hope--she knows.

But she is human too and dwells in the midst of a human race that does
not know and therefore will not wholly take her at her word, and the
very height of her exaltation must also be, then, the measure of her
despair. The fact that she knows so certainly intensifies a thousandfold
her human sorrow, as she, who has _come that they may have life_, sees
how _they will not come_ to her and find it, as she sees how long the
triumph which is certain is yet delayed through their faithlessness. "If
_thou hadst known_," she cries in the heart-broken words of Jesus
Himself over Jerusalem, "_if thou hadst but known the things that belong
to thy peace! Behold and see, then, if there be any sorrow like to
mine_, if there be any grief so profound and so piercing as mine, who
hold the Keys of Heaven and watch men turn away from the Door."

So, then, in church after church stand symbolic groups of statuary,
representing joy and tragedy, compared with which Venus and Adonis are
but childish and half-civilized images--Mary as triumphant Queen, with
the gold-crowned Child in her arms, and Mary the tormented Mother, with
her dead Son across her knees. For she who is both Divine and Human
alone understands what it is that Humanity has done to Divinity.

Is it any wonder, then, that the world thinks her extravagant in both
directions at once; that the world turns away on Good Friday from the
unutterable depths of her sorrow, and on Easter Day from the unscalable
heights of her joy, calling the one morbid and the other hysterical? For
what does the world know of such passions as these? What, after all, can
the sensualist know of joy, or the ruined financier of sorrow? And what
can the moderate, self-controlled, self-respecting man of the world know
of either?