Mary's did, when the sword pierced through her soul, and the great God Incarnate, who for thirty years had been to her a loving and dutiful son, hung upon the Cross of Calvary?

The record of the Annunciation is as grand as it is simple. We are told of the mission of an Angel to a Virgin whose name was Mary. The appointed hour had come, all things were now ready, the mandate went forth from the Eternal, and Gabriel stands before the Jewish maiden. The Messenger of God appears; and the daughter of David to whom he has been sent receives, as the daughter of a king, the greeting of the messenger of the King of Heaven. Pure, spotless, and undefiled she stands crowned with humilty before the Angel, as he utters the words, "Hail, thou that art endued with grace!" Human reason cannot fathom the depth of the

Angel's salutation to S. Mary; we cannot add to it, and we may not take from it.

The mind grows confused when attempting to understand the perfection of a created being whom God Himself by the voice of an Archangel proclaimed to be "endued with grace"-grace to which no limit is assigned. True it is that no limit can be assigned to the overflowings of God's grace, either to individual Christians or to those who, living in darkness in any age of the world's history, have no means of seeing that light of which the Baptist gave witness: but in these latter days, when the world is growing old and sin abounds, we seem so very far away from the "pure in heart," at such an immeasurable distance from the love and the faith and the courage which were grouped around the foot of the Cross of Calvary; and the lives of men and women are so

different now to the lives of those who formed the "noble army of Martyrs" in earlier days, that before meditating upon the stupendous fact that a descendant of the first Adam was found meet to be the Mother of the Second Adam, it were well to pray that we might be kept from presumptuous sin, and that we may catch a portion of the Virgin's Spirit.

The Holy Scriptures teach us that the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance; and as we know that with the Son, God freely gives all things, and that He will withhold no good thing from those who love and obey Him, so we know that all gracious gifts must have been abundantly bestowed upon her who was to be the Mother of that Son. In S. Mary was found the willing mind to receive, and the loving, pure heart in which

to enshrine the gifts of God, and so by those gifts was she made ready for that greatest Gift, which she received when the fulness of time had come. The "princely spirit' with which her ancestor, King David, prayed that he might be stablished-stablished the highly favoured daughter of the House of Israel, and made her what she was when the Angel Gabriel stood before her and uttered the first "Hail Mary."

No daughter of earth was ever so adorned with rich gems, as was the lowly Virgin with jewels out of the treasury of heaven. She stands alone among the daughters of Eve as the chosen one of God, and what God had made her, and what she was in His sight, that she was in the sight of the Archangel; hence his salutation. "To Mary alone," says S. Ambrose, was this

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salutation reserved. For she alone is well said to be full of grace, who alone hath

attained such grace as none other hath done, to be filled by the Author of Grace." In her own eyes she was the "handmaid of the Lord," living to do His will, and willing that all His will should be accomplished in her.

When we realize in a measure all that being proclaimed "Blessed among women involves, we begin to see what she, the favoured daughter of Israel, must have been. Taught and guided by the Holy Spirit, the benediction of the great King of heaven and earth rested upon her; and as He by His Spirit has thus presented her to our view in the shadow of His almighty wings, we may, with profit to our souls, gaze upon her and listen to the words which fell from her lips, and from those of the Angel in the Annunciation scene of the great drama shadowed forth in type and figure and predicted by prophets through