here 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 God, 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 association 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