first; God so willed it, then, that the Incarnation should in a measure depend on her; if he wills it still, that the full accomplishment of all its results should, in part at least, depend on her, then her interposition is still needful. The disparagement to his mercy and power is not greater now, than it was then. Mary was created by his power, as the chief instrument of his mercy. All that her influence now accomplishes, and will obtain till the end, is therefore due, as its first cause, to his infinite and omnipotent goodness.

CHAPTER VI.

MARY SUFFERING.

"But she said to them, call. me not Noemi, that is beautiful, but call me Mara, that is bitter; for the Almighty hath filled me with bitterness."-Ruth. i. 20.

IN these bitter words, the grief of the Hebrew mother found utterance, on her return from her long exile, to the city of her youth. She had left it, years before, rich in the society of her husband and her

sons.

The compulsion of famine, under which she had abandoned it, had pressed lightly upon her, while they lived to compensate for every privation. Now she returned without them; the solace of her trials had been taken from her by death ; the bones of her beloved kindred rested in the burying-place of strangers; her youthful daughter-in-law, herself a widow, alone remained with her. Her neighbours

of former years recognised her again, and called her by her old name, "but she said to them call me not Noemi, that is beautiful; but call me Mara, that is bitter; for the Almighty hath filled me with bitterness."

The language of this childless widow is adopted by the church, to express the anguish of the most holy Virgin in her Seven Dolours, as they are called; the principal events of her life, in which the cross of her Son pressed most heavily on Mary's soul. They are the following 1. When the aged Simeon predicted that her soul should be pierced by the sword of grief. 2. When Mary fled in the night to save her Son from the cruel edict of Herod. 3. When she lost him for three days in Jerusalem; a remarkable type of the three days of darkness and dereliction that preceded the Resurrection. 4. When she met him toiling under the weight of his cross, up the hill of Calvary. 5. While the awful hours of his last agony wore away, and she stood by his cross, and saw him expire. 6. When the lance of the Roman soldier violated his sacred body in her sight. 7. When she saw his lifeless remains deposited in the tomb.

It is in virtue of the sorrows of the

holy Virgin, that she bears the title of the Queen of Martyrs. For while she not only fulfilled every condition of martyrdom, she far surpassed the constancy of the most undaunted martyr. Her self-sacrifice exceeded that of every other, 1. in the length of her sufferings; and 2. in their intensity.

1. The trial of the martyrs, for the most part, was short; a few hours, or even minutes, secured for them the palm of victory. A sharp conflict with the wild beasts, or the keener torture of the gridiron, or the boiling caldron; the rack, or, easiest of all, the sword, dismissed them to the joys of eternal life. But Mary's sufferings of compassion lasted as long as the life of her child. From the moment when he shed the first drops of his blood, the eighth day after his birth, till the last were poured out at the foot of his cross, Mary's was a daily wound, inflicted by the sword of prophecy, entering into her soul.

Nor suppose that it pained not, because it was not a material sword. Heroic natures have often preferred to endure torture, rather than stand by, to see it inflicted on one whom they loved. It was a refinement of cruelty that condemned the brave mother

of seven heroes, whose story is related in the Maccabees (2 Mac. vii.), to see them torn to pieces before her own turn came; and the sacred historian declares that she is "to be admired above measure, and worthy to be remembered by good men, who beheld her seven sons slain in the space of one day, and bore it with a good courage, for the hope that she had in God

being filled with wisdom, and joining a man's heart to a woman's thought."Ib. vii. 20-21. Sorrow of the same kind was Mary's, arising from evil which she could not avert from her Son. The years, as they passed, brought their own anguish; the persecution of the infant Jesus by Herod, his hasty flight into Egypt, the loss of her child at Jerusalem, his parting from her, when the time had come for his short ministry to begin. And, more terrible than all, the years, as they rolled on, brought nearer and more near the inevitable hour when she must give him up to death, who was the life of her life. The awful time was never absent from her thoughts for three-and-thirty years. Every new development of her son's perfection, his growth in earthly wisdom and stature, reminded her maternal heart that another