Our Lady Saint Mary Part 9

Unless they will abandon the Child, Mary and Joseph must set out on the desert way. They had no doubt much to learn; but what is important is not the size or amount of what we learn, but the learning of it. When we are called, as they were, to leave all for Christ, it often turns out as hard, oftentimes harder, to leave property as riches; and the reason is that what we ultimately are leaving is neither poverty nor riches, but self: and self to us is always a "great possession."

Therein, I suppose, lies the solution of the problem of the relation of property and Christianity in the common life. Idleness is sin; every one is bound to some useful labour, no matter what his material resources may be. And if we work for our living, if our labour is to be such as will support us, then there at once arises the problem of possessions.

Useful, steady labour will ordinarily produce more than "food and raiment." Under present social arrangments acc.u.mulated property is handed on to heirs. A man naturally wants to make some provision for his family. Or he finds himself in possession of considerable wealth and the impulse is to spend in luxuries of one sort or another,--modern invention has put endless means of ministering to physical or aesthetic comfort within his reach. He can have a motor car, a country house, an expensive library; he can have beautiful works of art. And then he is confronted with the picture of the Holy Family which can never have lived much beyond the poverty line. He realises the nature of our Lord's life of poverty and ministry. And though the plain man may not feel that he can go very far in imitating this life, he does feel that there is a splendour of achievement in those who take our Lord at His word and sell all to follow Him.

But the literal abandonment of life to the ideal of poverty is clearly not what our Lord contemplated for the universal practice of His followers. He nowhere indicates that all gainful labour is to be abandoned, or that having gained enough for food and raiment we are to idle thereafter, or even give ourselves to some ungainful work. The Kingdom of heaven does not appear to be society organised on the lines of socialism or otherwise. Our Lord contemplated life going on as it is, only governed by a new set of motives. It has as the result of the acceptance of the Gospel a new Orientation; and as a result of that it will view "possessions" in a new way. The acceptance of the Gospel means the self surrendered utterly to the will of G.o.d, and all that self possesses held at the disposal of that will. We may expect that G.o.d's will for us will be manifested in the events of life and its opportunities, and we shall hold ourselves alert and ready to embrace that will. It may be that the call will come to sell all, and we need to beware lest the thoroughness of the demand terrify us into the repudiation of our Lord's service; lest the thought of the sacrificed possessions send us away sorrowing. Ordinarily the call is less searching than that; or perhaps the mercy of G.o.d spares us from demands that would be beyond our strength. In any case, the truly consecrated self will regard luxury as a dangerous thing, replete with entanglements of all kinds, that it were well to avoid at the expense of any sacrifice. One does well to hold "possessions" in a very loose grip, lest the hold be reversed, and we become their servants rather than they ours. And it is well to emphasise again that the mere size of possessions is of small importance. There is a not very rational tendency to think of this as being a matter of millions, for the man of moderate income to think that there is no problem for him. The problem is as pressing for him as for any man. His minimum of comfort may be as tightly grasped as the other man's maximum. The only solution of the problem will be found in the converted self. Those who have really given themselves to G.o.d hold all things at His disposal. They are not thinking how they can indulge self but how they can glorify G.o.d.

Egypt to many will stand for another sort of abandonment which much perplexes the immature Christian: that is, the sort of isolation in which the new Christian is quite likely to find himself when first he attempts to put Christian principles into practice. We imagine one brought up in the ordinary mixed circles of society, where there are unbelievers and lax Christians mingled together, and where there are no principles firmly enough held to interfere with any sort of enjoyment of life which offers. Such an one--a young woman, let us suppose--in the Providence of G.o.d becomes converted to our Lord, and comes to see that the lax and indifferent Christian life she had been leading was a mere mockery of Christian living. Speedily does she find when she attempts to put into action the principles of living which she now understands to be the meaning of the Gospel that a breach of sympathy has been opened between her and her accustomed companions; that many things which she was accustomed to do in their society and which made for their common fund of amus.e.m.e.nt are no longer possible to her. The careless talk, the shameless dress, the gambling, the drinking, the Sunday amus.e.m.e.nts--such things as these she has thrown over; and she finds that with them she has thrown over the basis of intimacy with her usual companions. It is not that they are antagonistic but simply that their points of contact have ceased to exist. Her own inhibitions exclude her automatically from most of the activities of her social circle. She finds herself much alone. Her friends are sorry for her and think her foolish and try to win her back, but it is clear to her that she can only go back by going back from Christ.

