intercede for them; and thus it is the Divine presence which is the intermediating power by which we reach her and she reaches us. Woe is me, if even by a breath I sully these ineffable truths! but still, without prejudice to them, there is, I say, another range of thought quite distinct from them, incommensurate with them, of which the Blessed Virgin is the centre. If we placed our Lord in that centre, we should only be degrading him from his throne, and making him an Arian kind of a God; that is, no God at all. He who charges us with marking Mary a divinity, is thereby denying the divinity of Jesus. Such a man does not know what divinity is. Our Lord cannot {79} pray for us, as a creature, as Mary prays; he cannot inspire those feelings which a creature inspires. To her belongs, as being a creature, a natural claim on our sympathy and familiarity, in that she is nothing else than our fellow. She is our pride,--in the poet's words, "Our tainted nature's solitary boast." We look to her without any fear, any remorse, any consciousness that she is able to read us, judge us, punish us. Our heart yearns toward that pure virgin, that gentle mother, and our congratulations follow her, as she rises from Nazareth and Ephesus, through the choirs of angels, to her throne on high. So weak, yet so strong; so delicate, yet so glory-laden; so modest, yet so mighty. She has sketched for us her own portrait in the magnificat. "He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaid; for behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. He hath put down the mighty from their seat; and hath exalted the humble. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away." I recollect the strange emotion which took by surprise men and women, young and old, when, at the coronation of our present queen, they gazed on the figure of one so like a child, so small, so tender, so shrinking, who had been exalted to so great an inheritance and so vast a rule, who was such a contrast in her own person to the solemn pageant which centred in her. Could it be otherwise with the spectators, if they had human affection? And did not the All-wise know the human heart when he took to himself a mother? did he not anticipate our emotion at the sight of such an exaltation? If he had not meant her to exert that wonderful influence in his church which she has in the event exerted, I will use a bold word, he it is who has perverted us. If she is not to attract our homage, why did he make her solitary in her greatness amid his vast creation? If it be idolatry in us to let our affections respond to our faith, he would not have made her what she is, or he would not have told us that he had so made her; but, far from this, he has sent his prophet to announce to us, "A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel," and we have the same warrant for hailing her as God's Mother, as we have for adoring him as God.