WHEN
we reach the mystery of the Nativity of our Blessed Lord, it is but
natural that He should Him self become so engrossing a figure in the
picture which we try to draw for ourselves, that with our weak powers
of attention we have little of it to bestow on any one else.
Nevertheless it belongs to Christian contemplation to endeavour to
take in the whole of God's dealings in these great mysteries, and on
this account when we are specially drawing out for ourselves those
dealings with our Blessed Lady or with St. Joseph, it is necessary to
fix our eyes on them more exclusively. In truth, they can never be
separated from Him. Mary especially is a part of Him, and it is more
true to say that we contemplate Him altogether incompletely when we
omit her, than to say that any attention paid to her history takes
away our minds from Him. Without her, we should miss the most
beautiful part of His work, the part most dear to Himself. We shall
find, then,-that there are certain features in what has come down to
us of those dealings which are greatly worthy of notice, and which
furnish us with great occasions for glorifying God. Here again we
must make use of theological reasoning rather than of any direct
statements of the Sacred Text, which is as short here as elsewhere,
and which in the narrative of the Nativity and of many of the earlier
incidents of the Infancy may be considered as being comparatively
silent about our Lady in particular, for the very reason that she was
herself the chief informant of the Evangelists in this part of their
work.
Nothing
is said on the subject in the New Testament, but it seems a matter of
Christian reason to be sure that while our Lord was in the womb of
His Blessed Mother she was free from all the inconveniences and
sufferings which are now the lot of all mothers during that time, and
which it is reasonable to consider as a part of the consequences of
original sin. It is hard to conceive it possible that our Lord could
have been a burthen and an occasion of misery to His Mother at such a
time. It is an extension of the same truth to see that the actual
childbearing of our Blessed Lady was free from all pain and trouble
of every kind. She required no assistance or nursing, her Son was
born in a marvellous and preter natural manner, she was able to wrap
Him herself in the clothes she had provided for Him, and to
discharge, with immense joy and delight, all the offices which are
usually the mother's part in such cases. At the actual Birth of our
Lord no one was present but herself and the holy angels, but as soon
as all was over, and when the Child was in His Mother's arms and at
her holy breast, the blessed Joseph was able to pour forth his
thankful adoration to Him of Whom as father he was to undertake the
charge.
The
Church believes that a further privilege was conferred on our Blessed
Lady at the moment of her childbearing, of which it would have been
out of place for the Gospels to make specific mention, especially as
we have in them probably no account of the Nativity which does not
come from Mary herself. But there is solid foundation in Scripture
for the truth of which we speak, inasmuch as it is said in the
prophecy of Isaias, that the Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son,
and the words seem to imply that she is to be a Virgin both in her
conception and in her bearing. This truth is confirmed by the
universal tradition of the Church, and is very dear indeed to the
Catholic mind. Our Lord worked a marvellous miracle for this purpose,
preserving in some hidden way the perfect integrity of His Mother
both in His Conception and in the act of His coming forth from her
sacred womb. This privilege was due to the honour of this Blessed
Mother, to the perfect purity of her soul, to her consecration of
herself by vow to God, to her faithful abandonment of the guard of
her promised Virginity to the custody of God in her Annunciation, to
the special glory of her Virgin Maternity, to the majesty of our Lord
her Son, and to the great dignity she was to hold in His Kingdom, and
also to the commission in trusted to her to raise in the world the
standard of perfect integrity and continence for the example of
others and for the immense benefit of the whole human race. The
manner in which this integrity was preserved is hidden from us, nor
need we inquire curiously into such a matter, especially as we have
other miracles of our Lord which may be considered as figures of
this, as when He left the Holy Sepulchre without breaking the stone
or the seals set by the Jews, or entered the room in which the
disciples were assembled through the closed door. Our Blessed Lady
must have been conscious of the working of the miracle, and it must
have filled her heart with joy and thankfulness.
