When Moses was called by heaven to be the leader of the Hebrew people he hesitated to assume the formidable office on the plea of “impediment and slowness of tongue.” But Jehovah reassured him by promising to qualify him for the sublime functions assigned to him: “I will be in thy mouth, and I will teach thee what thou shalt speak.”(212) The Prophet Jeremiah was sanctified from his very birth because he was destined to be the herald of God’s law to the children of Israel: “Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.”(213) “Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost,”(214) that she might be worthy to be the hostess of our Lord during the three months that Mary dwelt under her roof. John the Baptist was “filled with the Holy Ghost even from his mother’s womb.”(215) “He was a burning and a shining light”(216) because he was chosen to prepare the way of the Lord. The Apostles received the plenitude of grace; they were endowed with the gift of tongue and other privileges(217) before they commenced the work of the ministry. Hence St. Paul says: “Our sufficiency is from God, who hath made us _fit_ ministers of the New Testament.”(218) Now of all who have participated in the ministry of the Redemption there is none who filled any position so exalted, so sacred, as is the incommunicable office of Mother of Jesus; and there is no one, consequently, that _needed_ so high a degree of holiness as she did. For, if God thus sanctified His Prophets and Apostles as being destined to be the bearers of the Word of life, how much more sanctified must Mary have been, who was to bear the Lord and “Author of life.”(219) If John was so holy because he was chosen as the pioneer to prepare the way of the Lord, how much more holy was she who ushered Him into the world. If holiness became John’s mother, surely a greater holiness became the mother of John’s Master. If God said to His Priests of old: “Be ye clean, you that carry the vessels of the Lord;”(220) nay, if the vessels themselves used in the divine service and churches are set apart by special consecration, we cannot conceive Mary to have been ever profaned by sin, who was the chosen vessel of election, even the Mother of God. When we call the Blessed Virgin the Mother of God, we assert our belief in two things: First—That her Son, Jesus Christ, is true man, else she were not a _mother_. Second—That He is true God, else she were not the _Mother of God_. In other words, we affirm that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Word of God, who in His divine nature is from all eternity begotten of the Father, consubstantial with Him, was in the fulness of time again begotten, by being born of the Virgin, thus taking to Himself, from her maternal womb, a human nature of the same substance with hers.