It is not the first time that Eve and Mary have stood over against each other in the scheme of the ages. They are both the medium of creation, vessels of life, the material of the active, creative principle of the universe. But in Eve this material has failed, it thwarts the life that works in it, so that its energies are not only cramped but perverted. Eve fights against the power that uses her—hence her own suffering, and the apparent failure of the power, due to the defects of its instrument. For Eve has discovered herself, and uses her will for her own purposes, with the result that both her own purposes and the purposes of God as far as she is concerned are lost. She knows both good and evil, but can use neither. The serpent deceived her by biting his own tail and calling himself eternity, hence she is caught in the round of things and cannot escape. Mary stands at the foot of the Cross as the second Eve. Once more the creative principle has sought a medium, and this time the medium has responded perfectly, so that the work of the new creation of the new heavens and the new earth has not been foiled by its instrument. Mary used her freedom, her will, not for herself but to further the purposes of God. She became as it were the collaborator of God by yielding herself as his handmaiden. As a reward he has made her a sharer of his joys and sorrows. The sorrows of Mary are fertile because they are the sorrows of the Cross. Every one of them, from the flight into Egypt till the moment when she holds the slain body of her son upon her knees, every one of them draws life from the fountain of the Precious Blood. The mother standing there weeps no vain tears of selfish grief nor vain regret—her sorrows are already united with the sacrifice of her Son, she offers them to God with his, for the purposes of redemption. Her sorrows are fruitful for the assistance of the world on its new ways, in company with all human sorrow which is offered at the foot of the Cross. They are part of the new processes of life—the sublimation of the old laws whereby nature groaned and travailed towards higher things; they are part of the supernatural evolution, in which sorrow is eucharistic, a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. The sorrows of Mary go up to heaven in perfume, like the fires of September. Her motherhood burns in an agony of sweetness. She is the rich earth, scented and fertile, at the foot of the golden bough, now ripe for harvest. October _Month of the Holy Angels_