In part, our conception of the character of Mary may receive light from her nationality. A fine human being is never the product of one generation, but rather the outcome of a growth of ages. Mary was the offspring and flower of a race selected, centuries before, from the finest physical stock of the world, watched over, trained, and cultured, by Divine oversight, in accordance with every physical and mental law for the production of sound and vigorous mental and bodily conditions. Her blood came to her in a channel of descent over which the laws of Moses had established a watchful care; a race where marriage had been made sacred, family life a vital point, and motherhood invested by Divine command with an especial sanctity. As Mary was in a certain sense a product of the institutes of Moses, so it is an interesting coincidence that she bore the name of his sister, the first and most honored of the line of Hebrew prophetesses,--Mary being the Latin version of the Hebrew Miriam. She had also, as we read, a sister, the wife of Cleopas, who bore the same name,--a custom not infrequent in Jewish families. It is suggested, that, Miriam being a sacred name and held in high traditionary honor, mothers gave it to their daughters, as now in Spain they call them after the Madonna as a sign of good omen. There is evidence that Mary had not only the sacred name of the first great prophetess, but that she inherited, in the line of descent, the poetic and prophetic temperament. She was of the royal line of David, and poetic visions and capabilities of high enthusiasm were in her very lineage. The traditions of the holy and noble women of her country's history were all open to her as sources of inspiration. Miriam, leading the song of national rejoicing on the shore of the Red Sea; Deborah, mother, judge, inspirer, leader, and poet of her nation; Hannah, the mother who won so noble a son of Heaven by prayer; the daughter of Jephtha, ready to sacrifice herself to her country; Huldah, the prophetess, the interpreter of God's will to kings; Queen Esther, risking her life for her people; and Judith, the beautiful and chaste deliverer of her nation,--these were the spiritual forerunners of Mary, the ideals with whom her youthful thoughts must have been familiar. The one hymn of Mary's composition which has found place in the sacred records pictures in a striking manner the exalted and poetic side of her nature. It has been compared with the song of Hannah the mother of Samuel, and has been spoken of as taken from it. But there is only that resemblance which sympathy of temperament and a constant contemplation of the same class of religious ideas would produce. It was the exaltation of a noble nature expressing itself in the form and imagery supplied by the traditions and history of her nation. We are reminded that Mary was a daughter of David by certain tones in her magnificent hymn, which remind us of many of the Psalms of that great heart-poet.