Prayer.

O Lord, I can now more fully understand those divine words which flowed from the Cross, and were treasured up on Calvary by the best beloved of Thy disciples: "Behold thy Mother!" I see that they were spoken to the children of grace throughout all ages; that they extend even to me, and relate to me. I see that I am truly the child of Thy humble Handmaid, and that Thy Mother is also mine, because my life was given me by her, because it has pleased Thee to give it to me through her. O Divine Wisdom! Thou dost nothing imperfectly; when Thou gavest us a Mother, Thou didst give to her a mother's heart; when Thou gavest us a Divine Mother, Thou didst enkindle her heart with the fire of Divine love. Blessed be Thou, O my God, for this ineffable gift! I would fain prove my gratitude by awakening the like in the hearts of others, and by seizing every opportunity of saying to the ungrateful and the blind of heart: If you did but know the gift of God! If you did but know what a Mother's heart is loving you in heaven! Only put that heart to the proof, and you will soon attest by your own experience the truth which you now receive on faith. Mary, my own true Mother, I will not rest content with loving thee myself; I desire to make thee known, to make thee to be loved! Dignare me laudare te Virgo sacrata. It will be no hard task. It is not difficult to make thee loved. It is enough to tell men what thou art. God Himself draws all men to thy love; for when He made thee their Mother, He made them thy children; and when He filled thy heart with love for them, He infused also into their hearts a child-like instinct, which awakens at thy presence. There is something supernatural in the heart of man which speaks to him of thee; and whoever resists that divine attraction revolts against the order of God, and falls from the supernatural love which he rejects into the supernatural hatred to which he

becomes subject. Yes, love and hatred are the distinctive characteristics here below of the children of God and the children of Satan,-that father of pride, who has ever detested in thee the humility which vanquished him. I will labour, then, to win hearts for thee. I will tell them of thy greatness, thy beauty, thy motherly love. I will teach them to trust to thy prayers; and as my reward, most sweet and holy Mother, thou wilt pray for me with all the tender compassion of which I stand in need. Amen.

CHAPTER II.

MARY THE MEDIATRIX OF GRACE TO ALL GENERATIONS OF MANKIND.

GOD has impressed the character of unity on all His works; but He has been especially jealous of the unity of the human race, which is, as it were, His own family, created to His own image and likeness: Ipsius genus sumus ("for we are also His offspring"). Thus, not only did He ordain that the whole human race should issue from one primitive family, and that family the offspring of the first marriage between one man and one woman, the father and the mother of all generations of mankind,—but He formed the first woman herself from the first man, the first Eve from the first Adam; thus constituting the perfect unity of the natural life. The gift of supernatural life has not broken that unity; for it was of a daughter of Eve, according to nature, that the second Adam, the Principle of the life of grace, vouchsafed to be born; the Creator Word becoming thus incarnate to redeem and to restore His work without dividing it.

Acts xvii. 28.

The unity of the supernatural life is not less perfect in the human race than the unity of the natural life; for if all generations have received the one from the first Adam by the first Eve, all likewise, without excepting the first man and the first woman, have received the other from the second Adam by the second Eve.

Mary, in fact, did not first become the Mother of grace at the moment of the Incarnation, but from the very origin of mankind; as Jesus is the Source of grace, the Principle of the superior life of mankind, not only from the moment of the Incarnation, but from the beginning of the world—ab origine mundi. It is of faith that grace was restored to the first man by virtue of his foreseen redemption by the "Lamb slain from the beginning." Jesus Christ, therefore, was the true Principle of life to the first man and to all his descendants.

But by whom did God will from the beginning to give us Jesus Christ? By Mary. It was, therefore, by her that from the beginning He willed to restore us to life; and Mary is thus the Mother of grace ab initio ("from the beginning of all things"), by the will of God.

But to place this truth in its full light, it ought to be viewed in relation to another, explained very clearly by S. Francis of Sales in his Treatise on the Love of God, in which he shows that not only was grace restored to the first man with a view to redemption, but that it was originally given to him with a view to the Incarnation; because the Incarnation of the Word, and therewith the Divine Maternity which was the condition freely chosen for it by Providence (freely chosen as was the Incarnation itself), belonged to the original purpose of the Creator; a divine purpose which would have been realised without the fall of man (to which the order of redemption corresponds), by some other free effect of the infinite mercy of God.

But we will cite the very words of St. Francis of Sales, both because they are so full of light, and because they show us how the Saints treat ascetical subjects, carefully basing piety on the sweet and interior knowledge of divine truth; and lastly, because they will lead us to our conclusion by a process of reasoning so forcible and so sublime as might be accounted over-bold in our mouth had we not borrowed it from the spiritual science of the saintly Bishop of Geneva.

"Every thing which God has done,” says he, was destined for the salvation of men and angels; but this is the order of His Providence with regard to them, as we have been able to discover it by diligent attention to Holy Scripture and to the teaching of antiquity; and we are now about to speak of it so far as our weakness will permit.

"God knew from all eternity that He had power to create an innumerable host of creatures to whom He might communicate Himself; and considering that, among all the different modes of such communication, the most excellent was so to unite Himself to some created being, that the creature should be, as it were, ingrafted into the Divinity, so as to form but one person with It, His infinite goodness, which was led of itself and by itself to that communication, resolved to make it after this manner, in order that, as from eternity there is an essential communication in God, by which the Father, in begetting the Son, communicates to Him all His infinite and indivisible Divinity; and the Father and the Son together, producing the Holy Spirit, communicate also to Him their proper Divinity,-so this Sovereign Goodness was in the Incarnation so perfectly communicated out of itself to a created nature, that that nature and the Divinity, each preserving its own properties, were nevertheless so perfectly united together as to form but One Person.

"Now, among all the created beings which it was in the power of Almighty God to produce, He thought

fit to choose the humanity which was afterwards actually united to the Person of God the Son, to raise it to the incomparable dignity of a personal union with His Divine Majesty, that through all eternity it might preeminently enjoy the treasures of His infinite glory. Next, having thus chosen for this supreme felicity the Sacred Humanity of our Saviour, the Eternal Father determined not to restrict His bounty to the Person of His well-beloved Son alone, but for His sake to bestow it upon a great multitude of His creatures; and among all the innumerable variety of possible creatures, He chose to create men and Angels to bear His Son company, to share His graces and His glory, and to adore and praise Him eternally.

"And because Almighty God saw that His Son might become truly incarnate in many different ways,His body, for example, as well as His soul, might have been created out of nothing, or (as in the creation of Adam and Eve) His Body might have been formed out of previously existing matter, or by the way of ordinary generation, or by extraordinary generation of a Virgin,1

-He willed that the Incarnation should be brought to pass in this latter way; and among all the women whom He might have chosen for that end, He made choice of the most Blessed Virgin Mary, that by her means the Saviour of our souls might become, not only Man, but the Child of the human race.2

"Moreover, Divine Providence 'determined to pro

1 Of the Virgin promised from the beginning, of her whom Isaias calls the Virgin, whose image appears in all the traditions of mankind, and even in the fables of paganism, combined with the idea of the Incarnation, as we have shown elsewhere, from the sacred books of the nations of antiquity. Our fathers, in the forests of the North, thus raised altars to the Virgin who was to bring forth a child, Virgini parituræ. See the second part of Le Christ et les Antichrists, tom. i., “Jesus Christ dans Î'Histoire."

? See what we have just said in the beginning of this second chapter on the unity of the work of God.