the present action of the Holy Spirit, we shall
not find that the fact that a given doctrine is not explicitly contained
in Holy Scripture is any bar to its acceptance. We shall have learned
that the revelation of God in Christ, and our relation to God in Christ,
are facts of such tremendous import and inexhaustible content that it
would be absurd to suppose that all their meaning had been understood
and explicitly stated in the first generation of the Christian Church.

We shall not, then, find it any bar to the acceptance of belief in the
assumption of our Lady that its formal statement came, as is said,
"late." We simply want to know that when it came it came as the outcome
of the mature thought of the Church, the Body of Christ, the Fulness of
Him that filleth all in all.

It is to be noted that the assumption is not a wholly isolated fact.
There are several cases of assumption in the Old Testament though of a
slightly different character in that they were assumptions directly from
life without any interval of death. Such were the assumptions of Enoch
and Elijah. Moses, too, it has been constantly believed, was assumed
into heaven,--in his case after death and with his resurrection body. A
case which is more strangely like what is believed to have taken place
in the experience of blessed Mary is that closely connected with our
Lord's resurrection and recorded by S. Matthew. "And the graves were
opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of
the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and
appeared unto many." Although it is not asserted that these were assumed
into heaven, it seems impossible to avoid the inference; and if "many
saints which slept" were raised from the dead and assumed into the
heavenly world, there can be no _a priori_ difficulty in believing the
same thing to have taken place in the Blessed Mother of God. Nay if such
a thing as an assumption is at all possible for any human being one
would naturally conclude from the very relation of S. Mary to our Lord
that the possibility would be realised in her.

And there were elements in her case which were lacking in all the other
cases which suggest a certain fitness, if not inevitability, in her
assumption. She was conceived without sin,--never had any breath of sin
tainted her. Was it then possible that she should be holden by death?
Surely, in any case, it was impossible that her holy body should see
corrup