it is an unselfish love.  She is necessarily interested in all the members of the Body, and their cares and joys and sorrows she is glad to make her own.  She is very close to us in her love and sympathy; she is very ready to help us with her prayers.  We never go to her for succour but she hears us.  “Behold thy son,” her divine Son said to her on the Cross in His agony, and all who are members of that Son are her sons too.  Her place in heaven above all creatures, most highly favoured as she is, is a place to which our prayers penetrate, and never penetrate unheard.  For that other Son, through whose merits she is what she is, whose Face she ever beholds as the Face alike of her Redeemer and her Child, is ever ready to hear her intercessions for us because they come to Him with the power and the insight that perfect purity and perfect sympathy alone can give.  So for us there is intense personal consolation in this word:  “Behold thy mother.”

But there is another side to this committal.  It is mutual:  “Behold thy son.”  If we can see ourselves in S. John, committed to the Blessed Mother, we can also see ourselves in S. John to whom the blessed mother is committed.  “Behold thy mother.”  There is a sense in which the blessed mother is committed to us; to-day she is our care.  We see the fulfillment of this trust in the love and reverence wherewith Christendom from the beginning has surrounded S. Mary.  It has accepted the charge with a passionate devotion.  The growth of devotion to her is recorded in the vast literature of Mariology which comes to us from all parts and all eras of the Catholic Church.  The details of the expression of this devotion have been wrought out through the centuries with loving care, and the result is that wherever there is a Catholic conception of religion, either in East or West, there is a grateful response to our Lord’s trust of His Blessed mother to His Church in the person of S. John.

We feel, do we not? that it is one of the great privileges of our spiritual life that we have found a personal part in this trust, that it is permitted us to preserve and hand on this reverence for Blessed Mary, and in so doing to gain personal contact with her as a spiritual power in the Kingdom of God.  It means much to us that we can have the love and sympathy which are blended with her intercession, that we can associate our prayers with hers in the time of our need.  Much as we value the sympathy and prayers of our friends here, we cannot but feel that in Mary we have a friend whose helpfulness is stimulated by a great love and directed by deep spiritual insight into the reality of our needs.  We turn therefore to her with the certainty of her co-operation.

Our Lord on the Cross had now fulfilled His mission in the care of individual persons, had prayed for His tormentors, had forgiven the penitent thief, and had commended those who were the special objects of His love to one another, and could now turn His thoughts away from earth to the love of the Father.  His last words are intimate words to Him.  They express the agony that tears His soul as the Face of the Father is for a moment hidden, and the peace of an accomplished work as He surrenders Himself into the hands of the Father that sent Him.  He who had been our example all His life, showing us how to meet life, is our example in death, showing us how to meet death.