to the revelation of the divine love;
and something of our love that goes out to our hidden Lord, goes out too
to the maiden-mother who so willingly became God's instrument in His
work for our redemption. In imagination I see S. Gabriel kneeling before
her who has become a living Tabernacle of God Most High, and repeating
his "Hail, thou that art highly favoured," with the deepest reverence.

"Hail, thou that art full of grace." We linger over this Ave of S.
Gabriel, and often it rises to our lips. Perhaps it is with S. Luke's
narrative, almost naked in its simplicity, in our hands as we try once
more to push our thought deep into the meaning of the scene, that we may
understand a little better what has resulted in our experience from the
Incarnation of God, and our thought turns to S. Mary whom God chose and
brought so near to Himself. Perhaps it is when, with chaplet in hand,
we try to imagine S. Mary's feelings at this first of the Joyful
Mysteries when the meaning of her vocation comes clearly before her.
Hail! thou that art full of grace, of the Living Grace, the very
Presence of the divinity itself. The plummet of our thought fails always
to reach the depth of that mystery of Mary's Child. It was indeed
centuries before the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit
thought out and fully stated the meaning of this Child; it was centuries
before it fully grasped the meaning of Mary herself in her relation to
her divine Son: and after all the centuries of Spirit-guided statement
and saintly meditation it still remains that many fail to understand and
to make energetic in life the fact of the Incarnation of God in the womb
of the Virgin Mary.

And what was S. Mary's own attitude toward the announcement of the
Angel? Her first instinctive word--the word called out by her imperfect
grasp of the meaning of the message of S. Gabriel, is: How can this be
seeing I know not a man? Are we to infer from these words, as many have
inferred, that in her secret thoughts S. Mary had resolved always to
remain a virgin, that she had so offered herself to God in the virgin
state? Possibly when we remember that such was God's will for her it is
not going too far to assume that she had been prompted thus to meet and
offer herself to the divine will. Be that as it may there is an obvious
and instantaneous assumption that the child-bearing which is predicted
to her lies outside the normal and accustomed way of marriage. She
clearly do