This is the common case of the young whether boy or girl to-day, and the practical question is, Can they endure the isolation? It is easy to say: Let them make Christian friends; but that is not always practical, especially in the present state of the Church when there is no cohesion among its members, no true sense of const.i.tuting a Brotherhood, of being members of the same Body. We have to admit that the attempt to hold a high standard usually ends in failure, at least the practical failure of a weak compromise. But there are characters that are strong enough to face the isolation and to readjust life on the basis of the new principles and to mould it in accord with the new ideals. The period of this readjustment is one of severe testing of one's grasp on principles and one's strength of purpose. But the battle once fought out we attain a new kind of freedom and expansion of life. We look back with some amus.e.m.e.nt at the old life and the things that fascinated us in the days of our spiritual unconsciousness much as we look back at the games that amused us in our childish hours. The desert of Egypt that we entered with trepidation and fearful hearts turns out not to be so dreadful as we imagined, and indeed the flowers spring up under our feet as we resolutely tread the desert way.

These trials must be the daily experience of those who attempt to put their religion into practice, and these perplexities must a.s.sail them so long as the Christian community continues to show its present social incompetence; so long, that is, as we attempt to make the basis of our social action something other than the principles of the spiritual life.

A Christian society, one would naturally think, would spring out of the possession of Christian ideals; and doubtless it would if these ideals were really dominant in life, and not a sort of ornament applied to it.

Any social circle contains men and women of various degrees of intellectual development and of varying degrees of experience of life; what holds them together is the pursuit of common objects, the objects that we sum up as amus.e.m.e.nt. Now the Christians in a community certainly have a common object, the cultivation of the spiritual life through the supernatural means offered by the Church of G.o.d. One would think that this object would have a more constraining power than the attractions of motoring or golf; but in fact we know that this is not so save in individual cases. There is not, that is to say, anywhere visible a Christian community which is wrought into a unity by the solidifying forces of its professed ideals. Those very people whose paths converge week by week until they meet at this altar, as they leave the altar, follow diverging paths and live in isolation for the rest of their time.

One of the constant problems of the Church is that of the loss of those who have for a time been a.s.sociated with it--of those who have for a time seemed to recognise their duty to G.o.d, and their privileges as members of His Son. They drift away into the world. We pray and meditate and worry over this and try to invent some machinery which will overcome it. But it cannot be overcome by machinery, especially by the sort of machinery which consists in transferring the amus.e.m.e.nts that people find in the world bodily into the Church itself. It cannot and will not be overcome until a Christian society has been created which is bound together by the interests of the Kingdom of G.o.d, and in which those interests are so predominant as to throw into the shade and practically annihilate other interests. And especially must such spiritual interests be strong enough to break down all social barriers so that the cultured and refined can find a common ground with the uneducated and socially untrained in the spiritual privileges that they share in common. When the banker can talk with his chauffeur of their common experience in prayer, and the banker's wife and her cook can confer on their mutual difficulties in making a meditation, then we shall have got within sight of a Christian society; but at present, while these have no spiritual contact, it is not within sight. The primitive Christian community in Jerusalem made the attempt at having all things in common.

Their mistake seems to have been that they, like other and more modern people, by "all things" understood money. You cannot build any society which is worth the name on money, a Church least of all. It is unimportant whether a man is rich or poor; what is important is his spiritual accomplishment: and it is common spiritual aims and accomplishments which should make up the "all things" which possessed in common will form the basis of an enduring unity. But not until accomplishment becomes the supreme interest of life can we expect to get out of the impa.s.se in which we at present find ourselves; in which, that is, the person can be converted to Christianity and enter into union with G.o.d in Christ and become a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, and wake to find himself isolated from his old circle by his profession of new principles; but not, by his new principles, truly united to his fellow citizens in the Kingdom of G.o.d! One is tempted to write, What a comedy; but before one can do so, realises that it is in fact a tragedy!

Mother of G.o.d--oh, rare prerogative; Oh, glorious t.i.tle--what more special grace Could unto thee thy dear Son, dread G.o.d, give To show how far thou dost all creatures pa.s.s?

That mighty power within the narrow fold Did of thy ne'er polluted womb remain, Whom, whiles he doth th' all-ruling Sceptre hold, Not earth, nor yet the heavens can contain; Thou in the springtide of thy age brought'st forth Him who before all matter, time and place, Begotten of th' Eternal Father was.