The
devout woman who is mentioned in the Gospels as having lifted up her
voice out of the crowd to praise the Mother of our Lord, is reported
to have declared her to be blessed on two accounts, because her womb
had born the Son of the Eternal Father, and because her breasts had
suckled the Lord Christ, as the Church sings. When our Lord had been
wrapped in His swathing bands, our Lady gave Him to suck from her
pure bosom, and this must have been an occasion of new joy and
gratitude to her. It implied that, all through the time of His
Infancy and Childhood she was to minister to Him in the way of
ordinary mothers to their children, only without the weariness and
fatigue and exhaustion and other sufferings which may be incidental
in such relations. These are the delights and choicest pleasures of
all good Christian mothers, who would think it one of the greatest
degradations possible to allow others to perform these duties for
them, except in cases of absolute necessity, as if they were not fit
by their worldliness and frivolity to be the mothers of Christian
children. The whole of these services as Mother 'were discharged by
our Lady with the utmost joy and faithfulness, and must have been to
her occasions of immense grace in reward for that faithfulness, and
the love and purity of intention with which they were performed by
her. Thus day after day she mounted higher and higher in the Kingdom
of grace, not only by the special graces which she may have received
from time to time from the immense bounty of God, and by the
continual communications which passed between her soul and the Heart
of her Blessed Son, but also by the exercise of the simplest duties
of a mother, which can be blest by God for the sanctification of all
who in such cases discharge them with devotion and pure intention, as
St. Paul implies. 1
Another
point which belongs to this contemplation is that our Lady now began
to converse with those who came to visit and honour the new-born King
of the world, such as the shepherds, and those who may have come
after them on hearing what they had to say. It is indeed very
possible that the first visitants of the Crib in the cave, the holy
angels sent from Heaven by the Father to adore His Son in His Human
Nature, may have made themselves manifest to our Blessed Lady before
their departure to announce the glad tidings to the shepherds. In
this case our Lady's converse as the Mother of the holy Child would
have begun with them. When the time came for the shepherds to
approach, it would be her place to receive them and show her Son to
them, not with the foolish pride which may be found in some mothers
who are ready to boast of the beauty or other external qualities of
their babes, but with the serious and grave joy of the Mother of the
Redeemer. No doubt she understood and took in all the circumstances
of the Nativity, which had been so carefully chosen and arranged by
our Lord and which revealed to her what those conditions were which
He especially loved—poverty, obscurity, humiliation, pain,
discomfort, homelessness, and the like. In all these things she could
read the lesson which He was beginning so early to teach to the
world, a lesson which had its peculiar character from the office of
our Lord as Saviour and Redeemer, as well as of Teacher as to the
dangers of all those things which the world usually clings to and
desires. This was the beginning of His teaching, and there fore of
the drinking in of that teaching on the part of His Blessed Mother,
who formed with St. Joseph the whole company of His disciples at this
time.
It
is now that we find for the first time the words concerning our
Blessed Lady which are once more repeated at a later period of the
Infancy. " Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her
heart." In a narrative which is so short, and in which every
word seems to have been measured and weighed before it was inserted,
it cannot be thought that a statement of this kind would be twice
repeated, unless it were meant that we should gather from it some
important truth, at least with regard to the characteristic grace and
office of this Blessed Mother. It was now for the first time that our
Lord manifested Himself to the outer world. Before this He had been
the treasure of His Mother and St. Joseph alone, hidden from all
beside, except in so far as He had shown His power in the case of the
blessed child who was to be His Precursor. The manifestations of
Himself by our Blessed Lord, therefore, as far as they had been made
at all, had been internal and spiritual, but now, as soon as He was
born into the world, He entered on a new phase of existence in this
respect, because His presence was now visible and tangible, and,
however silent and apparently helpless, capable of receiving homage
and honour, and of dealing with men externally and visibly. As has
been said, the circumstances of the Providential arrangement of His
Life in the world, the persons called around Him, the manner of their
conduct towards Him, the course of events which affected Him, and the
like, were now all subject of devout contemplation, as they were, in
their way and degree, manifestations of His will and choice, and of
the place and position which He chose to occupy in the eyes of men.
The most marvellous of histories, therefore, was now beginning, and
it was fitting that it should have, if not its historian, at least
some intelligent heart and mind that could watch it and appreciate
it, and learn from its study what God wished to be gathered from it.
