by hope of future meed, What pleasure more than thee in heaven to see? An earthly sight doth only please the eye, And breeds desire, but doth not satisfy: Thy sight gives us possession of all joy; And with such full delights each sense shall fill, As heart shall wish but for to see thee still, And ever seeing, ever shall enjoy.

IV

Sweet Queen, although thy beauty raise up me From sight of baser beauties here below, Yet, let me not rest there; but, higher go To him, who took his shape from God and thee. And if thy form in him more fair I see, What pleasure from his deity shall flow, By whose fair beams his beauty shineth so, When I shall it behold eternally? Then, shall my love of pleasure have his fill, When beauty's self, in whom all pleasure is, Shall my enamoured soul embrace and kiss, And shall new loves and new delights distill, Which from my soul shall gush into my heart, And through my body flow to every part.

HENRY CONSTABLE: 1562-1613.



PART TWO

CHAPTER XXIV

THE HOME OF S. JOHN

And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.

S. John XIX, 27.

But now we unite to praise thee, O Pure and Immaculate One, blessed Virgin and sinless Mother of thy great Son and the God of all. O perfectly spotless and altogether holy, thou art the hope of despairing sinners. We bless thee as most full of grace, who didst give birth to Christ, God and Man. And we fall down before thee. We all invoke thee and implore thy help. Deliver us, O Virgin, holy and undefiled, from every pressing strait and from all temptations of the Evil One. Be thou our peacemaker in the hour of death and judgment. Do thou save us from the future unquenchable fire and from the outer darkness. Do thou render us worthy of the glory of thy Son, O Virgin and Mother, most sweet and clement.

A PRAYER OF S. EPHREM THE SYRIAN.

There is no scene in the whole range of Scripture narrative which is more full of pathos than this scene of the Cross. Two agonies meet: the agony of the nailing, the lifting, the dying; and the agony that looks on in silent helplessness. But while our Lord's physical agony was in some sort swallowed up in the intensity of the love which was the motive for enduring it, overpassed in the vision of the need of those for whom He was dying, S. Mary's agony was the pain of a love concentrated upon the Sufferer Who hangs dying before her eyes. If there be anything that can lighten the pain of such love it is that it feels itself answered, that its object is conscious of it and is helped by it. And S. Mary had that consolation: the love poured to her from the Cross, and revealed itself when the suffering Son turned His eyes upon her agony and, understanding what her desolation would be, committed her to His beloved disciple: "Behold thy Mother; behold thy son." These two great loves which had been our Lord's human consolation were thus committed to one another. And when the darkness fell, and death relieved the agony, and the Sacred Body had been cared for, then the mother found refuge with S. John: "and from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home."

From the day of Pentecost on, S. Mary is no more heard of in the history of the Church. As so often, the Scriptures are silent and decline to answer our interested questions. They go on with the essentails of their story, the founding of the Church of God, and leave other things aside. So we do not know any of the last years of the life of Blessed Mary. Where did she live? How long did she live? The traditions, in any case of quite an untrustworthy nature, are contradictory. Jerusalem and Ephesus contend for the honour of our Lady's residence. Jerusalem must have been the site of that "home" to which S. John took her after the crucifixion. Did she remain there, or did she follow S. John, and at length come to live with him in Ephesus? Ephesus puts forward the claim, and we feel that it would be well founded in the nature of the relation between these two, if S. Mary lived until the settlement of the last of the apostles in the Asian city. Our Lord's committal of His Mother to the beloved disciple implies their personal association as long as S. Mary lived: if till S. John was settled in Ephesus, then we may be sure that she was there. She would be with S. John as long as she lived, but can we think of her as living long? Would not a great love draw her to another world and the presence of her triumphant Son?

Let us, however think, as one tradition bids us, of our Lady as living some time with S. John at Ephesus. We can understand the situation because it is so much like our own. These Asia Minor cities of the imperial period were curiously like the great centers of population in the Western world of to-day—London, Paris, New York, Chicago. There was the same over-crowding of population, the same intense commercial activity, the same almost insane thirst for amusement and excitement, the same degeneracy of moral fibre. The sins that sapped the life of Ephesus are the same that degrade contemporary life. In some ways Ephesus was, possibly, more frankly corrupt; but on the other hand it had no daily press to advertise and promote sin and social corruption. There is more of Christianity and of Christian influence in the modern city, but even here there is a curious resemblance between the two. The Christian Religion had but recently been introduced into Ephesus, but already it had precisely that touch of ineffectiveness that seems to us so modern. The message of the risen Lord to the angel of the Church in Ephesus is: "Nevertheless I have this against thee, that thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent."

