Our Lady Saint MaryBarry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Religion
Our Lady Saint Mary
Barry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint -- Meditations
To-day the Angel Gabriel brought the palm and the crown to
the triumphant Virgin. To-day he introduced to the Lord of
all, her, who was the Temple of the Most High, and the
dwelling of the Holy Spirit.
FOR THE ASSUMPTION. ARMENIAN.
The heaven which S. John the Evangelist shows us is the continuation of
the earthly Church. As we read his pages we feel that entrance there
would be a real home-coming for the earnest Christian. We are familiar
enough with presentations of heaven which seem to us to be so detached
from Christian reality as to lack any human appeal. We think of
philosophic presentations of the future with entire indifference. It is
possible, we say, that they may be true; but they are utterly
uninteresting. It is not so in the visions of S. John. Here we have a
heaven which is humanly interesting because it is continous with the
present life, and its interests are the interests that it has been the
object of our religion to foster. The qualities of character which the
Christian religion has urged upon our attention are presented as finding
their clear field of development in the world to come. There, too, are
unveiled the objects of our adoration, the ever-blessed Three who yet
are but one. Love which has striven for development under the conditions
and limitations of our earthly life, which has tried to see God and has
gone out to seek Him in the dimness of revelation, now sees and is
satisfied. Whom now we see in a mirror, enigmatically, we shall then see
face to face.
And it is a heaven thronged with saints, with men and women who have
gone through the same experiences as those to which we are subjected,
and have come forth purified and triumphant. We sometimes in
discouragement think of life as continuous struggle. It is perhaps
natural and inevitable that we should thus concentrate attention upon
the present, but if we lift our eyes so as to clear them from the mists
of the present we see that it is far from a hopeless struggle, but
rather the necessary discipline from which we emerge triumphant. Those
saints whom we see rejoicing about the throne of God, those who go out
to follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth, passed through the struggle
of persecution to their triumphant attainment of the Vision. It is our
eternal temptation to expect to triumph here; but it is only in a very
limited sense that this can be true: our triumph is indeed here, but the
enjoyment of it and all that is implied in it is elsewhere. Here even
our most complete achievement is conditioned by the limitations of
earth: there the limitations are done away and life expands in
perfectness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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