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REV. JOHN HUNTLEY SERINE^ D.B., ON 



two worlds," it was for the moment: and then the company of 

 heaven did receive him not unto terror but unto love ; the 

 ghostly fire consumed not, it had become like the martyrs' 

 furnace, " a soft whistling wind," the very breath of very life. 

 And from it he came back to the kindly human brotherhood, a 

 man as they and yet a man not as they, because now and hence- 

 forth his conversation is in heaven too. Why should it be 

 otherwise even for Mary of Nazareth ? She must henceforw^ard 

 do all a mother's offices, homely, industrious, glad, to a child 

 who was Son of 3fan : yet that once she had been the mystic 

 virgin, the intermediary of heaven, the handmaid of the Lord ; 

 it had been unto her according to His word, and the Christ was 

 conceived in hei- by the Holy Ghost. 



Shall we have the courage of our convictions and dare, as 

 unnumbered pencils have dared, to paint Madonna according to 

 our thought of her ? Eor his own eyes at least any Christian 

 lawfully may so picture her, indeed must picture so, if his belief 

 of her is belief. Let us then, as others have ventured, look in 

 through an open Syrian doorway, and see within — not the 

 submissive girl-figure bowed before the lily-wanded angel, but a 

 peasant maiden, young and fair, of simple grace, of purest 

 health in limb and mind, new risen from her knees. We discern 

 by the clasped, straining hands, wide eyes and parted lips that 

 there has fallen on her in a rapture the hour for which God 

 sent her among men. There is none other in that chamber to 

 our sight ; but One there surely is to hers. All is silent, yet a 

 converse thrills the air ; and from the rapt figure a virtue goes out 

 to us, till we know that a nameless passion has risen and is 

 working; in the maiden's soul. And we make surmise that this 

 passion is none other than the vast hope of Israel, that has been 

 secret fire in the blood of her race a thousand years, and now in 

 the veins of this one daughter of Israel breaks, at a spark that 

 falls from heaven, into the flame of faith, that can do all things 

 through love that has cast out the fear. 



Ah ! this is no portrayal of the mystic intermediary of 

 Heaven. But then — is it perhaps a portrait not all unlike a 

 Syrian woman in life's crowning moment, who by the operation 

 of the Holy Ghost shall be made the mother of Jesus, a carpenter 

 of Nazareth, whose brethren, our fellow men, we know, and His 

 sisters are they not with us in our own ? 



