VISION, IN SACKED AND OTHER HISTORY. 



87 



the giving of a toll of pain. In sacrifice, as we know it, there 

 is indeed the moment, inseparable in human fact, of pain ; bat 

 since pleasure and vitality are one, pain, which is the negation 

 of both, cannot belong to the nature of sacrifice which makes 

 life. Nor are we without human experiences — the soldier's or 

 the lover's delight in danger for a passion's sake, the martyr's 

 or even the fanatic's pang transmuted into something akin to- 

 rapture — which teach us that not pain but joy is the real 

 substance of self-sacrifice. Above all, in the sacrifice which 

 Mary offers, the " sorrow because her hour will come " is to be 

 forgotten in the joy because the Man shall be born into the 

 world." And yet I seem to discern even in the tale itself some 

 hint of actual pain confronting the handmaid of the Lord when, 

 she chooses the sacrifice. Does not the record of old Symeon's. 

 presage, " Yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own bosom 

 also," suggest to us, familiar with telepathic fact, a conscious- 

 ness in the Virgin lierself of perils in her moral adventure 

 and a reflection of this upon the mind of him who talked with 

 her. It is Symeon who gives utterance to the thought, but I 

 shall guess that Mary thought it first, that this was one of the 

 things she pondered in her heart; that she had seen that 

 sword before she said, " Be it unto me." 



However this be, I am sure I must look elsewhere tham 

 toward the pains, whether physical or mental, involved in 

 Mary's act of faith, if I am to understand its character. I shall 

 resort again to our parable of Domremy. In the France of 

 that day there were, I believe, among the people, anticipations 

 of a deliverance, and they even took voice in whispers of a maid 

 who should save the realm. Indeed we should, even in the 

 absence of positive testimony to it, expect the rise of a genius to 

 be not an isolated occurrence, but the culmination of a movement, 

 in the general mind, whatever the gap between the hero and 

 the foremost of the multitude. It is to be thought that there 

 were many girls in France in whom patriotic fervours woke, and 

 dreams (though they died on air) of playing the inspired woman's 

 part and saving France. But while these others said to their 

 own heart, " Might it be I ? " J oan said to hers, " It is I." So 

 at Domremy the fire of heaven fell ; the Lord answered the. 

 sacrifice of man. 



'Now in Israel the conditions of mind which we gather from 

 the French story were more demonstrably present. A move- 

 ment of faith in a section of the nation which has been called 

 " the seed-plot of the Gospel," the class which held Zacharias,. 

 Elisabeth, Symeon, and Anna, and in the next generation, the- 



