(_β_) The kind of love, however, which in this sphere of art is most within its reach and is generally the most successful object of the romantic and religious imagination, is the love of Mary, the mother's love. It stands closest to Nature's reality, is very human, and yet entirely spiritual, without either the interest or the egotism of sensual desire, not sensuous and yet present inward bliss in its absolute condition of fruition. It is a love that has no longing in it, not friendship, for friendship, albeit also so rich in soul quality, requires a substantive content, an essential material as the associating object. A mother's love, on the contrary, possesses without any mutuality[230] of aim or interests an immediate basis in the natural maternal bond. But in this particular case the mother's love is just as little restricted to the purely natural affiliation. Mary possesses in the child which she has carried under her heart and borne with travail the perfected knowledge and feeling of her very self, and this selfsame child, the blood of her blood, is also in equal degree exalted above her, and yet for all that she is conscious that this higher belongs to herself, and is precisely that she gains in her act of self-oblivion and possession. The natural intimacy of the mother's love is absolutely spiritualized, it receives for its very embodiment the Divine; but this spiritual coherence remains lowly and unaware, permeated in a wonderful manner with the unity of Nature and the emotion of womanhood. It is the _blessed_ mother's love, and pertains only to the _one_ mother, who first was recipient of its joy[231]. It is quite true that even this love is not without its pain, but the pain is merely the grief of loss, the lament over the suffering, dying, and dead son, and, as we shall find it at a later stage[232], has nothing to do with the injustice and torture suffered from a force without, or with the infinite conflict with sin, still less with agonies and pangs that arise in the soul. The inwardness of soul such as we have analysed is the beauty of Spirit, the Ideal, the human identification of man with God, with Spirit, with Truth; oblivion in its pure selflessness, the surrender of the ego, which, however, in this surrender, is from beginning to end at unity with that in which it is absorbed, and it is in this coalescence that the feeling of blessedness is consummated.