Oh, be thou then, while we admire thy worth A means unto that Son not to proceed In rigour with us for each sinful deed.

John Brereley, Priest (Vere Lawrence Anderton, S.J.) 1575-1643

PART TWO

CHAPTER XI

NAZARETH

And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them.

S. Luke II, 51.

The Holy Church acknowledges and confesses the pure Virgin Mary as Mother of G.o.d through whom has been given unto us the bread of immortality and the wine of consolation. Give blessings then in spiritual song.

ARMENIAN.

After the rapid succession of fascinating pictures which are etched for us in the opening chapters of the Gospel there follows a s.p.a.ce of about twelve years of which we are told nothing. The fables which fill the pages of the Apocryphal Gospels serve chiefly to emphasise the difference between an inspired and an uninspired narrative. The human imagination trying to develop the situation suggested by the Gospel and to fill in the unwritten chapters of our Lord's life betrays its incompetence to create a story of G.o.d Incarnate which shall have the slightest convincing power. These Apocryphal stories are immensely valuable to us as, by contrast, creating confidence in the story of Jesus as told by the Evangelists, but for nothing more.

We are left to use our own imagination in filling in these years of silence in our Lord's training; and we shall best use it, not by trying to imagine what may have occurred, but by trying to understand what is necessarily involved in the facts as we know them. We know that the home in Nazareth whither Mary and Joseph brought Jesus after the death of Herod permitted them to return from Egypt was the simple home of a carpenter. It would appear to have been shared by the children of Joseph, and our Lady would have been the house-mother, busy with many cares. We know, too, that under this commonplace exterior of a poor household there was a life of the spirit of far reaching significance.

Mary was ceaselessly pondering many things--the significance of all those happenings which, as the years flowed on without any further supernatural intervention, must at times have seemed as though they were quite purposeless. Of course this could not have been a settled feeling, for the insight of her pure soul would have held her to the certainty that such actions of G.o.d as she had experienced would some day reveal the meaning which as yet lay hidden.

In the meantime other things did not matter much, seeing she had Jesus, the object of endless love. Every mother dreams over the baby she cares for and looks out into the future with trembling hope; so S. Mary's thoughts would go out following the hints of prophecy and angelic utterances, unable to understand how the light and shadow which were mingled there could find fulfilment in her Child. But like any other mother the thought would come back to her present possession, the satisfaction of her heart that she had in Jesus. With the growth of Jesus there would come the unfolding of the answering love, which was but another mode in which the love of G.o.d she had experienced all her life was manifesting itself. Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and we are able to enter a little into the over-flowing love of Mary as she watched the advance, this unfolding from day to day. The wonder that was hers in guiding this mind and will, in teaching our Lord His first prayers, in telling Him the story of the people of whom He had a.s.sumed our nature!

There was here no self-will, no resistance to guidance, no perversity to wound a mother's heart. In the training of an ordinary child there are from time to time hints of characteristics or tendencies which may develop later into spiritual or moral disaster. There are growls of the sleeping beast which make us tremble for the future: there are hours of agony when we think of the inevitable temptations which must be met, and suggestions of weakness which colour our imagination of the meeting of them with the lurid light of defeat. But as Mary watched the unfolding character of Jesus she saw nothing there that carried with it the least suggestion of evil growth in the future, no outcropping of hereditary sin or disordered appet.i.te. A constantly unfolding intelligence, and growing interest in the things that most interested her, an eagerness to hear and to know of the will and love of the eternal Father, these are her joy. That would have been the centre--would it not?--of the unfolding consciousness of Jesus: the knowledge of the Father.

Training by love, so we might describe the life in the Home at Nazareth.

And we must not forget the grave ageing figure who is the head of the household. _The Holy Family_--that was the perfect unity that their love created. There is a wonderful picture of these three by Sa.s.saferato which catches, as no other Holy Family that I know of does, the meaning of their a.s.sociation. S. Mary whom the artistic imagination is so apt, after the Nativity, to transform into a stately matron, here still retains the note of virginity which in fact she never lost. It is the maiden-mother who stands by the side of the grave, elderly S. Joseph, the ideal workman, who is also the ideal guardian of his maiden-wife.

And Jesus binds these two together and with them makes a unity, interpreting to us the perfection of family life.