The things that hearten us are sometimes strange; but I suppose that there is a feeling of encouragement in our present day distress and spiritual ineffectiveness in the thought that even under S. John the Church in Ephesus was not wholly ideal. The conditions which baffle us, baffled him. The converts who were so promising and enthusiastic declined in zeal and fell back under the spell of worldliness. Zeal is a quality which is maintained with great difficulty, and the pull of the world, whether social or business, is steadily exercised. Converts in Ephesus, like converts in New York, felt that their friends were right who declared that they were quite unnecessarily strict, and that in order to serve Christ it was not necessary to turn their backs absolutely on Diana.

As one tries to reconstruct the situation in Ephesus, one feels that our Lady would have had no prominence in the Church in the way of an actively exercised influence. One thinks of her as living in retirement, as not even talking very much. If she lived long she would be an object of increasing interest and even of awe to the new converts, and an object of growing love to all those who were admitted to any sort of fellowship with her. But one cannot imagine a crowd about her, inquiring into her experiences and her memories of her divine Son. Once she told of her experience, for it was necessary that the Church should know of the circumstances of the coming of the Son of God into the world, but beyond that necessary communication of her experience we cannot think of her as speaking of her sacred memories. Silence and meditation, longing and waiting, would have filled the years till the hour of her release.

But in the quiet hours spent with S. John it would be different. Between the Blessed Virgin and S. John there was perfect understanding and perfect sympathy, and we love to think of the hours that they would have spent together in deep spiritual intercourse. Those hours would not be hours of reminiscence merely; they would rather be hours in which these two would attempt with the aid of the Spirit Who ruled in them so fully to enter deeper and ever deeper into the meaning of Incarnate God. Jesus would be the continual object of their thought and their love, and meditation upon His words and acts would lead them to an ever increasing appreciation of their depth and meaning.

We have all felt, in reading the pages of S. John, how vast is the difference both in attitude toward his subject and in his understanding of it from that of the other Evangelists. The earlier Evangelists seem deliberately to keep all feeling out of their story, to tell the life of our Lord in the most meagre outline, confining themselves to the essential facts. Anything like interpretation they decline. In S. John all this is changed. The Jesus whom he presents is the same Jesus, but seen through what different eyes! The same life is presented, but with what changes in selection of material! The Gospel of S. John seems almost a series of mediations upon selected facts of an already familiar life rather than an attempt to tell a life-story. And so indeed we think of it. When S. John wrote, the life of our Lord as a series of events was already before the Church. The Church had the synoptic Gospels, and it had a still living tradition to inform it. What it needed, and what the Holy Spirit led S. John to give it, was some glimpse of the inner meaning of the Incarnation, some unfolding of the spiritual depths of the teaching of Jesus.

We know how it is that different people listening to the same words get different impressions and carry away with them quite different meanings. We hear what we are able to hear. And S. John was able to hear what the other disciples of our Lord seem not to have heard. What dwelt in his memory and was worked up in his meditations and was at length transmitted to us, was the meaning of such incidents as the interview with Nicodemus, and the talk with the woman of Samaria, the discourse on the Holy Eucharist and the great High-priestly prayer. Men have felt the contrast between S. John and the other Evangelists so intensely that they have said that this is another Christ who is presented by S. John, and the influences which have shaped the author of the Fourth Gospel are quite other than those which shaped the men of the inner circle of Jesus. But no: it is the instinctive, or rather the Spirit-guided, selection of the material afforded by those years of association with Jesus for the purpose of transmitting to the Church a spiritual depth and beauty, a spiritual significance in our Lord's teaching, that the earlier Gospel had hardly touched.

Which perhaps they could not touch because when they wrote there was not yet in the Church the spiritual experience which could fully interpret our Lord. Through the life of union with the risen Jesus and all the spiritual experience, all the illumined intelligence that that life brought, S. John was enabled to understand and interpret as he did. Writing far on toward the end of the first century he was writing out of the personal experience of Christian living of many years, which brought with it year by year an increased power of spiritual vision opening to him the depth and wonder of the fact of God made man. It is to an experience of our Lord that he appeals as the basis of his teaching. "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life: (for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and His Son Jesus Christ." And as we read on in S. John's Epistles we cannot fail to see how deeply the years of meditation have influenced his understanding of our Lord and His teaching, and how much his past experience of our Lord has been illumined by the experience of the risen Jesus which has followed. At no time, we are certain, has S. John been out of touch with his Master.

