This was the starting point of Blessed Mary.  She was filled with all the fulness of God from the moment of her conception, and was never separated from the joy of the great possession.  We are born in sin and have to travel the road to the very end.  Yet we, too, begin in union, because we are born of our baptism into Christ soon after our natural birth, and our problem is to achieve in experience the content of our birthright.  In other words:  our feet are set in the Way from the beginning, and our part is to keep to the Way and not wander to the right hand or to the left; that this may be possible for us Christ lived and died and to-day is at the Right Hand of the Father where He ever liveth to make intercession for us.  We need never walk without Christ.  The weariness of the journey is sustained by His constant and ready help.  The way is lighted by the Truth which is Himself, and the life that we live is His communicated life.  “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”  There are those who find the road godward, the road of the Christ-life, wearisome because they keep their eyes fixed on the difficulties of the way and treat each step as though it were a separate thing and not one step in a wonderful journey.  The way to avoid the weariness of the day’s travel is to keep one’s eye fixed on the end, to raise the eyes to the heavens where Jesus sitteth enthroned at the Right Hand of the Father.  The day’s song is the Sursum Corda,—­“Lift up your hearts unto the Lord!”

The mediatorial office of our Lord is exercised chiefly through His Sacrifice.  He ever liveth to make intercession for us; and this intercession is the presentation of the Sacrifice that He Himself offered once for all in Blood upon the Cross, and forever presents to the Father in heaven “one unending sacrifice.”  This heavenly oblation of our Lord which is the means wherethrough we approach pure Divinity, is also the Sacrifice of the Church here on earth.  The heavenly Altar and the earthly Altar are but one in that there is but one Priest and one Victim here and there.  The Eucharistic Sacrifice is the Church’s presentation of her Head as her means of approach to God, as the ground of all her prayers.  These prayers make their appeal through Jesus Who died and rose again for us and is on the Right Hand of Power.  We know of no other way of approach, we plead no other merit as the hope of our acceptance.  Let us be very clear about this centrality of our Lord’s mediation because I shall presently have certain things to say which are often assumed to be in conflict with his Mediatorial Office, but which in reality do not so conflict, but exist at all because of the Office.

We approach Divinity, then, through our Lord’s humanity; and we at once see how that teaching, so common to-day, which denies the Resurrection of our Lord’s Body, and believes simply in the survival of His human soul strikes at the very heart of the Catholic Religion.  If Revelation be true, our approach to God is rendered possible because there is a Mediator between God and man, the MAN Christ Jesus.  All our prayers have explicitly, or implicitly, this fact in view.  All our Masses are a pleading of this fact.