to understand that not only is the sanctity of them diverse in
experience but different in degree. All men have not the same capacity
for sanctity, we infer; all cannot develop to the same level of
attainment. We may perhaps say that while all partake of God, all do not
reflect God in the same way or in the same degree.

But if there be a hierachy of saints it is impossible that we should
think of any other at its head than Blessed Mary. Whatsoever diversity
there may be in the attainments of the saints, there is one saint who
is pre-eminent in all things, who,--because in her case there has never
been any moment in which she was separate from God, when the bond of
union was so much as strained,--is the completest embodiment of the
grace of God. That is, I think, essentially what is meant by the
Coronation of our Lady,--that her supremacy in sanctity makes her the
head of the heirarchy of saints, that in her the possibilities of the
life of union have been developed to the highest degree through her
unstained purity and unfailing response to the divine will.

It is of the last importance, if the Catholic conceptions are to be
influential in our lives, that we should gain such a hold on the life of
heaven, the life that the saints, with Saint Mary at their head, are
leading to-day, as shall make it a present reality to us, not a picture
in some sort of dreamland. Our lives are shaped by their ideals; and
although we may never attain to our ideals here, yet we shall never
attain them anywhere unless we shape them here. Heaven must be grasped
as the issue of a certain sort of life, as the necessary consequence of
the application of Christian principles to daily living. It is wholly
bad to conceive it as a vague future into which we shall be ushered at
death, if only we are "good"; it must be understood as a state we win to
by the use of the means placed at our disposal for the purpose. Those
attain to heaven in the future who are interested in heaven in
the present.

And a study of the means is wholly possible for us because we have at
hand in great detail the lives of those whom the Church, by raising
them to her altars, has guaranteed to us as having achieved sanctity and
been admitted to the Beatific Vision. They achieved sanctity here--that
is, in the past. They achieved it under an infinite variety of
circumstanies,--that is the encouragement. They now enjoy the fruits of
it in the world of heaven,--that is the prom