And can we for a moment think that the years of intercourse with our Lady meant nothing in the spiritual development of S. John? On the contrary, may we not think that much of the spiritual richness which is the outstanding feature of his writings was the outcome of his association with the blessed Mother? No one has ever shown the sympathetic understanding of our Lord, has been so well able convincingly to interpret Him, as the beloved disciple. I myself have no doubt that much of his understanding came by way of S. Mary. Her interpretative insight would have been deeper than any one else's, not only because of her long association with Jesus, but because of her sinlessness. No two lives ever touched so closely; and there was not between them the bar that so blocks our spiritual understanding and clouds our spiritual vision, the bar of sin. I suppose it is almost impossible for us to appreciate the effect of sin in clouding vision and dulling sympathy. Our every day familiarity with venial sin, our easy tolerance of it, the adjustment of our lives to habits that involve it, have resulted in a lack of spiritual sensitiveness. Much of the meaning of our Lord's life and words passes over us just because of this dimness of vision, this insensitiveness to suggestion. And therefore we find it difficult to imagine what would be the understanding, the insight, the response to our Lord, of one between whom and Him there was no shadow of sin. And such an one was the blessed Mother. With unclouded vision she looked into the face of her Son. As His life expanded she followed with perfect sympathy; indeed, sometimes, as at Cana, her understanding of what He was made her precipitate in concluding as to His necessary action. When He became a public teacher and unfolded largely in parable His doctrine, it was her sinless soul which would see clearest and deepest, and with the most ready response. And therefore I am sure that we cannot go astray in thinking that S. John's relation to S. Mary was not simply that of a guardian of her from the pressure of the world, but was indeed that of a son who listened and learned from the experience of his Mother. No doubt S. John himself was of a very subtle spiritual understanding; notwithstanding that, and notwithstanding his exceptional opportunities of learning, we may still believe that there are many touches in his Gospel which are the result of his association with his Lord's Mother.

Is it not possible for us to have our share in that pure insight of blessed Mary? When we try to think out the lines of our own spiritual development and the influences that have contributed to shape it, do we not find that the presence or absence of devotion to our Lady has been a factor of considerable importance? Devotion to her injected an element into our religion which is of vast moment, an element of sympathy, of gentleness, of purity. You can if you like, in condemnatory accents, call that element sentimentalism, although it is not that but the exercise of those gentler elements of our nature without whose exercise our nature functions one-sidedly. You may call it the feminine element, if you like; you will still be indicating the same order of activity. Surely, an all around spiritual development will bring out the feminine as well as the masculine qualities. And it seems to be historically true that those systems of religion which represent a revolt against the cultus of our Lady and carefully exclude all traces of it from their worship, show as a consequence of this exclusion a hardness and a barrenness which makes their human appeal quite one-sided. And when those same systems have realised their limitations and their lack of human appeal, and have tried to supply what is lacking, they have again failed, because instead of reverting to historical Christianity they have taken the road of humanitarianism, basing themselves on our Lord's human life and consequent brotherhood with us, rather than upon His supernatural Personality as operative through His mystical Body. Stress is laid upon charitable helpfulness rather than upon the power of grace. The modern man tries to reform life rather than to regenerate it.

And, I repeat, I cannot help associating with a repudiation of the cultus of the saints, and especially of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a consequent failure to understand the Christian life as a supernatural creation. If one leaves out of account the greater part of the Kingdom of Heaven, all the multitudes of the redeemed, and their activities, and fastens one's attention exclusively upon that small part of the Kingdom which is the Church on earth, one can hardly fail to miss the significance of the earthly Church itself. Religion understood in this limited way may well drift more and more toward Deism and Humanitarianism, and further and further from any supernatural implications. This is no theory; it is what has happened. It was the course of Protestantism from the Reformation to the eighteenth century; and, after a partial revival of supernaturalism, is once more the rapid course of Protestantism to-day. Protestantism has lost or is fast losing any grip on the Trinity or the Incarnation: to it God is more and more a barren unity, and Jesus a good man. And this largely because all interest in the world of the Redeemed has been abandoned and all intercourse with the inhabitants of that world denied.

It is therefore of the last importance that we, infected as we are with Protestantism, should stress the revival of the cultus of the saints, and should insist upon our right and privilege to pay due honour to the Mother of God and ask our share in her prayers. We must do all we can to make her known to our brethren. We need her sympathy, her aid, her example.

Above all, the example of her spotless purity. It is notorious that one of the most marked features of our time is the virulent assault on purity. We had long emphasised a certain quality of conduct which we called modesty; it was, perhaps, largely a convention, but it was one of those protective conventions which are valuable as preservative of qualities we prize. It was protective of purity; and however artificial it was, in some respects, it existed because we felt that purity was a thing too precious to be exposed to unnecessary risk. Well, modesty is gone now, whether in conduct or convention. One hears discussed at dinner-tables and in the presence of young girls matters which our mothers would have blushed to mention at all. The quality of modesty is declared Puritanical and hypocritical. "Hypocritical virtue" is a phrase one frequently meets; and we seem fast going on to the time when all virtue will be regarded as hypocrisy. Customary standards are falling all about us, overthrown in the name of personal liberty.

