BYZANTINE.

The silences of the Holy Scriptures have always provoked speculation as
to what is left untold. The devout imagination has played about the
hints we receive and woven them into stories which far outrun any true
implication of the facts. Thus has much legendary matter gathered about
the childhood of our Lord, containing the stories, not always very
edifying according to our taste, which are set down in the Apocryphal
Gospels. The same eagerness to know more than we are told has produced
the developed legend of the childhood of our Lady. We can of course
place no reliance on most of the statements that are there made; perhaps
the most that we can lay hold of is the fact that S. Mary's father was
Joachim and her mother Anna. The rest may be left to silence.

But if the facts of the external life of Mary of Nazareth cannot be
hoped for, certain general truths evidently follow from God's plan for
her and from her relation to our Blessed Lord. There are certain
inferences from her vocation which are irresistible and which the
theologians of the Church did not fail to make as they thought of her
function in relation to the Incarnation. We know that the work of
Redemption by which it was God's purpose to lead back a sinful world to
Himself was a purpose that worked from the very beginning of man's fatal
separation from the source of his life and happiness. The essential
meaning of Holy Scripture is that it is a history of the origin of God's
purpose and of His bringing it to a successful issue in the mission of
our Lord. In the Scriptures we are permitted to see the unfolding of the
divine purpose and the preparation of the instruments by which the
purpose is to be effected. We see the divine will struggling with the
human will, and in appearance baffled again and again by the selfishness
and the stupidity of man. We see too that the divine will is in the long