God--for we remember that sacrifice is but the highest form of prayer.
The blessedness of S. Mary, that peculiar degree of blessedness which
seems signalized by the reiterated attribution of the quality to her,
must for our purposes to be understood as "power with God," power of
intercession. It means that our Lord has chosen her to be a special
medium of approval to Him, and that through her prayers He wills to
bestow upon men many of His choicest gifts. Naturally, her prayers, like
our prayers, are mediated by the merits of her divine Son; nevertheless
they have a peculiar power which is related to her peculiar blessedness
in that she is the mother of Incarnate God, and by special privilege is
herself without sin. Of all those to whom we are privileged to turn in
the joys and tragedies of our lives for the sympathy which helps through
enlightened, loving prayer, we most naturally resort to her who is all
love and all sympathy, Mary, the Mother of Jesus, blessed among
women forever.

Although we are told nothing of these days that S. Mary spent with her
cousin Elizabeth, we do gather that she remained with her until her
child was born and that she saw S. John in his mother's arms, and was a
partaker in the joy of the aged parents. She was present when Zacharias,
his speech restored, uttered the _Benedictus_ in thanksgiving for the
birth of his son. It was then, having seen her own Son's Forerunner that
S. Mary went back to Nazareth filled more than ever with the sense that
God's hand was in the events that were taking place, and of the approach
of some crisis in her nation's history. It must have been that she
talked intimately with Zacharias and Elizabeth and with them tried to
imagine what was the future in which these two children were so closely
concerned. When we consider the _Magnificat_ and the _Benedictus_ not as
the "Gospel Canticles" to be sung in Church but as the utterances of
pious Israelites under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, we feel how