And by liberty, one gathers, is meant freedom to do as one pleases, and especially as one sexually pleases. The assault is pushed hardest just now against the sanctity of the sacrament of matrimony and the morals of that sacrament as they have been developed by the Christian Church. Protestantism long ago assented to the overthrow of Christian standards in the marriage relation and has aided the sexual anarchy with which we are faced to-day. To-day the chief attack is on the purity of marriage in the interests, ostensibly, of humanity. A vigorous campaign in favour of what is called birth-control is being carried on, and is being supported in quarters which are professedly Christian. There are many grounds for opposing the movement, social, humanitarian and other. We are here concerned with it only as it is an attack on purity. From the Christian point of view the marriage relation has for its end the procreation of children for the upbuilding of the Kingdom of God. If circumstances are such, through reasons of health or economy, that children seem undesirable, the remedy is plain, self control. The theory that human beings have no more control over their appetites than beasts, while it has much to support it in contemporary life, cannot be admitted from the point of view of religion. Self-control is always possible, and is constantly exercised by many men and women who choose to be guided by principle rather than by passion. And in any case the Christian Religion can become no partner, not even a silent one, in a conspiracy to murder, or in the sort of compromise that turns marriage into a licensed sodomy. If indeed the economic status of the modern world is such that the average couple cannot support a family, then the Christian Church may well aid in the bringing about of an economic revolution; but it can hardly aid in the destruction of its own ideals of purity.

What is ultimately at stake in the modern world is the whole conception of purity as a quality that is desirable. This attitude has become possible among us for one reason because we have consented to the suppression of ideals of life which were calculated to sustain it. To sustain any moral or spiritual conception there must be maintained certain appropriate ideals which, while out of the reach of the average man, create and sustain in him an admiration and respect for the ideal standard. So the standard of purity presented in Mary and protected by the belief in her Immaculate Conception and her assumption, has the effect, not only of commending the life of chastity in the sense of the vows of religion, but also in the broad sense of the restraint and discipline of appetite whether within or without the marriage relation. It impresses upon us the truth that purity is not only a human quality but a divinely created virtue, the result of the infusion of sanctifying grace into the soul. Is it not largely because the young are taught (when they are taught anything at all in the premises) that purity is a matter of the will, that they so often fail? If they were taught the nature of the virtue and were led to rely more on the indwelling might of the Holy Spirit would they not have better success? And if there were held constantly before their eyes the example of the saints and especially of Blessed Mary ever-virgin, would not they have an increased sense of the value of purity?

The life and example of S. Mary are an inestimable treasure of the Church of God, and her removal from the world has only enhanced that value. To-day her meaning is clearer to us than ever. The spirit-guided mind of the Church has through the centuries been meditating on the meaning of her office as Mother of God. The words in which she accepts her vocation, Behold the handmaid of the Lord, implying, as they do, an active co-operation with the divine purpose, a voluntary association of herself with it, imply, too, the perpetual continuance of that association, and contain in germ all Catholic teaching in regard to her office. She passed from this world silently, and to the world unknown; but to the Church of God she ever remains of all human beings the greatest spiritual force in the Kingdom of God.

Weep, living things, of life the Mother dies; The world doth lose the sum of all her bliss, The Queen of earth, the Empress of the skies; By Mary's death mankind an orphan is. Let Nature weep, yea, let all graces moan, Their glory, grace and gifts die all in one.

It was no death to her, but to her woe, By which her joys began, her griefs did end; Death was to her a friend, to us a foe, Life of whose lives did on her life depend: Not prey of death, but praise to death she was. Whose ugly shape seemed glorious in her face.

Her face a heaven; two planets were her eyes, Whose gracious light did make our clearest day; But one such heaven there was, and lo, it dies, Death's dark eclipse hath dimmed every, ray: Sun, hide thy light, thy beams untimely shine; True light since we have lost, we crave not thine. Robert Southwell, 1560-1595



PART TWO

CHAPTER XXV

THE ASSUMPTION

Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me.

S. John XVII, 24.

Hail! Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, hail! Our life, our sweetness, our hope, all hail. To thee we cry, poor exiled children of Eve. To thee we send up our cries, weeping and mourning in this vale of tears. Turn, then, Most gracious Advocate, thy merciful eyes upon us, and now, after this our exile, show unto us the blessed Fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O gracious, O merciful, O sweet Virgin Mary. Anthem from the breviary. Attributed to Hermann Contractus, 1013-54.

There is nothing more wonderful or beautiful, nothing that brings to us a more perfect revelation of our Lord's mind, than this prayer which is recorded for us by S. John. There is in it a complete unfolding of that sympathy and love which we feel to underlie and explain our Lord's mission. As we come to know what God is only when we see Him revealed in Jesus; when we enter into our Lord's saying, "He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father," so in the revelation of Jesus we understand God's attitude toward us. In Jesus the love of God shows itself, not as an abstract quality, a philosophical conception, but as a burning, passionate eagerness to rescue, an outgoing of God to individual souls. There is a deep personal affection displayed in this final scene in the Upper Chamber. This is our Lord's real parting from His disciples. He will see them again, but under conditions of strain and tragedy, or under such changed circumstances that they cannot well enter into the old intimacy. But here there is no bar to the expression of love. Here He gives them the final evidence of His utter union with them in the humility of the foot-washing. Here He marvellously imparts Himself in the Breaking of the Bread, wherein is consummated His personal union with them. This is the demonstration, if one were needed, that having loved His own, He loved them unto the uttermost.

