I remember that once I had been travelling in Scotland all one long summer's day. It was unbearably hot; the third-class carriage in which I was seated stopped maddeningly at every station. The atmosphere was already stifling when a woman of the people entered the compartment, and sat down opposite me in the already over crowded place. I said to myself: "Yet another. How dreadful!" when in a moment I was rebuked indeed. The poor woman quietly opened her shawl, and I saw that she had on her lap a child. To that child she gave her breast. Suddenly it happened that the sun shone fiercely through the window, but I was gladdened as it shone upon that simple mother with her babe. For the grace of God had touched my heart and I had remembered. " Yes," I thought, "yes, thank God, I believe. I believe that once a poor Woman, rejected and despised by men, gave her breast to her Child. And that Woman was the Mother of my God." The whole scene was transfigured, made surpassingly beautiful, glorified. The Incarnation touches and makes splendid things that are in themselves colourless and ordinary. Who that believes in Jesus Christ can see a woman with her child and think awhile on his religion, without his heart burning within him and tenderness flooding his soul ?—for when the Heavens once kissed the earth, and the Love of God appeared in our midst, that Love was manifested as a Child in a Woman's arms. Those who believe that Jesus is their Lord, and that He is Blessed Mary's Son, can hardly fail to remember, with deep feeling, that every woman is of our Lady's sex.
