appeared monotonous.  As we read any series of the lives of the saints, and realise that it is these men and women and multitudes of others like them, that make up the society of heaven, we get rid of any other notion than that of endless diversity.  And thus studying individual saints we come to understand that not only is the sanctity of them diverse in experience but different in degree.  All men have not the same capacity for sanctity, we infer; all cannot develop to the same level of attainment.  We may perhaps say that while all partake of God, all do not reflect God in the same way or in the same degree.

But if there be a hierachy of saints it is impossible that we should think of any other at its head than Blessed Mary.  Whatsoever diversity there may be in the attainments of the saints, there is one saint who is pre-eminent in all things, who,—­because in her case there has never been any moment in which she was separate from God, when the bond of union was so much as strained,—­is the completest embodiment of the grace of God.  That is, I think, essentially what is meant by the Coronation of our Lady,—­that her supremacy in sanctity makes her the head of the heirarchy of saints, that in her the possibilities of the life of union have been developed to the highest degree through her unstained purity and unfailing response to the divine will.

It is of the last importance, if the Catholic conceptions are to be influential in our lives, that we should gain such a hold on the life of heaven, the life that the saints, with Saint Mary at their head, are leading to-day, as shall make it a present reality to us, not a picture in some sort of dreamland.  Our lives are shaped by their ideals; and although we may never attain to our ideals here, yet we shall never attain them anywhere unless we shape them here.  Heaven must be grasped as the issue of a certain sort of life, as the necessary consequence of the application of Christian principles to daily living.  It is wholly bad to conceive it as a vague future into which we shall be ushered at death, if only we are “good”; it must be understood as a state we win to by the use of the means placed at our disposal for the purpose.  Those attain to heaven in the future who are interested in heaven in the present.

And a study of the means is wholly possible for us because we have at hand in great detail the lives of those whom the Church, by raising them to her altars, has guaranteed to us as having achieved sanctity and been admitted to the Beatific Vision.  They achieved sanctity here—­that is, in the past.  They achieved it under an infinite variety of circumstanies,—­that is the encouragement.  They now enjoy the fruits of it in the world of heaven,—­that is the promise.