Family life is a tremendous test, it brings out the best and the worst of those who are a.s.sociated in it. The ordinary restraints of social intercourse are of less force in the intimacy of family life: there is less need felt to watch conduct, or to mask what we know are our disagreeable traits. It is quite easy for character to deteriorate in the freedom of such intercourse. It is pretty sure to do so unless there is the constant pressure of principle in the other direction. The great safeguard is the sort of love that is based on mutual respect,--respect both for ourselves and for others. We talk a good deal as though love were always alike; as though the fact that a man and a woman love each other were always the same sort of fact. It does not require much knowledge of human nature or much reflection to convince us that that is not the case. Love is not a purely physical fact; and outside its physical implications there are many factors which may enter, whose existence const.i.tute the _differentia_ from case to case. It is upon these varying elements that the happiness of the family life depends.

One of the most important is that character on either side shall be such as to inspire respect. Many a marriage goes to pieces on this rock; it is found that the person who exercised a certain kind of fascination shows in the intimacy of married life a character and qualities which are repulsive; a shallowness which inspires contempt, an egotism which is intolerable, a laxity in the treatment of obligations which destroys any sense of the stability of life. A marriage which does not grow into a relation of mutual honour and respect must always be in a state of unstable equilibrium, constantly subject to storms of pa.s.sion, to suspicion and distrust.

And therefore such a marriage will afford no safe basis on which to build a family life. But without a stable family life a stable social and religious life is impossible. It is therefore no surprise to those who believe that the powers of evil are active in the world to find that the family is the very centre of their attack at the present time. The cra.s.s egotism lying back of so much modern teaching is nowhere more clearly visible than in the a.s.sertion of the right of self-determination so blatantly made in popular writings. By self-determination is ultimately meant the right of the individual to seek his own happiness in his own way, and to make pleasure the rule of his life. "The right to happiness" is claimed in utter disregard of the fact that the claim often involves the unhappiness of others. "The supremacy of love,"

meaning the supremacy of animalism, is the excuse for undermining the very foundations of family life. No obligation, it appears, can have a binding force longer than the parties to it find gratification in it.

Personal inclination and gratification is held sufficient ground for action whose consequences are far from being personal, which, in fact, affect the sane and healthy state of society as a whole.

The decline of a civilisation has always shown itself more markedly in the decline of the family life than elsewhere. The family, not the individual, is the basis of the social state, and no amount of theorising can make the fact different. Whatever a.s.sails the integrity of the family a.s.sails the life of the state, and no single family can be destroyed without society as a whole feeling the effect. "What," it is asked, "is to be done? If two people find that they have blundered, are they to go on indefinitely suffering from the result of their blunder?

If an immature boy or girl in a moment of pa.s.sion make a mistake as to their suitability to live together, are they to be compelled to do so at the expense of constant unhappiness?"

It would seem obvious to say that justice requires that those who make blunders should take the consequences of them; that those who create a situation involving suffering should do the suffering themselves and not attempt to pa.s.s it on to others. It is not as though the consequences of the act can be avoided; they cannot. What happens is that the incidence of them is shifted. It is a part of the brutal egotism of divorce that it is quite willing to shift the incidence of the suffering that it has created on to the lives of wholly innocent people; in many cases upon children, in all cases upon society at large. For it is necessary to emphasize the fact that society is a closely compact body: so interwoven is life with life that if one member suffer the other members suffer with it. Breaches of moral order are not individual matters but social.

This truth is implied in society's constantly a.s.serted right to regulate family relations in the general interest even after it has ceased to think of such relations as having any spiritual significance. We need to-day a more vivid sense of the _community_ lest we shall see all sense of a common life engulfed in the rising tide of individual anarchism. We need the a.s.sertion in energetic form of the right of the community as supreme over the right of the individual. We must deny the right of the individual to pursue his own way and his own pleasure at the expense of the rights of others. And to his insolent question, "Why should I suffer in an intolerable situation?" we must plainly answer: "Because you are responsible for the situation, and it is intolerable that you should be permitted to throw off the results of your wickedness or your stupidity upon other and innocent people."

And it is quite clear that should society a.s.sert its pre-eminent right in unmistakable form and make it evident that it does not propose to tolerate the results of the egotistic nonsense of self-determination and the right of every one to live his own life, the evils of divorce and of shattered families would presently shrink to relatively small proportions. The present facility of divorce encourages thoughtless and unsuitable marriages in the first place; and in the second place, encourages the resort to divorce in circ.u.mstances of family disturbance which would speedily right themselves in the present as they have done in the past if those concerned knew that their happiness and comfort for years compelled an adjustment of life. When as at present any one who loses his temper can rush off to a court and get a marriage dissolved for some quite trivial reason, there is small encouragement to practice self-control. If a man and woman know that the consequences of conduct must be faced by them, and cannot be avoided by thrusting them upon others, they will no doubt in the course of time learn to exercise a little self-control.

