CONSUMMATION.
We have spoken of the way in which the arch-enemy, the seducer of God’s children, is aping the mysteries of the still hidden future, according as his subtlety and his enmity direct him. But while his rage and cunning are devising new deceits for those who are not enlightened by divine truth, or who have hid their light under a bushel, our attention is called in a special manner to her whose office it is, and ever has been, to crush his head. Whenever and wherever the deceits of men and devils are putting out the light and wrapping the soul of man in darkness, there does the Virgin Mother come more openly and more directly to counteract the fatal influence. It has been reserved for the cold, matter-of-fact, utilitarian last half of the nineteenth century to see awakened in the multitude the simple and romantic faith in pilgrimages and in the childlike, pathetic histories of Mary’s appearances upon earth that lent such charm to the ages of faith. If the enemy of mankind seems to have more power allowed to him in the
evil days on which we have fallen, so the Mother of fair love, from whose pure hands the divine odyle streams, is deigning to speak to children and childlike souls, showing herself to be the great channel of special graces, the medium of divine communications, and the sure refuge against Satan’s acted prophecy and pantomime of God’s loving intentions. “We will come to him, and dwell with him”—and Mary is the precursor and the channel now as she was then to his first coming, when he took flesh in her womb. The promise to the individual soul is the promise to the church: and vice versa. The revelation of God in the church is also the life of God in the soul—the two are bound up in one. The life of the church is the guarantee of the life of the soul; it is the only sure foundation of such life; and the golden house, the domus aurea, of that life is devotion to the divine Mother. For as her presence, her sweet virginal life, was the necessary preliminary to the first coming of Christ, so will the Son of God not appear on his glorious second mission till Mary has come in the hearts of her people as an army with banners; all her prerogatives known and worshipped, all her position, flowing from her rights as the mother of the God-man, acknowledged and understood, and her court of angels following in her mystic footsteps upon earth, even as the bees follow their queen wherever she may choose to alight; and so preceding the second coming of our dearest Lord and ushering in the new glories of the kingdom of God upon earth.
The Holy Ghost could only be sent by Jesus glorified. The sacrifice of the cross needed to be accomplished and the precious blood
shed, before the promised Paraclete could come. And thus between the one stupendous event and the other there lies an epoch of forty days, when he had not yet ascended into heaven, and when therefore his risen glory was in a measure incomplete. At the beginning of that dread time, full of the deepest mystery, of which we but imperfectly comprehend the meaning, he was seen first by Mary Magdalene in the garden. And as she fell at his feet with extended hands, he said, “Touch me not.” We have probably all of us at some time meditated sadly on those repelling words.
Time was when she might touch those blessed feet, not with her hands only but with her lips. Does he love her less now that her repentance is complete, and her salvation accomplished? Do not her rapid thoughts go back in one rush to the time when she sat at his feet unrebuked, whiling away the contemplative hours as she listened to his words and heard him say she had chosen “the better part”? Does she not with a pang of wounded love recall the moment when she wiped the precious ointment with her hair from the feet she had bathed with it and with her tears? But now he says, “Touch me not!” Yes, there is a change. But, O loving heart! it is not a change of loss but of gain. It is true there is an interim in which our beloved Lord is shrouded from us in too much glory for our human sense. The cradle-time of his sweet infancy is past, the grace of his youth, the glory of his manhood, and all the bitter-sweet ignominies of his cross. He has passed somewhat beyond our ken. He is risen, but not yet ascended. The first Mass[153] had not
then been offered. The bloody sacrifice was over; the Eucharistic Sacrifice had not been celebrated by mere priestly hands, only by his own divine hands on Holy Thursday. Until Mass had once been said, there was something as it were incomplete in the condition of the church. The next touch, the only touch possible for us (save by a special command to St. Thomas and his faltering disciples), was in the Blessed Sacrament.[154] Now we touch him daily, and fear no rebuke. Jesus is ascended, and the Paraclete has come, and is ever coming more and more; and as the Holy Dove sheds the light of his wings upon the church and speaks through her utterance, so the privileges and the status of Mary are more revealed and more developed. We know more of our queen, and we are learning more of her court, and when both have taken their place in the hearts of men and have prepared for the reign of the Holy Ghost, when the angels have accomplished their mission, the far-off glories of which are hardly dawning on us, then will he make us know all that lies hidden in the deep mystery of his second coming, and God and man and angels will be united in the sweet bonds of Jesus, and through the mediation of her who is clothed with the sun, with the moon beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her virgin head.
This is the divine progression, and this is leading to the divine consummation.
* * * * *
Our task is drawing to a close. It has been our endeavor to encircle