Our Lady Saint Mary Part 19

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 G.o.d. 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 ma.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.ses 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 repet.i.tion 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d can always be resisted--and always is. Nevertheless the Holy Spirit is in the Church.

He shaped and is shaping its beliefs and inst.i.tutions: 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 G.o.d 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 sanct.i.ty. Guiltlessness is a negative, sanct.i.ty is a positive state, and is acquired as the result of active correspondence with the will of G.o.d. In order that there may be this correspondence the will of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sent to truth as true; but they are not thereby necessarily moved to act upon it: it may remain una.s.similated. The vast majority of the people of this country, if they were questioned, would a.s.sert a belief in G.o.d; 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 pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sistance 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 G.o.d 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 sanct.i.ty. 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 Pa.s.sion. 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d's will, and then we deceive ourselves as to the nature of our response. We think we are seeking for G.o.d when in reality we are seeking our own ends. We make our own plans and then seek to impose them on the will of G.o.d. Self-seeking, which we mistake for something else, is at the root of much spiritual failure. We try to believe that G.o.d's will is our will, and we succeed in a measure. We need therefore to be constantly examining ourselves by the revealed standard of G.o.d'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 G.o.d of our wills that He can go on to His desired work. The aim of G.o.d 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 a.n.a.lyses into these qualities which are the evidence of G.o.d'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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.similates the natural elements which are furnished it by the Providence of G.o.d 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 G.o.d, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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. G.o.d gives, but He gives to those who want.

I

others do of grace bereave, When, in their mother's womb, they life receive, G.o.d, as his sole-borne Daughter, loved thee: To match thee like thy birth's n.o.bility, 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sions 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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, G.o.d 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, overpa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sociation 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 circ.u.mstances of the coming of the Son of G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sociation 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.ses 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 a.s.sociation 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.