Christianity would not be what it professes, the religion of the world and perfect harvest of the Golden Bough, if it did not fulfil the religious dreams of mankind, the myths, legends and allegories of a world growing slowly lighter. Since our Lord is the embodiment of the world’s dreams of a triumphant sun-god, slain, buried, and mightily risen, so our Lady is the embodiment of the world’s dreams of a woman wonderful in her child-bearing and herself wonderfully born. The two strains of sea-daughter and earth-mother meet in her. Her beauty is the beauty of Aphrodite before men’s hearts corrupted it, of the virginal, white sea-foam—her fertility is the fertility of Proserpine, lady of the harvest, her sorrows are the sorrows of Ceres, that far-off Mater Dolorosa who suffered in her child. She is the meeting-place of Spring and Summer, both Virgin and Mother. She stands before us as the Maiden, sweet, youthful and lovely—all the purity of the world is in her mouth and in her eyes. Yet her virginity is not sterile—she is not only virgin but mother. She is the palace of life—on her arm is throned the New Life come in the eternal child. As Virgin and Mother, Mary fulfils the world’s dreams of womanhood—dreams more tarnished and groping than any, perhaps, since the world was astray in strange paths of thought as it sought to realise a perfect woman. For the world had conceived its ideal of a perfect woman as a paradox—the paradox of virginity and motherhood. Some such ideal would seem to lie, perversely, at the bottom of sensual and terrible cults, corrupted almost past recognition in their development, but none the less traceable in their origins. In other cases the two strands of the paradox are divided, and we have the age-long and universal reverence for virginity surviving and flourishing in the midst of cults based on the worship of fertility and the processes of generation. Mary is both Virgin and Mother. Therefore she is perfect and complete. Virginity alone lacks something—Motherhood alone has lost something. In Mary alone there is neither loss nor lack, so she is able to stand at the meeting-place of two worlds. Behind her lies the old Covenant that made her—the age-long processes of nature, the agonies of the earth-mother, the gropings and dreams of the mind of man, and finally, as the stream narrows, the austere ways of Israel—the “ethical Monotheism” which was to mould her conduct and belief so as to fit her for the guidance of the Holy and True—the endless complication, the sanctified hygiene of the Mosaic law, preparing a noble body for her who was to give a body to her Maker. Is it fanciful to believe that the Mosaic law—all that long elaboration of washings and cleansings and self-denials, of regulated food and regulated marriage—had no other object than to prepare a fit physical vehicle for Incarnate God? ... “a body hast thou prepared me.”