The family is the foundation of the state because, among other things, it is the natural training place of citizens: no public training in schools and camps can for a moment safely be looked to as a subst.i.tute or an equivalent of wholesome family influence. If the family does not make good citizens we cannot have good citizens. The family too is at the basis of organised religious life; if the family does not make good Christians we shall not have good Christians. The Sunday School and the Church societies are poor subst.i.tutes for the religious influence of the family, as the school and the camp are for its social interests.

One is inclined to stress the obvious failure of the family to fulfil its alloted functions in the teaching of religion as the root difficulty that the Christian religion has to encounter and the most comprehensive cause of its relative failure in modern life. The responsibility for the religious and moral training of children rests squarely upon those who have a.s.sumed the responsibility of bringing them into the world, and it cannot be rightly pushed off on to some one else. To the protest of parents that they are incompetent to conduct such training, the only possible reply is a blunt, "Whose fault is that?" If you have been so careless of the fundamental responsibilities of life, you are incompetent to a.s.sume a relation which of necessity carries such responsibility with it. It is no light matter to have committed to you the care of an immortal soul whose eternal future may quite well be conditioned on the way in which you fulfil your trust. It would be well as a preliminary to marriage to take a little of the time ordinarily given to its frivolous accompaniments and seriously meditate upon the words of our Lord which seem wholly appropriate to the circ.u.mstance: "Whoso shall cause to stumble one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea." It is the careless and incompetent training of children which in fact "causes them to stumble" when the presence of word and example would have held them straight. It has been (to speak personally) the greatest trial of my priesthood that out of the thousands of children I have dealt with, in only rare cases have I had the entire support of the family; and I have always considered that I was fortunate when I met with no interference and was given an indifferent tolerance. It is heart-breaking to see years of careful work brought to naught (so far as the human eye can see: the divine eye can see deeper) by the brutal materialism of a father and the silly worldliness of a mother.

The interplay of lives in a family should be consciously directed by those who control them to the cultivation, to the bringing out of the best that is in them. Education means the drawing out of the innate powers of the personality and the training of them for the highest purposes. It is the deliberate direction of personal powers to the highest ends, the discipline of them for the performance of those ends.

The life of a child should be shaped with reference to its final destiny from the moment of its birth. It should be surrounded with an atmosphere of prayer and charity which would be the natural atmosphere in which it would expand as it grows, and in terms of which it would learn to express itself as soon as it reaches sufficient maturity to express itself at all. It should become familiar with spiritual language and modes of action, and meet nothing that is inharmonious with these. But we know that the education of the Christian child is commonly the opposite of all this. It learns little that is spiritual. When it comes to learn religion it is obviously a matter of small importance in the family life; if there is any expression of it at all, it is one that is crowded into corners and constantly swamped by other interests which are obviously felt to be of more importance. Too often the spiritual state of the family may be summed up in the words of the small boy who condensed his observation of life into the axiom: "Men and dogs do not go to Church." In such an atmosphere the child finds religion and morals reduced to a system of repression. G.o.d becomes a man with a club constantly saying, Don't! He grows to think that he is a fairly virtuous person so long as he skilfully avoids the system of taboos wherewith he feels that life is surrounded, and fulfils the one positive family law of a religious nature, that he shall go to Sunday School until he is judged sufficiently mature to join the vast company of men and dogs.

Nothing very much can come of negatives. Religion calls for positive expression; and it is not enough that the child shall find positive expression once a week in the church; he must find it every day in the week in the intimacy of the family. He must find that the principles of life which are inculcated in the church are practiced by his father and his mother, his brother and his sister, or he will not take them seriously. If he is conscious of virtue and religious practice as repression, a sort of tyranny practiced on a child by his elders, his notion of the liberty of adult life will quite naturally be freedom to break away from what is now forced upon him into the life of self-determination and indifference to things spiritual that characterises the adult circle with which he is familiar.

