Considering the subjects on which divine grace has to act, and the opposition which it has to encounter, this, its work in the saints, may well be called the most wonderful of all works, and its triumph the grandest of all triumphs. Unseen and unheeded though it may be, that divine work is ever silently but surely and steadily progressing in the spiritual world over which grace rules. We can see it in its development, if not in its actual operation, and if so minded, can estimate its magnitude by examining its results in the annals of the saints. Those annals are of a singularly diversified character. They comprise the history of once rebellious souls won by the sweet attractions of grace from every part of the empire of Satan, and by a strange contrast, they at the same time record that of faithful souls, who, upheld by its strength, never swerved from their allegiance to God. They tell of saintly penitents, dating their first correspondence with its inspirations from the eleventh hour, and of docile hearts, obedient from earliest childhood to its voice. They show us, side by side, profaned temples re-consecrated, and holy sanctuaries never sullied; scentless flowers restored to fragrance, and garlands of purity from which not a blossom or even a leaf had ever fallen. In different ways both manifest the magnificence of the riches of divine grace. In different ways, both prove that whether grace changes a sinner into a saint, or preserves a saint from sin, it is pre-eminently the worker of wonders. If the catalogue of holy penitents forms a dazzling page in its record, so does that of the privileged few who never lost their baptismal innocence. While the one is traced in characters of mercy, the other is written in letters of light. While the one reveals the grandeur, and the other the sweetness of the work of grace, both concur in proclaiming the triumph of its omnipotence. In obdurate wills subdued, the conquests of grace are often hard to win. In the docile souls of the early sanctified, its task is easy. Into these, its inspirations sink as the soft dew into good soil; and with the same result. Finding in them no impediment to its action, no check to its liberality, it is free to pour out the wealth of its exhaustless treasury, and so it leads them from virtue to virtue, from height to height, even to the sublimity of perfection and the consummation of divine union, when, resplendent with heavenly light, and dazzling with interior beauty, they excite the admiration, nay, perhaps even the wonder of the angels. To this bright page of the annals of the work of grace belongs the name of the Mother Mary of the Incarnation, whose history is about to engage us.