“Almost 800 years before the Son of God came into the world, a prophet spoke, and recorded his words, and deposited the record of them in the hands of the Jews, Christ’s inveterate enemies; and his words were these: ‘Behold, a Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and His name shall be called Emanuel,’[219] which in the Hebrew language signifies ‘God with us,’ that is with men.
“This prophecy was of course fulfilled in the conception and birth of God’s Son on earth.”
“And who was she?” asked Fabiola, with great reverence.
“One whose very name is blessed by every one that truly loves her Son. Mary is the name by which you will know her: Miriam, its original in her own tongue, is the one by which I honor her. Well, you may suppose, was she prepared for such high destiny by holiness and virtue; not as cleansed, but as ever clean; not as purified, but as always pure; not freed, but exempted, from sin. The tide of which you spoke, found before her the dam of an eternal decree, which could not brook that the holiness of God should mingle with what it could only redeem, by keeping extraneous to itself. Bright as the blood of Adam, when the breath of God sent it sparkling through his veins, pure as the flesh of Eve, while standing yet in the mould of the Almighty hands, as they drew it from the side of the slumbering man, were the blood and the flesh, which the Spirit of God formed into the glorious humanity, that Mary gave to Jesus.
“And after this glorious privilege granted to our sex, are you surprised that many, like your sweet Agnes, should have chosen this peerless Virgin as the pattern of their lives; should find in her, whom God so elected, the model of every virtue; and should, in preference to allowing themselves to be yoked, even by the tenderest of ties, to the chariot-wheels of this world, seek to fly upwards on wings of undivided love like hers?”
After a pause and some reflection, Miriam proceeded briefly to detail the history of our Saviour’s birth, His laborious youth, His active but suffering public life, and then His ignominious Passion. Often was the narrative interrupted by the tears and sobs of the willing listener and ready learner. At last the time for rest had come, when Fabiola humbly asked:
“Are you too fatigued to answer one question more?”
“No,” was the cheerful reply.
“What hope,” said Fabiola, “can there be for one who cannot say she was ignorant, for she pretended to know every thing; nor that she neglected to learn, for she affected eagerness after every sort of knowledge; but can only confess that she scorned the true wisdom, and blasphemed its Giver;—for one who has scoffed at the very torments which proved the love, and sneered at the death which was the ransoming, of Him whom she has mocked at, as the ‘Crucified?’”
A flood of tears stopped her speech.