It is inconceivable that passionate love such as this should ever end. It is a personal relation which must endure while personality endures. It is really the demands of love which more than anything else outside revelation are the evidence of immortality. We are certain that the love of God which in its fulness has been made known in Christ cannot be annihilated by death. "I have loved thee with an everlasting love; therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee." Love such as that must draw men, not only in this world, but in all worlds. If it can draw men out of sin to God, it must create an enduring bond. If it can draw God to men, it must be the revelation of a permanent attitude of God to man. It is a love that goes out beyond the world, that love of which S. Paul says: "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Our instinctive thought of the Judgment seems to be of it as condemnation, or, at best, as acquittal. But why not think of it as consummation? Why not think of it as setting the seal of God's approval upon our accomplishment of His will and purpose for us? The final Judgment is surely that,—the entrance of those who are saved into the full joy of their Lord. There once more will our humanity be complete because it is the whole man, not the soul only, but the soul clothed with the body of the resurrection, once more clothed upon with its "house from heaven," which is filled with the joy of the Beatific Vision. The thought of the particular judgment may fill us with dread; but if we are able to look beyond that to the general Judgment at the last day, we shall think only of our perfect bliss in the enjoyment of God.

The belief in the Assumption of our Lady is a belief that in her case that which is the inheritance of all the saints, that they shall rise again with their bodies and be admitted to the Vision of God, has been anticipated. In her, that which we all look forward to and dream of for ourselves, has been attained. She to-day is in God's presence in her entire humanity, clothed with her body of glory.

This teaching, one finds, still causes some searching of hearts among us, and is thought to raise many questions difficult to answer. And it may be admitted at the outset that it is not a truth taught in Holy Scripture but a truth arrived at by the mind of the Church after centuries of thought. Unless we can think of the Church as a divine organism with a continuous life from the day of Pentecost until now, as being the home of the Holy Spirit, and as being continuously guided by Him into all the truth; unless we can accept in their full sense our Lord's promises that He will be with the Church until the end of the world, we shall not find it possible to accept the assumption as a fact, but shall decline to believe that, and not only that but, if we are consistent, many another belief of the Christian Church. But if we have an adequate understanding of what is implied in the continuity of the Church as the organ of the present action of the Holy Spirit, we shall not find that the fact that a given doctrine is not explicitly contained in Holy Scripture is any bar to its acceptance. We shall have learned that the revelation of God in Christ, and our relation to God in Christ, are facts of such tremendous import and inexhaustible content that it would be absurd to suppose that all their meaning had been understood and explicitly stated in the first generation of the Christian Church.

We shall not, then, find it any bar to the acceptance of belief in the assumption of our Lady that its formal statement came, as is said, "late." We simply want to know that when it came it came as the outcome of the mature thought of the Church, the Body of Christ, the Fulness of Him that filleth all in all.

It is to be noted that the assumption is not a wholly isolated fact. There are several cases of assumption in the Old Testament though of a slightly different character in that they were assumptions directly from life without any interval of death. Such were the assumptions of Enoch and Elijah. Moses, too, it has been constantly believed, was assumed into heaven,—in his case after death and with his resurrection body. A case which is more strangely like what is believed to have taken place in the experience of blessed Mary is that closely connected with our Lord's resurrection and recorded by S. Matthew. "And the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many." Although it is not asserted that these were assumed into heaven, it seems impossible to avoid the inference; and if "many saints which slept" were raised from the dead and assumed into the heavenly world, there can be no a priori difficulty in believing the same thing to have taken place in the Blessed Mother of God. Nay if such a thing as an assumption is at all possible for any human being one would naturally conclude from the very relation of S. Mary to our Lord that the possibility would be realised in her.

And there were elements in her case which were lacking in all the other cases which suggest a certain fitness, if not inevitability, in her assumption. She was conceived without sin,—never had any breath of sin tainted her. Was it then possible that she should be holden by death? Surely, in any case, it was impossible that her holy body should see corruption: we cannot think of the dissolution of that body which had no part in sin. If ever an assumption were possible, here it was inevitable—so the thought of the Church shaped itself. The compelling motives of the belief were theological rather than historical. The germ out of consideration of which was evolved the belief in the assumption was the relation of Blessed Mary to her Son. That unique relation might be expected to carry with it unique consequences, and among these the consequence that the body which was bound by no sin should be reunited to the soul which had needed no purgation, but had passed at once to the presence of its God and its Redeemer who was likewise Son. It is well to stress the fact that the assumption is not only a fact but a doctrine. Fact, of course, it was or there could be no doctrine; but the truth of the fact is certified by the growing conviction in the mind of the Church of the inevitability of the doctrine.

