THE GARLAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARIE.

Here are five letters in this blessèd name,
Which, changed, a five-fold mystery design,
The M the Myrtle, A the Almonds claim,
R Rose, I Ivy, E sweet Eglantine.

These form thy garland, when of Myrtle green
The gladdest ground to all the numbered five,
Is so implexéd fine and laid in, between,

As love here studied to keep grace alive.

Thy second string is the sweet Almond bloom
Mounted high upon Selines' crest:

As it alone (and only it) had room,

To knit thy crown, and glorify the rest.

The third is from the garden culled, the Rose,
The eye of flowers, worthy for her scent,
To top the fairest lily now, that grows
With wonder on the thorny regiment.

The fourth is the humble Ivy intersert
But lowly laid, as on the earth asleep,
Preserved in her antique bed of vert,

No faiths more firm or flat, then, where't doth creep.

But that, which sums all, is the Eglantine,

Which of the field is cleped the sweetest briar,
Inflamed with ardour to that mystic shine,

In Moses' bush unwasted in the fire.

Thus love, and hope, and burning charity,
(Divinest graces) are so intermixt

With odorous sweets and soft humility,

As if they adored the head, whereon they are fixed.

PART TWO

CHAPTER II

THE ANNUNCIATION I

And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women.

S. Luke, I. 28

Oh God, whose will it was that thy Word should take flesh, at the message of the Angel, in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, grant to us thy suppliants that, we who believe her to be truly the Mother of God, may be assisted by her intercession with thee. Through &c.

ROMAN.

W

HEN we attempt to reconstruct imaginatively any scene of Holy Scripture it is almost inevitable that we see it through the eyes of some great artist of the past. The Crucifixion comes to us as Dürer or Guido Reni saw it; the Presentation or the Visitation presents itself to us in terms of the imagination of Raphael; we see the Nativity as a composition of Corregio. So the Annunciation rises before us when we close our eyes and attempt to make "the composition of place" in a familiar grouping of the actors: a startled maiden who has arisen hurriedly from work or prayer, looking with wonder at the apparition of an angel who has all the eagerness of one who has come hastily upon an urgent mission. The surroundings differ, but artists of the Renaissance like to think of a sumptuous background as a worthy setting for so great an event.

We keep close to the meaning of Scripture if we set the Annunciation in a room in a cottage of a Palestinian working man. And I like to think of S. Mary at her accustomed work when Gabriel appeared, not with a rush of wings, but as a silent and hardly felt presence standing before her whom the Lord has chosen to be the instrument of His coming. Wonder there would have been, the kind of awe-struck wonder with which the supernatural always fills men; and yet only for a moment, for how could she who

was daily living so close to God fear the messenger of God? The thought of angels and divine messengers would be wholly familiar to her. They had been the frequent agents of God in many a crisis of her people's history, and appeared again and again in the story of her ancestors on whose details she had often meditated. Yet in her humility she could but think it strange that an angel should have any message to bear to her.

It is a striking enough scene, as the artists have felt when they tried to put it before us. But no artist has ever been able to go below the surface and by any hint lead us to an appreciation of the vast implications of the moment. This moment of the Annunciation is in fact the central moment of the world's history. No moment before or since has equalled it in its unspeakable wonder, in its revelation of the meaning of God. Not the moment of the creation when all the Sons of God sang together at the vision of the unfolding purpose of God; not the morning of the Resurrection when the empty tomb told of the accomplished overthrow of death and hell. This is the moment toward which all preceding time had moved, and to which all succeeding ages will look back-the moment of the Incarnation of God.

It is well to ask ourselves at this point what the Incarnation means, because our estimate of Blessed Mary as the chosen instrument of God's grace will be influenced by our estimate of that which she was chosen to do. One feels the failure to grasp her position in the work of our redemption often displays