VISION, IN SACRED AND OTHER HISTORY. 



83 



appear to any one? Or who and what, for that matter, is 

 Gabriel ? There is no authority for the existence of either 

 except the Eabbinic angelology. The angel who visited the 

 house in Nazareth may, indeed, be the reflection in human senses 

 of some reality and even a personal reality, but all that we can 

 verify is that reflection in the human senses of Mary. The 

 angel who appeared at Domremy is something greatly less : he 

 is but the reflection of a reflection, twice removed from reality. 



I imagine that even convinced believers in the doctrine of 

 the Incarnation find this consideration a difficulty for faith. 

 The Lucan story of the Annunciation has round it airs of fancy 

 and folklore which cause a modern Christian to turn faith's 

 attention in other directions, and to rest it not on the scene in 

 a chamber of Nazareth but on that in the Bethlehem stable. 

 To do this is to turn away from the essential to the accidental, 

 from ultimate fact to consequential, from the divine-human to 

 the merely human. The true moment of the Incarnation in 

 history is not the Nativity but the Annunciation. The mystery 

 of God become Man will, indeed, never yield itself up to an 

 intelligence limited by human conditions, but we shall approach 

 it only so far as we grasp the significance of that event which is 

 reported in the form of a parley between the Virgin and an 

 Angel. 



That significance, I have thought, can be brought out by an 

 application of the comparative method which to all other 

 subjects we have applied with most fruitful results. If I can 

 see what the significance is of Joan's parleyings with her 

 Council," what the event was in her personal history and that 

 of her people which had vital association with her visions, it is 

 likely there will be suggested to me the bearing of Mary's 

 vision on the fortune of her soul and of the human race. 



This at once I feel sure of ; it is vain to hope to discover the 

 nature of Joan's visions and " voices " (for the communications 

 through the ear alone were the more numerous, I believe) if we 

 only study these phenomena in separation from the other facts 

 of her career. Had nothing more happened than that the girl 

 saw forms and faces in an empty space and heard words spoken 

 in what to other ears was a silence, the phenomenon might 

 remain inscrutable or might prove explicable by natural laws, 

 but it w^ould be without value spiritually. What actually 

 happened was a train of vast and surprising consequence. A 

 rustic girl, as a result of her visions, undertook an enterprise 

 which in every judgment was impossible for any capacity what- 

 ever, but for the womanly capacity something more than 



G 2 



