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EEY. JOHN HUNTLEY SERINE, D.J)., ON 



some time (who can know ?) to all, but to no one many times, 

 which throw a penetrating beam of light upon the experience of 

 her in whom that Incarnate tirst was born. 



One speaks of these with the reserve which reverence and mere 

 instinct dictate ; but has it not happened to us, upon some 

 peril or stroke of bereavement or sight of death even in no kin 

 of ours, that the unseen reality has laid a dread hand upon our 

 mortalnature andour "immortality" has become " a presence that 

 is not to he put by." There fell an hour — how name it else ? 

 — of ghostliness. Suddenly the man was " in the spirit," but by 

 no rapture, rather by a chilling seizure. The Hand plucked him 

 from the kindly human brotherhood : he walked among the 

 living crowd an alien and incommunicable, a ghost that cast no 

 shadow, become to himself a shadow ; his conversation was now^ in 

 the company of heaven : and flesh and blood shivered to enter this. 



Let who ever has known such an experience take away from 

 it all elements merely natural, as the terror or the desolation, 

 and there will be left the sense that the Spiritual had touched 

 him, the great hand of the Eternal had drawn him out of the 

 temporal world to have his portion in that other. Eemembering 

 that summons to take up his lot in the Unseen, he may judge 

 how it was with Mary at the same summoning. If he ever 

 thought of the Virgin as heroine of a wonder-tale receiving a 

 miraculous fortune, he will rethink that shallow fancy and 

 know her now as one like himself, constrained as he was once 

 to attempt an intercourse wdth the Eternal Order. " The 

 Holy Ghost shall come upon thee." If there were not for the 

 Virgin the pain of desolation or fear of death, yet she was as 

 that man was in the aw^areness of communion and fellowship 

 with the Spiritual Ones. 



She had to endure, as it were, a Passing, to make the 

 shuddering venture across from w^orld to world, to brook in her 

 veins of mortal the ghostly fire, to bear on her shrinking flesh 

 the burden of the Power of the Highest. Was not this 

 Sacrifice ? This Passion, had it not the Pang ? 



This then, as I try to understand, is what happened when the 

 Maiden of Nazareth in Galilee saw a Vision of the angel 

 Gabriel, sent from God, and, in seeing it, " by the operation ot 

 the Holy Ghost," began to be mother of the Christ. 



It will be said that in this attempt to analyse the event of the 

 Vision I am seeking to explain an historic incident by a cause 

 w^hich is wholly mystical. That is so. But no other manner of 

 explanation can render the cause of this effect in history. 

 Mystical and historic fact are not facts of two orders, any more 



