VISION, IN SACKED AND OTHER HISTORY. 



89 



caii*T go who never rode a horse ? How can I, a villager, face a 

 king's court." Was there no deeper pain than these ? I will 

 dare to speculate that, as we credit an artist with all the riches 

 of beauty and significance in a masterpiece, though they were 

 not all present in the creative moment, so we ought to think 

 that the unforeseen travail and agony of lier martyrdom were 

 im'plicitly accepted by the girl who chose to venture. And to 

 speculate so of Joan is to ask whether Mary did not bow her- 

 self both, in a conscious acceptance, to the perils and pains which 

 it behoved the Messiah, as every prophet affronting the w^orld, 

 to suffer in His own Person and to reflect from it upon her who 

 bare Him, and also, in an unconscious acceptance, to her doom of 

 an agony under the cross. In Symeon's [trophecy, " A sword shall 

 pierce through thy own bosom," T have ventured to see an act of 

 thought in which he read the thought of the woman before him, 

 her dumb presentiment waking in him prediction. 



But I will try to get closer home to the more human of the 

 two incidents which is my parable of the more mystic. Joan 

 spoke with an archangel, Michael. A symbol only, one says. 

 But a symbol of what fact ? Of a contact through a visual and 

 aural sensation with the spiritual reality. In her flesh this girl 

 had communion with the ghostly world and was called to have 

 her portion in that world of the ghostly. What fear and 

 what pain lies in the self -surrender by which flesh consents to 

 have to do with spirit ! But that same fear and pain lay in 

 Mary's parley with an angel, Gabriel sent from G-od. 



Must one take on trust from the universal human tradition 

 the terror of an intercourse with the Ghostly ; or does one find 

 in oneself an attesting echo of the pang there is when our warm 

 humanity feels bending over it the shadow of that Presence ? 



I suppose that to believe, really to believe in the Incarnation, 

 to accept with seeing eye and with willing will the fact that the 

 word is made flesh in this mortal, in me, my very self, is to 

 accept an intercourse with a world of things and persons spiritual 

 and to have to do, flesh and blood as we are, with that Unseen 

 Order, to know ourselves to be of that Order first and last and 

 most. If our belief as Christian has not been to us such an 

 experience, it will be because the force of the mystical experience 

 has been only in proportion to the force of the belief. But in that 

 measure in which we have submitted ourself to the presence and 

 touch of the Eternal — has it been a sacrifice that cost us 

 nothing, has it been a passion in which there was no pang ? 



But this is common to every soul alike which truly yields 

 self to the Incarnate. There are experiences that come indeed 



