Before her lies the new covenant of grace—the assumption of nature into supernature, the taking up of the manhood into God. The old testament has done its work, but it can do no more—there must be a change, a new process must be set working in the world—and once more there is a miraculous birth—of Mary—Mare. There she stands, at the meeting-place of the worlds, both virgin and mother—purity without sterility, experience without corruption. Herself both Spring and Summer she is the heart and essence of Eternal May. June _Month of the Sacred Heart_ The trees are all covered now—they are thick with their summer leafage. The outline of the hedge is blurred, and the hedge trees no longer stand out spindled against the sky, but have become rich shapes of green. The meadow trees cast wide shadows, in which the cattle sleep, and the waters of the stream are dark with the reflected grey-green of the willows. But the thickest shades are in the woods. The interlacing boughs of the oaks, the denseness of the undergrowth of chestnut and hazel, have woven a tent above a hidden place of secrets and shadows. The woods have a secret heart—dense, green and living; the sunlight filters only in stray drops down into the spurge, while the moss round the trunks of the trees is still damp, though outside in the meadow the sun has long ago drunk up the dew. There is a refuge in the secret places, in the secret heart, of the woods—away from the dust that whirls in the baking lane and has parched the hedgerow, from the sun that glares down on the grass and up from the ponds, from the activity of the fields where the haymakers are at their work. The woods know neither dust nor heat nor toil, and keep their secret places cool and green. * * * * * “He came, a man, to a deep heart, even to a secret heart, hiding his Godhead from human view....” So St. Augustine the Bishop quotes the Vulgate in the Lesson from his works which is read at the Office of Tenebrae for Holy Saturday. “He came”—God came, even the eternal Word and Son—“a man”—in our complete human nature, in our flesh—“to a deep heart”—even to the participation of our human emotions, our joys, our sorrows, our fears, our indignations, which have their symbol in the human heart.