This
was the office of our Blessed Lady, and it seems to be this that is
meant when we are reminded that she made it her practice to keep all
these things in her heart. And it seems reasonable to think, as will
be drawn out more fully hereafter, that this habit which she
contracted during the first days of the Holy Infancy, was continued
during the remainder of her life, and that she was always
contemplating, with devout and eager attention, the events connected
with our Lord as they passed before her, much as we may suppose the
holy Angels in Heaven now contemplate, and have always contemplated,
the marvellous order of the government of God over the world. There
are always in the Church a certain number of souls who are thus
occupied, and while they give continual glory and thanks to God for
His wonders, in a manner which to some extent gives back to Him His
due in this respect, they are also in many ways the supports and
mainstays of the Militant Church, either guiding it by their wise
counsels, or, far more, bringing down on its rulers blessings and
light by their prayers.
Thus
we find that the Nativity of our Lord was a point of time at which it
is reasonable to suppose that our Blessed Lady received some great
advance in the graces bestowed upon her, for the reason, in the first
place, that it was a great point in advance in the unfolding of the
mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God, and in the second
place, that it was a point at which she entered in some respects into
new relations with Him, involving new duties, and requiring new
supplies of Divine power. It was the occasion to her of the
reception, from the love and magnificent gratitude of her Son, of the
grace which is commemorated by the Church when she sings post
partum Virgo inviolata, and begs her intercession on this
ground also. It was the occasion of the beginning of a number of new
and most loving services on her part to Him, recompensed by a
continual stream of the most tender manifestations of affection and
gratitude on His part to her. It was the occasion of the beginning of
her dealings with others as the nursing Mother of the great King,
Whom they came to honour. And it was also the beginning of that
watchful and thoughtful study of the course of Providence in His
regard, which was in an especial way the office and the
characteristic of this Blessed Mother, an office to her discharge of
which we owe many things indeed in the history as far as we are able
to understand it, but probably far more of which we do not suspect
our obligation to her.
We
have thus in our Blessed Lady, in this mystery of the Nativity, a
twofold grace which has lasted on, after having been first made to
rest on her head, for the benefit of the children of the Church. For
in the silence of the cave, when our Lord came forth from her sacred
womb, she received, as has been said, the miraculous gift by which
her spot less virginity was preserved for ever, after the birth of
her Son as well as before, and this gift, thus shrined in Mary, has
made her the Mother of thou sands of virgins, who have followed her
in her devotion to this most beautiful virtue, whether as consecrated
to the service of the altar and the ministration of the sacraments,
and of the word of God, or in the simple dedication of religious
life, or of personal continence in the world. The Church has thus
received blessings which cannot be counted, of all of which Mary is
the Queen. And in the second place, it was now that began in the
Church, in the person of the same glorious Mother, the holy habit of
contemplation of the doings of God through His Incarnate Son. Thus
was laid the foundation of the fabric of Christian thought and
theology, the treasures of ascetic lore and spiritual wisdom were
first accumulated in the heart of the Blessed Mother.
Our
Blessed Lady, then, was the first to see, in the manifestations of
Himself by our Lord in the crib, the exercise of His office of
Redeemer and of Teacher. She was the first to understand how it was
that His infinite compassion and mercifulness made Him choose to take
on Himself all the sufferings and miseries of our human condition,
sin only excepted, not in order that He might know them, for He knew
them before by His Divine knowledge, and by the imparted knowledge
stored up in His Sacred Humanity, but that He might know them in that
way which could most perfectly make Him sympathize with us under
them, that is, in the way of personal experience. Thus she could see
in this condescension of His, now first manifested to the world, the
intensity and the tenderness of His mercy. She, too, was the first to
understand that He took on Himself the same penalties of our mortal
condition, for the other purpose of expiating for the offences
against God which indulgence in the good things of this world, which
He now rejected, had so often caused, and for the brood of evils
which they had generated for the souls of men. And she, too, was the
first student in the school which He now opened, as our Teacher by
example, of the manner in which these things were to be used by us in
order to please God, and walk securely and meritoriously on the path
to Heaven. She was the first to understand His preference for the
poor and simple and lowly, when He called the shepherds, first of all
mankind, to do Him homage in His cradle, and made them almost the
companions of the angels, in the blessings which He lavished on them
in return for their humble worship, and their lowly offerings.
1
i Tim. ii. 15.
