Ninth Day

"Si scires donum Dei" ("Didst thou but know the gift of God "),J said Christ one evening to the Samaritan v/oman. What is this gift of God, but Himself ? " He came into His own, and His own received Him not," declares the beloved disciple. § To many a soul might St. John the Baptist utter the reproach, " There stands One in the midst of you whom you know not."|| "Didst thou but know the gift of God!" There is one created being who knew that gift of God, who lost no particle of it : a creature so pure and luminous that she seemed light itself. Speculum justitia ; a being whose life was so simple, so lost in God, that there is but little to say of her. Virgo fi delis, the faithful Virgin, " who kept all these words in her heart."H She was so lowly, so hidden within the secret of God's face, in the seclusion of the temple, that the Blessed Trinity took pleasure in her : " Because He hath regarded the humility of¹²

His handmaiden ; for behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed."* The Father, bending down to this creature, lovely, but so ignorant of her loveliness, chose her for the Mother, in time, of Him of Whom He had been Father for ail eternity. Then the Holy Spirit, Who presides over all the works of God, overshadowed her : the blessed Virgin uttered her fiat : " Behold the handmaid of the Lord ; be it done to me according to Thy Word"f : the greatest of all mysteries was accomplished, and by the descent of the Word into her bosom, Mary became God's own for ever.

Our Lady seems to me to be, during the period between the Annunciation and the Nativity, the model of interior souls : those whom God has called to live within themselves, in the depths of the bottomless abyss. In what peace and recollection did she live and act ! Her most trivial actions were sanctified by her, for amid all that was passing she adored the gift of God. Yet that did not prevent her spending herself for others when charity required it : the Gospel tells us that " Mary, rising up . . . went into the hill country with haste " to her cousin Elizabeth.^ The ineffable vision which she contemplated within herself did not lessen her charity to others, for <c though contemplation is directed to the praise and eternity of its Lord, yet it owns, and will never loose, concord."