Mariae Corona

THERE is always a difficulty about our treatment of the supernatural. However we may have tried to bring it home to, our understandings, and to master it in all Its details, there is always a consciousness that we have failed. Even when we call to our assistance the Word of God, and the Fathers of the Church, to enable us by study to comprehend our subject fully, yet there remains an uneasy feeling that we have mastered not OUI subject, but our idea of it-that our words have merely gone to express our own ideas, but have been utterly inadequate to describe that supernatural truth to the minds of others. In a certain sense, this is more true of the mystery of the Immaculate Mother of God than of any other mystery of Christian Revelation. Because in approaching all other mysteries we acknowledge them to be mysteries, and confess our own inability to comprehend them; but in speaking of God's Mother, we grow through familiarity, perhaps, into the mistake of believing that we are speaking of a subject that comes within the range of human knowledge. And it is only when we have recognised the truth that if the Incarnate God be the greatest of all mysteries, the Mother of the Incarnate God must participate in that mystery, that we shelter ourselves under our humility, leaving to God the knowledge of His mysteries, and retaining only our wonder and admiration for Him and them. This mystic character has been given to the Mother of God by her close relations with her Divine Son. The Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ conferred upon His Mother a dignity proportioned to His humiliation. He humbled Himself, and she was exalted in the humiliation. He became Man, and she became the Mother of Ged. The deeper He descended, the higher she ascended. He emptied Himself of His glory, and clothed her with It. He concealed all His supernatural powers and qualities, and descended upon earth to mingle amongst men, and behold! He raised His Mother at the same time from her place amongst men, and endowed her with supernatural powers and supernatural graces. He robbed earth of a great deal that He might make a larger compensation to earth-taking from earth a Mother, and giving it a Son; taking from earth its purest and holiest daughter, from men their best-loved sister, and giving Himself in return; infinitely purer, infinitely holier than she, and yearning to be better beloved through her and for her sake. And thus Jesus met His 1fother half-way betwixt heaven and earth; she, raised to meet Him, and He, descending to meet her; there Mother and Child were united, and there united and inseparable they live for ever in the thought of Christians.