The dying words of Jesus have been collected and arranged by the Church in a rosary,--pearls brought up from the depths of a profound agony, and of precious value in all sorrow. Of those seven last words it is remarkable what a proportion were words for other than himself. The first sharp pang of torture wrung from him the prayer, "Father, forgive them; they know not what they do." The second word was of pardon and comfort to the penitent thief. The third the commendation of his mother to his beloved friend. If any mortal creature might be said to have entered into the sufferings of the great atonement with Jesus, it was his mother in those last hours. Never has sorrow presented itself in a form so venerable. Here is a depth of anguish which inspires awe as well as tenderness. The magnificent "Stabat Mater," in which the Church commemorates Mary's agony, is an outburst with which no feeling heart can refuse sympathy. We rejoice when again we meet her, after the resurrection, in the company of all the faithful, waiting to receive that promised illumination of the Holy Spirit which solved every mystery and made every doubt clear. In all this history we see the picture of a woman belonging to that rare and beautiful class who approach the nearest to our ideal of angelic excellence. We see a woman in whom the genius and fire of the poet and prophetess is tempered by a calm and equable balance of the intellect; a woman not only to feel deeply, but to examine calmly and come to just results, and to act with energy befitting every occasion. Hers are the powers which might, in the providence of God, have had a public mission, but they are all concentrated in the nobler, yet secret mission of the mother. She lived and acted in her son, not in herself. There seems to be evidence that both Jesus and his mother had that constitutional delicacy and refinement that made solitude and privacy peculiarly dear, and the hurry and bustle and inevitable vulgarities of a public career a trial. Mary never seems to have sought to present herself as a public teacher; and in the one instance when she sought her son in public, it was from the tremulous anxiety of a mother's affection rather than the self-assertion of a mother's pride. In short, Mary is presented to us as the mother, and the mother alone, seeking no other sphere. Like a true mother she passed out of self into her son, and the life that she lived was in him; and in this sacred self-abnegation she must forever remain, the one ideal type of perfect motherhood. This entire absence of self-seeking and self-assertion is the crowning perfection of Mary's character. The steadiness, the silent reticence, with which she held herself subject to God's will, waiting calmly on his Providence, never by a hasty word or an imprudent action marring the divine order or seeking to place self in the foreground, is an example which we may all take reverently to our own bosoms.