seen chiefly in offers, in opportunities to be something which we have
declined or have only imperfectly realized. Be that as it may, there is
no life, I am quite convinced, that has not a spiritual history which is
a marvellous history of what God at least wanted to do for it. It is
also a history of what He actually has done: a history of graces, of
rich gifts, of deliverances. It matters not that we have been so
heedless as to miss most of what God has done. The facts stand and are
discoverable whenever we care to pay enough attention to them to
ascertain their true meaning. When we do that, then surely we shall be
compelled to do, what blessed Mary never needed to do, fall at God's
feet in an act of penitence, seeing ourselves, perhaps for the first
time, in the light of God's mind.

The Magnificat, if we consider it as a personal expression, is a
wonderful expression of selfless devotion, where the perception of the
glory and majesty of God excludes all other thoughts. It is, too, a
thanksgiving for the personal gift which is her vocation to be the
Mother of the Saviour. Out of her lowliness she has been exalted--how
highly she herself cannot at the time have dreamed. We can see what was
necessarily involved in God's choice of her, and to-day we think of her
as in her perfect purity exalted in heaven far above all other
creatures. Mother of God most holy we call her, and in the words of her
canticle ever repeat her thanksgiving as our thanksgiving, too, for the
vocation that God sent her and for the gift which through her has
come to us.

But there is a more universal aspect of the Magnificat. Essentially it
is the presentation of the constant antithesis which runs through all
revelation between the flesh and the spirit, between the Kingdom of God
and the Kingdom of this world. It embodies the conception of God