“How comes this error, trouble, horror?”
“In wedding bodies, without consents or courtings of the souls, if those, who, though mismated, happen to join lives, were only wise, they might yet be happy, growing together. But read more daughter.”
“In the fullness of time, the angel Gabriel, known amid the Seraphim as God’s champion, the chosen of Jehovah and His messenger of comfort and sympathy from heaven to man, was commissioned to carry the glorious news to earth. He spread his rainbow pinions, and with his own radiance to lighten his course, passed from the confines of the august court of the Divine Presence, the companionship of his fellow archangels, Michael, Raphael, Uriel, to go out across the planet-lightened realms of everlasting space. His course was watched with throbbing interest by the spirits of mercy appointed for ministering to man. Gabriel sped on, with sweeps of power which almost devoured distances, nor paused to bask for a moment in the many-colored lights of the golden and silvery shielded planets or constellations that he passed in his rapid flight. The wheeling suns and rushing worlds, marching and charging along the shoreless oceans of eternal space, had no splendors nor powers with which to challenge his high mission; though theirs was grand, his was grander. He traveled at love’s behest, on mercy’s work, to carry to this little earth, rolling along, mostly in shadows, the mandate of glory, the news of heaven’s great saving device. He bore proclamation in its substance and its realizations forever the manifold wisdom of God; the wonder of all who know to think or reason. And so that voyage passed into the pages of history and the records of eternity as well.
“Mary, whom Gabriel sought, was engaged in evening prayer as was her wont, with her face toward Jerusalem’s Temple.”
Miriamne paused; she perceived that she had arrived at a part of the manuscript which Father Adolphus had marked with a red line to remind her it was from his Christian Bible. She feared to read this portion to her mother.
“Read on, daughter, the words are precious; they are as songs in the night to my soul.”
Miriamne continued:
“And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,
“To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.