God's will. Submission implies a certain effort to place ourselves in
line with the will of God; it often seems to imply that we are accepting
it because we cannot do anything else. But with Blessed Mary there is a
glad going forth to meet God; the word "Behold" springs out to meet the
will of God half-way. It is as though she had been holding herself
ready, expectant, in the certainty of the coming of some message, and
now she offers herself without the shadow of hesitation, as to a purpose
which was a welcome vocation: "Behold the Handmaid of the Lord; be it
unto me according to thy word." How wonderful is the humility of
obedience!

And humility--we must stress this--is not a virtue of youth; it is not
one of the virtues which ripen quickly, but is of slow development and
delayed maturity. Modesty we should expect in a maiden, and lack of
self-assertion; and perhaps obedience of a sort. But those do not
constitute the virtue of humility. We are humble when we have lost self;
and Mary's wondering answer reveals the fact that she is not thinking of
herself at all, but only of the nature of the divine purpose. That that
purpose being known she should at all resist it would seem to her a
thing incredible, for all her life she had had no other motive of
action. Her will had never been separated from the will of God.

This state of union which was hers by divine election and privilege, we
achieve, if we achieve it at all, by virtue of great spiritual
discipline. We are, to be sure, brought into union with God through the
sacraments, but the union so achieved is, if one may so express it, an
unstable union; it is union that we have to maintain by daily spiritual
action and which suffers many a weakening through our infidelity, even
if it escape the disaster of mortal sin. We sway to and fro in our
struggle to attain the equilibrium of perfection which belonged to