THE CORONATION

     And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed
     with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head
     a crown of twelve stars.

     Rev. XII, I.

To-day the Angel Gabriel brought the palm and the crown to the triumphant Virgin.  To-day he introduced to the Lord of all, her, who was the Temple of the Most High, and the dwelling of the Holy Spirit.

     FOR THE ASSUMPTION.  ARMENIAN.

The heaven which S. John the Evangelist shows us is the continuation of the earthly Church.  As we read his pages we feel that entrance there would be a real home-coming for the earnest Christian.  We are familiar enough with presentations of heaven which seem to us to be so detached from Christian reality as to lack any human appeal.  We think of philosophic presentations of the future with entire indifference.  It is possible, we say, that they may be true; but they are utterly uninteresting.  It is not so in the visions of S. John.  Here we have a heaven which is humanly interesting because it is continous with the present life, and its interests are the interests that it has been the object of our religion to foster.  The qualities of character which the Christian religion has urged upon our attention are presented as finding their clear field of development in the world to come.  There, too, are unveiled the objects of our adoration, the ever-blessed Three who yet are but one.  Love which has striven for development under the conditions and limitations of our earthly life, which has tried to see God and has gone out to seek Him in the dimness of revelation, now sees and is satisfied.  Whom now we see in a mirror, enigmatically, we shall then see face to face.

And it is a heaven thronged with saints, with men and women who have gone through the same experiences as those to which we are subjected, and have come forth purified and triumphant.  We sometimes in discouragement think of life as continuous struggle.  It is perhaps natural and inevitable that we should thus concentrate attention upon the present, but if we lift our eyes so as to clear them from the mists of the present we see that it is far from a hopeless struggle, but rather the necessary discipline from which we emerge triumphant.  Those saints whom we see rejoicing about the throne of God, those who go out to follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth, passed through the struggle of persecution to their triumphant attainment of the Vision.  It is our eternal temptation to expect to triumph here; but it is only in a very limited sense that this can be true:  our triumph is indeed here, but the enjoyment of it and all that is implied in it is elsewhere.  Here even our most complete achievement is conditioned by the limitations of earth:  there the limitations are done away and life expands in perfectness.