sanctity, she has at least brought him to its foot and set him there
beneath that ladder of the supernatural which reaches from hell to
heaven.

For she alone has this power. She alone is so utterly confident in the
presence of the sinner because she alone has the secret of his cure.
There in her confessional is the Blood of Christ that can make his soul
clean again, and in her Tabernacle the Body of Christ that will be his
food of eternal life. She alone dares be his friend because she alone
can be his Saviour. If, then, her saints are one sign of her identity,
no less are her sinners another.

For not only is she the Majesty of God dwelling on earth, she is also
His Love; and therefore its limitations, and they only, are hers. That
Sun of mercy that shines and that Rain of charity that streams, _on just
and unjust alike_, are the very Sun and Rain that give her life. If I
_go up to Heaven she is there_, enthroned in Christ, on the Right Hand
of God;_ if I go down to Hell she is there also_, drawing back souls
from the brink from which she alone can rescue them. For she is that
very ladder which Jacob saw so long ago, that staircase planted here in
the blood and the slime of earth, rising there into the stainless Light
of the Lamb. Holiness and unholiness are both alike hers and she is
ashamed of neither--the holiness of her own Divinity which is Christ's
and the unholiness of those outcast members of her Humanity to whom she
ministers.

By her power, then, which again is Christ's, the Magdalen becomes the
Penitent; the thief the first of the redeemed; and Peter, the yielding
sand of humanity, the _Rock on which Herself is built_.