What is implied in the word assumption is that the body of the Mother of our Lord was after her death and burial raised to heaven by the power of God. It differed therefore essentially from the ascension of our Lord which was accomplished by His Own inherent power. When this assumption took place we have no means of knowing. We do not certainly know where S. Mary lived, nor where and when she died. Jerusalem and Ephesus contend in tradition for the privilege of having sheltered her last days and reverently carried her body to its burial. There is no way of deciding between these two claims, although the fact that our Lord confided His Mother to S. John throws some little weight into the scale of Ephesus. And yet S. Mary may have died before S. John settled in Ephesus. We can only say that history gives us no reliable information on the matter.

In the silence of Scripture we naturally turn to the other writings of the early Church for light and guidance on the matter; but there, too, there is little help. There is, to be sure, a group of Apocryphal writings which have a good deal to say about the life of S. Mary, where the Scriptures and tradition are silent. Among other things these Apocryphal writings have a good deal to say, and some very beautiful stories to tell, of S. Mary's last days, of her burial and assumption. Are we to think of these stories as containing any grain of truth? If they do, it is now impossible to sift it from the chaff. These stories are generally rejected as a basis of knowledge. And there has been, and still is in some quarters, a conviction that the belief of the Church in the assumption rests on nothing better or more stable than these Apocryphal stories; that the authors of these Apocrypha were inventing their stories out of nothing, and that in an uncritical age their legends came to be taken as history. Thus was a belief in the assumption foisted upon the Church, having no slightest ground in fact. The human tendency to fill in the silences of Scripture has resulted in many legends, that of the assumption among them.

There is a good deal to be said for this position, yet I do not feel that it is convincing. That the incidents of the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary as narrated in the Apocrypha are historical, of course cannot be maintained. But neither is it at all probable that such stories grew up out of nothing: indeed, their existence implies that there were certain facts widely accepted in the Christian community that served as their starting point. While the Apocryphal stories of the life of our Lady cannot be accepted as history, they do presuppose certain beliefs as universally, or at least widely, held. Thus one may reject all the details of the story of the death and burial and assumption of our Lady, and yet feel that the story is evidence of a belief in the assumption among those for whom the story was written. What was new to them was not the fact of the assumption but the detailed incidents with which the Apocrypha embroidered it. I feel no doubt that these Apocryphal stories are not the source of belief in the assumption, but are our earliest witness to the existence of the belief. They actually presuppose its existence in the Church as the necessary condition of their own existence.

Another fact that tells in the same direction is the absence of any physical relics of our Lady. At a time when great stress was laid upon relics, and there was little scruple in inventing them, if the authentic ones were not forthcoming, there were no relics produced which were alleged to be the physical relics of S. Mary. Why was this? Surely, unless there were some inhibiting circumstances, relics, real or forged, would have been produced. The only probable explanation is that the inhibiting circumstance was the established belief in the assumption. If the assumption were a fact, there would be no physical relics; if it were an established belief, there would be no fraud possible. Add to this that various relics of our Lady were alleged to exist; but they were not relics of her body.

Again: by the seventh century the celebration of the feast of the assumption had spread throughout the whole church. This universal establishment of the feast implies a preceding history of considerable length, going well back into the past. The feast was kept in many places, and under a variety of names which seem to imply, not mere copying, but independent development. It is alleged, to be sure, that the names by which the feast was called do not imply belief in the assumption. The feast is called "the Sleeping," "the Repose," "the Passage" of the Virgin, as well as by the Western title, the assumption. But a study of the liturgies and of the sermons preached in honour of the feast will convince any one that the underlying tradition was that of our Lady's assumption.

These quite separate and yet converging lines of evidence seem to me to show convincingly what was the wide-spread belief of the early Christian community as to the destiny of Blessed Mary. They imply a tradition going well back into the past, so far back, that in view of the theological expression of the mind of the Church they may well be regarded as apostolic. Our personal belief in the assumption will still rest primarily upon its theological expression in the mind of the Church, but having attained certainty as to the doctrine, which is of course at the same time certainty as to the fact, we shall have no difficulty in finding in the above sketched lines of historical development the evidence of the primitive character of the belief.

It may not be amiss to give a few characteristic quotations as indicating the mind of the Church in this matter.

S. Modestus, patriarch of Jerusalem (d. 614), preaching on the Falling Asleep of the Mother of God, said:—

"The Lord of heaven and earth has to-day consecrated the human tabernacle in which He Himself, according to the flesh, was received, that it may enjoy with Him forever the gift of incorruptibility. O blessed sleep of the glorious, ever-virgin Mother of God, who has not known the corruption of the grave; for Christ, our all-powerful Saviour, has kept intact that flesh which gave Him His flesh.... Hail, most holy Mother of God: Jesus has willed to have you in His Kingdom with your body clothed in incorruptibility.... The most glorious Mother of Christ our Lord and Saviour, Who gave life and immortality, is raised by her Son, and forever possesses incorruptibility with Him Who called her from the tomb."

