It is well to ask ourselves at this point what the Incarnation means, because our estimate of Blessed Mary as the chosen instrument of God's grace will be influenced by our estimate of that which she was chosen to do. One feels the failure to grasp her position in the work of our redemption often displays a weak hold upon that which is the very heart of God's work--the fact of God made man. The moment of the Annunciation is the moment of the Incarnation: God in His infinite love for mankind is sending forth His Son to be born of a woman in the likeness of our flesh. God the Son, the second Person of the ever adorable Trinity, is entering the womb of this maiden, there to wrap Himself in her flesh and to pass through the common course of a human child's development till He shall reach the hour of the Nativity. When we try to grasp the reach of the divine Love, its depth, its self-forgetfulness, we must stand in the cottage in Nazareth and hear the angelic salutation. And then surely our own hearts cannot fail to respond 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.