But consider, by contrast, those rare families where the opposite of all this is true; where there is the peace of a recollected life of which the foundations are laid in constant devotion to our Lord. There you will find the nearest possible reproduction of the life of the Holy Family in Nazareth. Because the life of the family is a life of prayer, there will you find Jesus in the midst of it. There you will find Mary and Joseph a.s.sociated with its life of intercession. In such a family the expression of a religious thought will never be felt as a discord.

The talk may quite naturally at any moment turn on spiritual things.

There are families in which one feels that one must make a careful preparation for the introduction of a spiritual allusion: one does it with a sense of danger, much as one might sail through a channel strewn with mines. There are other families in which one has no hesitation in speaking of prayer, of sacraments, of spiritual actions, as things with which all are familiar in practice, and are as natural as food and drink. In this atmosphere it produces no smile to say, "I am going to slip into the Church and make my meditation"; or, "I shall be a little late to-night as I am making my confession on my way home." Religion in such a circle has not incurred contempt through familiarity: it still remains a great adventure, the very greatest of all indeed; but it is an adventure in the open, full of joy and gladness.

The Holy Family was a family that worked hard. It is no doubt true that our Lord learned his foster-father's trade, so that those who knew him later on, or heard His preaching, asked, "Is not this the carpenter?"

But the Holy Family was a radiant centre of joy and peace because Jesus was in the midst of it. Where Jesus dwells there is the effect of his indwelling in the spiritual gladness that results. Mary was never too busy for her religious duties nor Joseph too tired with his week's work to get up on the Sabbath for whatever services in honour of G.o.d the Synagogue offered. They were perhaps conscious as the Child "increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with G.o.d and man" of a spiritual influence that flowed from Him, and sweetened and lightened the life of the home. They were not conscious that in His Person G.o.d was in the midst of them; but that is what we can (if we will) be conscious of. We are heirs of the Incarnation, and G.o.d is in the midst of us; and especially does Jesus wish to dwell, as He dwelt in Nazareth, in the midst of the family. He wishes to make every household a Holy Family. He is in the midst of it in uninterrupted communion with the soul of the baptised child; and the father and mother, understanding that their highest duty and greatest privilege is to watch and foster the spiritual unfolding of the child's life in such wise that Jesus may never depart from union with it, become as Joseph and Mary in their ministry to it.

There is nothing more heavenly than such a charge; there is nothing more beautiful than such a family life.

There is often a pause in G.o.d's work between times of great activity--a time of retreat, as it seems, which is a rest from what has preceded and a preparation for what is to come. Such a pause were these years at Nazareth in the life of Blessed Mary. The time from the Annunciation to the return from Egypt was a time of deep emotion, of spirit-shaking events. Later on there were the trials of the years of the ministry, culminating in Calvary. But these years while Jesus was growing to manhood in the quietness of the home were years of unspeakable privilege and peace. The daily a.s.sociation with the perfect Child, the privilege of watching and guarding and ministering to Him, these days of deepening spiritual union with Him, although much that was happening to the mother was happening unconsciously,--were strengthening her grasp on ultimate reality, so that she issued with perfect strength to meet the supreme tragedy of her life. How wonderful G.o.d must have seemed to her in those thirty years of peace! To all of us G.o.d is thus wonderful in quiet hours; and the quiet hours are much the more numerous in most of our lives. But have we all learned to use these hours so that we may be ready to meet the hours of testing which shall surely come? No matter how quiet the valley of our life, some day the pleasant path will lift, and we must climb the hilltop where rises the Cross. It will not be intolerable, if the quiet years have been spent in Nazareth with Jesus and Mary and Joseph.

Most holy, and pure Virgin, Blessed Mayd, Sweet Tree of Life, King David's Strength and Tower, The House of Gold, the Gate of Heaven's power, The Morning-Star whose light our fall hath stay'd.

Great Queen of Queens, most mild, most meek, most wise, Most venerable, Cause of all our joy, Whose cheerful look our sadnesse doth destroy, And art the spotlesse Mirror to man's eyes.

The Seat of Sapience, the most lovely Mother, And most to be admired of thy s.e.xe, Who mad'st us happy all, in thy reflexe, By bringing forth G.o.d's Onely Son, no other.

Thou Throne of Glory, beauteous as the moone, The rosie morning, or the rising sun, Who like a giant hastes his course to run, Till he hath reached his two-fold point of noone.

How are thy gifts and graces blazed abro'd, Through all the lines of this circ.u.mference, T'imprint in all purged hearts this Virgin sence Of being Daughter, Mother, Spouse of G.o.d?

Ben Jonson, 1573-1637.