S. Andrew, Archbishop of Crete (d. 676), also preaching on the Falling Asleep of the Mother of God, says:—"It is a wholly new sight, and one that surpasses the reason, that of a woman purer than the heavens entering heaven with her body. As she was born without corruption, so after death her flesh is restored to life."

In one of his sermons at the same feast, S. Germanus of Constantinople (d. 733), speaks thus:—"It was impossible that the tomb should hold the body which had been the living temple of the Son of God. How should your flesh be reduced to dust and ashes who, by the Son born of you, have delivered the human race from the corruption of death?"

Preaching on the same festival, S. John Damascene (d. 760) said:—"Your flesh has known no corruption. Your immaculate body, which knew no stain, was not left in the tomb. You remained virgin in your child-bearing; and in your death your body was not reduced to dust but has been placed in a better and celestial state."

There are one or two practical consequences of this doctrine concerning which, perhaps, it may be well to say a few words. The first is as the result of such devotions to our Lady as are implied in, or have in fact followed, a belief in her assumption. It is objected to them that even granting the truth of the fact of the assumption, still the stress laid on the fact and the devotions to our Lady which are held to be appropriate to it, are unhealthy in their nature, and do, in fact, tend to obscure the worship of our Lord: that where devotions to our Lady are fostered, there devotion to our Lord declines. That therefore instead of trying to advance the cultus of our Lady, we should do much better to hold to the sanity and reserve which has characterised the Anglican Church since the Reformation.

These and the like arguments seem to me to hang in the air and to be quite divorced from facts. They imply a state of things which does not exist. The assertion that where devotion to our Lady prevails devotion to our Lord declines is as far as possible from being true. Where to-day is the Deity of our Lord defended most ardently and devotion to Him most wide spread? Is it in Churches where devotion to our Lady is suppressed? On the contrary, do you not know with absolute certainty, that in any church where you find devotion to our Lady encouraged, there will you find the Deity of our Lord maintained? Has the Anglican "sanity and reserve" in regard to the Blessed Virgin Mary saved the Anglican Church from the inroads of unitarianism and rationalism? Is it not precisely in those circles where the very virginity of our Lady is denied that the divinity of our Lord is denied also? No, devotion to Mary is far indeed from detracting from the honour due to Mary's Son.

And we cannot insist too much or too often that the doctrines of the Christian Church form a closely woven system such that none, even the seemingly least important, can be denied without injuring the whole. No article of Christian belief expresses an independent truth, but always a truth depending upon other truths, and in its turn lending others its support. To deny any truth that the mind of the Church has expressed is equivalent to the removal of an organ from a living body.

And to-day we feel more than ever the need of the doctrine of the assumption. One of the bitterest attacks on the Christian Faith which is being made to-day, emanating principally from within the Christian community, and even from within the Christian ministry, is that which is being made on the truth of the resurrection of the body, whether the resurrection of our Lord, or our own resurrection. In place of the Christian doctrine believed and preached from the beginning, we are asked to lapse back into heathenism and a doctrine of immortality. Not many seem to realise the vastness of the difference that is made in our outlook to the future by a belief in the resurrection of the body as distinguished from immortality. But the character of the religions resulting from these two contrary beliefs is absolutely different. It needs only to study them as they actually exist to be convinced of this fact.

And it is precisely the doctrine of the assumption of our Lady which contributes strong support to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. It teaches us that in her case the vision and hope of mankind at large has been anticipated and accomplished. The resurrection of our Lord is found, in fact, to extend (if one may so express it) to the members of His mystical body; and the promise which is fulfilled in Blessed Mary, is that hope of a joyful resurrection which is thus confirmed to us all. In its stress upon the assumption the mind of the Christian Church has not been led astray, has not been betrayed into fostering superstitions, but has been led by the Spirit of Christ which He promised it to the development of a truth not only revealing the present place of His glorious Mother in the Kingdom of her Son, but encouraging and heartening us in our following of the heavenly way.

Whoe is shee that assends so high Next the heavenlye Kinge, Round about whome angells flie And her prayses singe?

Who is shee that adorned with light, Makes the sunne her robe, At whose feete the queene of night Layes her changing globe?

To that crowne direct thine eye, Which her heade attyres; There thou mayst her name discrie Wrytt in starry fires.

This is shee, in whose pure wombe Heaven's Prince remained; Therefore, in noe earthly tombe Cann shee be contayned.

Heaven shee was, which held that fire Whence the world tooke light, And to heaven doth now aspire, Fflames with fflames to unite.

Shee that did so clearly shyne When our day begunne, See, howe bright her beames decline Nowe shee sytts with the sunne.

