pensation was sounded! Hereafter, God was to be brought nearer, to seem less terrible; and a religion of the spirit and of love was soon to dispossess a religion of ceremonials and of fear.

"Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard;

And thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son,
And thou shalt call his name John.
And thou shalt have joy and gladness;
And many shall rejoice at his birth.

For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord,

And shall drink neither wine nor strong drink;

And he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost even from his mother's womb.
And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God.
And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias,

To turn the hearts of the parents to the children,
And the disobedient to the wisdom of the just;
To make ready a people prepared for the Lord."

If this address, to our modern ears, seems stately and formal, it is to be remembered that no other language would seem so fit for a heavenly message to a Jewish priest as that which breathed the spirit of the Old Testament writings; and that to us it savors of the sermon because it has since been so often used for the purposes of the sermon.

But the laws of the material world seemed to the doubting priest more powerful than the promise of that God who made all physical laws. To this distinct promise of a son who should become a great reformer, and renew the power and grandeur of the prophetic office, he could only say, "Whereby shall I know this?" His doubts should have begun earlier, or not at all. He should have rejected the whole vision, or should have accepted the promise implicitly; for what sign could be given so assuring as the very presence of the angel? But the sign which he asked was given in a way that he could never forget. His speech departed; silence was the sign; ;-as if the priest of the Old was to teach no more until the coming of the New.

When Zacharias came forth to the people, who were already impatient at his long delay, they perceived by his altered manner that some great experience had befallen him. He could not speak, and could dismiss them only by a gesture.

We have no certainty whether this scene occurred at a morning or an evening service, but it is supposed to have been at the

evening sacrifice. In that case the event was an impressive symbol. The people beheld their priest standing against the setting sun, dumb, while they dispersed in the twilight, the shadow of the Temple having already fallen upon them. The Old was passing into darkness; to-morrow another sun must rise!

Elisabeth, the wife of Zacharias, returned to the "hill-country," or that region lying west and south of Jerusalem. The promise had begun to be fulfilled. All the promises made to Israel were pointing to their fulfilment through her. These promises, accumulating through ages, were ample enough, even in the letter, to fill a devout soul with ardent expectancy. But falling upon the imagination of a greatly distressed people, they had been magnified or refracted until the public mind was filled with inordinate and even fantastic expectations of the Messianic reign. It is not probable that any were altogether free from this delusion, not even the soberest and most spiritual natures. We can therefore imagine but faintly the ecstatic hopes of Zacharias and Elisabeth during the six months in which they were hidden in their home among the hills before the history again finds them. They are next introduced through the story of another memorable actor in this drama, the mother of our Lord.

It is difficult to speak of Mary, the mother of Jesus, both because so little is known of her and because so much has been imagined. Around no other name in history has the imagination thrown its witching light in so great a volume. In art she has divided honors with her divine Son. For a thousand years her name has excited the profoundest reverence and worship. A mother's love and forbearance with her children, as it is a universal experience, so is it the nearest image of the divine tenderness which the soul can form.

In attempting to present the Divine Being in his relations to universal government, men have wellnigh lost his personality in a sublime abstraction. Those traits of personal tenderness and generous love which alone will ever draw the human heart to God, it has too often been obliged to seek elsewhere. And, however mistaken the endeavor to find in the Virgin Mary the sympathy and fond familiarity of a divine fostering love, it is an error into which men have been drawn by the profoundest needs of the human soul. It is an error of the heart. The

cure will be found by revealing, in the Divine nature, the longedfor traits in greater beauty and force than are given them in the legends of the mother of Jesus.

Meanwhile, if the doctors of theology have long hesitated to deify the Virgin, art has unconsciously raised her to the highest place. There is nothing in attitude, expression, or motion which has been left untried. The earlier Christian painters were content to express her pure fervor, without relying upon the element of beauty. But as, age by age, imagination kindled, the canvas has given forth this divine mother in more and more glowing beauty, borrowing from the Grecian spirit all that was charming in the highest ideals of Venus, and adding to them an element of transcendent purity and devotion, which has no parallel in ancient art.

It is difficult for one whose eye has been steeped in the colors of art to go back from its enchantment to the barrenness of actual history. By Luke alone is the place even of her residence mentioned. It is only inferred that she was of the royal house of David. She was already espoused to a man named Joseph, but not as yet married. This is the sum of our knowledge of Mary at the point where her history is introduced. Legends abound, many of them charming, but like the innumerable faces which artists have painted, they gratify the imagination without adding anything to historic truth.

