When the angel described to the Blessed Virgin herself that miracle of miracles which was to take place in her, the assumption of human flesh by the Son of God, he used these terms: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee.” When the Son of God, at the moment of His Ascension, declared to His Apostles the creation of His mystical body, by using similar words He referred them back to His own conception: “You shall receive power, the Holy Ghost coming upon you:” having already on the day of His Resurrection told them, “I send the promise of my Father upon you; but wait you in the city until you be indued with power from on high.”(74) Our Lord Himself thus suggests to us the remarkable parallel between the formation of His natural and His mystical body. He who framed the one and the other is the same, the Holy Ghost: the Head precedes, the Body follows; because of the first descent, that Holy Thing which was to be born should be called the Son of God; because of the second, “you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and to the farthest part of the earth;” and this is said in answer to their question whether He would then restore the kingdom to Israel: that is, the second descent of the Holy Ghost forms the kingdom whose witness to Christ is perpetual; forms the body with which and in which He will be for ever by this power of His Spirit dwelling in it to the end of the world. We have therefore here all the various functions and qualities which, under the five great titles of Kingdom, Temple, Body, Spouse, and Mother, delineate His Church, gathered up into that unity which comprehends them all, and from which, as a source, they all flow, “The Power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men.”(75) This creation is as absolutely His, and His alone, as the forming of our Lord’s own Body in the Virginal Womb; it is the sequel of it; the fulfilment among men of those divine purposes for which God became Incarnate; in one word, the Body of the Head perpetually quickened by His Spirit. And here we may remark those striking resemblances between the natural and mystical Body which this “power of the Holy Ghost,” the former of them both, indicates. For in the first the manhood(76) cannot be severed from the Person of the Word, nor in the second can the body of the Church be severed from Christ the Head and His Spirit. Secondly, in the first the Person of the Word and His manhood make one Christ, and in the second Christ the Head and the Church the Body make one complete Body. Thirdly, in the first the manhood has its own will, but through union with the Godhead is impeccable and indefeasible; and in the second the Body of the Church, though possessing its own liberty, is so ruled by Christ and guided by His Spirit, that it cannot fail in truth or in charity. Fourthly, in the first there is an influx of celestial gifts from the Person of the Word into the manhood,