worked from the very beginning of man’s fatal separation from the source of his life and happiness.  The essential meaning of Holy Scripture is that it is a history of the origin of God’s purpose and of His bringing it to a successful issue in the mission of our Lord.  In the Scriptures we are permitted to see the unfolding of the divine purpose and the preparation of the instruments by which the purpose is to be effected.  We see the divine will struggling with the human will, and in appearance baffled again and again by the selfishness and the stupidity of man.  We see too that the divine will is in the long run successful in securing a point of action in humanity, in winning the allegiance of men of good will to co-operation with the purpose of God.  We see spiritual ideals assimilated, and sympathy with the work of God generated, until we feel that that work has gained a firm and enduring ground in humanity from which it can act.  God is able to consummate His purpose, and men begin to understand in some measure the nature of the future deliverance and to look forward to the coming of One Who should be the embodiment of the divine action and the Representative of God Himself with a completeness which no previous messenger of God had ever attained.

It we would understand the Old Testament we must find that its intimate note is preparation, just as the intimate note of the New Testament is accomplishment.  God is working to a foreseen end, and is working as fast as men will consent to co-operate and become the instruments of His purpose.  The purpose is not one that can be achieved by the exercise of power; it is a purpose of love and can be effected only through co-operating love.  And as we watch the final unfolding of that purpose in the Incarnation of God, we more and more become conscious of the preparation of all the instruments of the purpose which are working in harmony for the revelation of the meaning of God.

Of all the instruments of this divine purpose, one figure has preeminently fascinated the devout imagination because of her unique beauty, and has been the object of profound speculation because of the intimacy of her relation to God,—­Mary of Nazareth.  The vocabulary of love and reverence has exhausted itself in the attempt to express our estimate of her.  The literature of Mariology is immense.  And no one who has at all entered into the meaning of the Incarnation, of what is involved in eternal God taking human flesh, can wonder at this.  Here at the crisis of the divine redeeming action, when the crowning mystery which angels desire to look into is being accomplished, we find the figure of a village maiden of Israel as the surprising instrument of the advent of God.  We wonder:  and we instinctively feel, that as all the other steps and instruments in God’s redemption of man had from the beginning been carefully prepared, so shall we find preparation here.  We understand that as God could not come in the flesh at any time, but only when the “fulness of time” had come; so He could not come of any woman, but only of such an one as He had prepared to be the instrument of His Incarnation.