Sir John Beaumont, 1582-1628.



PART TWO

CHAPTER XXVI

THE CORONATION

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.

Rev. XII, I.

To-day the Angel Gabriel brought the palm and the crown to the triumphant Virgin. To-day he introduced to the Lord of all, her, who was the Temple of the Most High, and the dwelling of the Holy Spirit.

FOR THE ASSUMPTION. ARMENIAN.

The heaven which S. John the Evangelist shows us is the continuation of the earthly Church. As we read his pages we feel that entrance there would be a real home-coming for the earnest Christian. We are familiar enough with presentations of heaven which seem to us to be so detached from Christian reality as to lack any human appeal. We think of philosophic presentations of the future with entire indifference. It is possible, we say, that they may be true; but they are utterly uninteresting. It is not so in the visions of S. John. Here we have a heaven which is humanly interesting because it is continous with the present life, and its interests are the interests that it has been the object of our religion to foster. The qualities of character which the Christian religion has urged upon our attention are presented as finding their clear field of development in the world to come. There, too, are unveiled the objects of our adoration, the ever-blessed Three who yet are but one. Love which has striven for development under the conditions and limitations of our earthly life, which has tried to see God and has gone out to seek Him in the dimness of revelation, now sees and is satisfied. Whom now we see in a mirror, enigmatically, we shall then see face to face.

And it is a heaven thronged with saints, with men and women who have gone through the same experiences as those to which we are subjected, and have come forth purified and triumphant. We sometimes in discouragement think of life as continuous struggle. It is perhaps natural and inevitable that we should thus concentrate attention upon the present, but if we lift our eyes so as to clear them from the mists of the present we see that it is far from a hopeless struggle, but rather the necessary discipline from which we emerge triumphant. Those saints whom we see rejoicing about the throne of God, those who go out to follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth, passed through the struggle of persecution to their triumphant attainment of the Vision. It is our eternal temptation to expect to triumph here; but it is only in a very limited sense that this can be true: our triumph is indeed here, but the enjoyment of it and all that is implied in it is elsewhere. Here even our most complete achievement is conditioned by the limitations of earth: there the limitations are done away and life expands in perfectness.

So we look eagerly through the door that is opened in heaven as those who are looking into their future home. That is what we all are striving for—presumably. We are consciously selecting out of life precisely those elements, are centering on those interests, which have eternal significance and are imperishable values. As we travel along the Pilgrim Way it is with hearts uplifted and stimulated by the Vision of the end. We advance as seeing Him Who is invisible. We live by hope, knowing that we shall attain no enduring satisfaction until we pass through the gates into the City, and mingle with the throng of worshippers who sing the song of Moses and of the Lamb. Therefore our life is always forward-looking and optimistic: because we are sure of the end, we wait for it with patience and endurance, thankful for all the experience of the Way. As the years flow by we do not look back on them with regret as the unrenewable experiences of a vanished youth, but we think of them as the bearers of experiences by which we have profited, and of goods which we have safely garnered, waiting the time when their stored values can be fully realised.

Over all the saints whom the Church has seen rejoicing in the heavenly life, rises the form of Mary, Mother of God. S. John's vision of the "great sign in heaven" in its primary meaning has, no doubt, reference to the Church itself; but the form of its symbolism would be impossible if there were not a secondary reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is the thought of her and of her office as Mother of the Redeemer that has determined the form of the vision. The details are too clear to permit of doubt, and such has been the constant mind of Catholic interpreters.

And how else than as Queen of the heavenly host should we expect her to be represented? What does the Church teaching as to sanctity imply?

It implies the enjoyment of the Beatific Vision. The normal Christian life begins in the sacramental act by which the regenerate child is made one with God, being made a partaker of the divine nature, and develops through sacramental experience and constant response to the will of God to that spiritual capacity which is the medium of the Beatific Vision and which we call sanctity or purity. "The pure in heart shall see God."

But the teaching of the Church also implies that there is a marvellous diversity in the sanctity of the members of the Body of Christ. Each saint retains his personal characteristics, and his sanctity is not the refashioning of his character in a common mould but the perfecting of his character on its own lines. We sometimes hear it said that the Christian conception of heaven is monotonous, but that is very far from being the fact. It is only those conceptions of heaven which have excluded the communion of saints, and have thought of heaven as the solitary communion of the soul with God; which have in other words, excluded the notion of human society from heaven, which have appeared monotonous. As we read any series of the lives of the saints, and realise that it is these men and women and multitudes of others like them, that make up the society of heaven, we get rid of any other notion than that of endless diversity. And thus studying individual saints we come to understand that not only is the sanctity of them diverse in experience but different in degree. All men have not the same capacity for sanctity, we infer; all cannot develop to the same level of attainment. We may perhaps say that while all partake of God, all do not reflect God in the same way or in the same degree.