The scene of the Annunciation will always be admirable in literature, even to those who are not disposed to accord it any historic value. To announce to an espoused virgin that she was to be the mother of a child, out of wedlock, by the unconscious working in her of the Divine power, would, beforehand, seem inconsistent with delicacy. But no person of poetic sensibility can. read the scene as it is narrated by Luke without admiring its sublime purity and serenity. It is not a transaction of the lower world of passion. Things most difficult to a lower sphere are both easy and beautiful in that atmosphere which, as it were, the angel brought down with him.

"And the angel came in unto her and said, Hail! thou that art highly favored! The Lord is with thee!"

Then was announced the birth of Jesus, and that he should inherit and prolong endlessly the glories promised to Israel of

old. To her inquiry, "How shall this be?" the angel replied:

"The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee,

And the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee;

Therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee
Shall be called the Son of God."

It was also made known to Mary that her cousin Elisabeth had conceived a son. And Mary said: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord! Be it unto me according to thy word."

Many have brought to this history the associations of a later day, of a different civilization, and of habits of thought foreign to the whole cast of the Oriental mind. Out of a process so unphilosophical they have evolved the most serious doubts and difficulties. But no one is fitted to appreciate either the beauty or the truthfulness to nature of such a scene, who cannot in some degree carry himself back in sympathy to that Jewish maiden's life. The education of a Hebrew woman was far freer than that of women of other Oriental nations. She had more personal liberty, a wider scope of intelligence, than obtained among the Greeks or even among the Romans. But above all, she received a moral education which placed her high above her sisters in other lands.

It is plain that Mary was imbued with the spirit of the Hebrew Scriptures. Not only was the history of her people familiar to her, but her language shows that the poetry of the Old Testament had filled her soul. She was fitted to receive her people's history in its most romantic and spiritual aspects. They were God's peculiar people. Their history unrolled before her as a series of wonderful providences. The path glowed with divine manifestations. Miracles blossomed out of every natural law. But to her there were no laws of nature. Such ideas had not yet been born. The earth was "the Lord's." All its phe

nomena were direct manifestations of his will. Clouds and storms came on errands from God. Light and darkness were the shining or the hiding of his face. Calamities were punishments. Harvests were divine gifts; famines were immediate divine penalties. To us God acts through instruments; to the Hebrew he acted immediately by his will. "He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast."

To such a one as Mary there would be no incredulity as to the reality of this angelic manifestation. Her only surprise would be that she should be chosen for a renewal of those divine interpositions in behalf of her people of which their history was so full. The very reason which would lead us to suspect a miracle in our day gave it credibility in other days. It is simply a question of adaptation. A miracle as a blind appeal to the moral sense, without the use of the reason, was adapted to the earlier periods of human life. Its usefulness ceases when the moral sense is so developed that it can find its own way through the ministration of the reason. A miracle is a substitute for moral demonstration, and is peculiarly adapted to the early conditions of mankind.

Of all miracles, there was none more sacred, congruous, and grateful to a Hebrew than an angelic visitation. A devout Jew, in looking back, saw angels flying thick between the heavenly throne and the throne of his fathers. The greatest events of national history had been made illustrious by their presence. Their work began with the primitive pair. They had come at evening to Abraham's tent. They had waited upon Jacob's footsteps. They had communed with Moses, with the judges, with priests and magistrates, with prophets and holy men. All the way down from the beginning of history, the pious Jew saw the shining footsteps of these heavenly messengers. Nor had the faith died out in the long interval through which their visits had been withheld. Mary could not, therefore, be surprised at the coming of angels, but only that they should come to her.

It may seem strange that Zacharias should be struck dumb for doubting the heavenly messenger, while Mary went unrebuked. But it is plain that there was a wide difference in the nature of the relative experiences. To Zacharias was promised an event external to himself, not involving his own sensibility. But to a woman's heart there can be no other announcement possible that shall so stir every feeling and sensibility of the soul, as the promise and prospect of her first child. Motherhood is the very centre of womanhood. The first awaking in her soul of the reality that she bears a double life- herself within herself-brings a sweet bewilderment of wonder and joy. The more sure her faith of the fact, the more tremulous must her soul become.