VISION, IN SACRED AND OTHER HISTORY. 



91 



than soul and body are entities that can exist in separation, 

 though for the ordinary and lower purposes of life we do make an 

 abstraction, and isolate bodily facts for study and practice. It 

 is soul that makes body and only where the spirit is there is the 

 flesh. But here again our earthlier tale is a lucid parable of the 

 heavenlier. The career of Joan, redeemer of France, which has 

 been our similitude for the service wdiich Mary rendered to the 

 whole race, is a train of events in the physical order — 

 counsellings, musterings, battles, victories, the crowning of a 

 king ; but these events are not explicable, as it has seemed to 

 me, by causes belonging to the same order as their effects, and 

 the attempts so to account for them do not persuade me that 



" These are their reasons, — they are natural" 



The Maid's own account of it stands. " Joan," said one of the 

 examiners into her mission and its authority, " if God will save 

 France, why do you want soldiers ? " " The soldiers will fight," 

 she answered, " and God will give them the victory." Tlie 

 mystical must be there : then it will take to itself a body of the 

 historical. 



And I would say that what Joan's battles were to the Vision 

 of the warrior angel, that was Mary's travail and deliverance of 

 her first-born to the Vision of Gabriel, whom she saw and spoke 

 with under her roof in Nazareth. Joan's sacrifice " in the 

 spirit " was the generator of the victory of French arms, and 

 from the sacrifice of Mary came after the flesh the Christ. 



It will be said to me, perhaps, that this imagining of the 

 Virgin's act will not bear looking at under the light of common 

 day. This Maiden of the mystic trance yet became happy 

 mother of a goodly babe, proud mother of a son of genius ; the 

 sword that should pierce the bosom did not find her till after 

 thirty years of blessing ; and nowhere does she give on the 

 page of history proof of a character or even an intelligence 

 unique. 



No, nor was there need that she should. Her task in the world- 

 process w^as to have in her the faith through which Messiah might 

 be conceived in her ; to bear and rear and teach, and then leave 

 her child, as mothers must, to " make his own soul." In all this 

 it behoved the Christ's mother to be full-human and like all 

 mothers of a man. One of us who may have had the experience 

 which I have named an " hour of ghostliness," came back from 

 it to be again the shadow-casting mortal, like the rest, in a full- 

 human fellowship : yet that fellow^ship with the Divine Ones 

 had verily been. If for a moment he hung " wandering between 



