And cannot we get the same attitude toward life?  In the acceptance of the Christian Religion what we have accepted is God.  We have acknowledged the supremacy of a will outside ourselves.  We say, “we are not our own, we are bought with a price,” the price of the Precious Blood.  But if our acceptance is a reality and not a theory it will turn out to involve much more than we imagined at the first.  The frequent and pathetic failures of those who have made profession of Christianity is largely accounted for by this,—­that the demands of the Christian Religion on life turn out to be more searching and far-reaching than was supposed would be the case.  Religion turns out to be not one interest to be adjusted to the other interests of life, but to be a demand that all life and action shall be controlled by supernatural motive.  Those who would willingly give a part, find it impossible to surrender the whole.  The world is full of Young Rulers who are willing “to contribute liberally to the support of religion,” but shrink from the demand that they “sell all.”  “I seek not yours, but you,” S. Paul writes to the Corinthians; and that is also the seeking of God—­“Not yours but you.”  And because the limit of our willingness is reached in contribution and does not extend to sacrifice, we fail.

But Blessed Mary did not fail because there was no limit to her willingness to sacrifice.  Her will to sacrifice had the same limitless quality as her love; and because of the limitless quality of her self-giving her growth in the life of union was unlimited, or limited only by the limitations of creaturehood.  When therefore we think of her to-day as Queen of Saints we are not thinking of an arbitrarily conferred position; we are thinking of a position which comes to her because she is what she is.  She through the unstinting sacrifice of her love came into more intimate relations with God than is possible for any other, and through that relation came to know more of the mind of God than any other.  The power of her intercession is the power of her understanding, of her sympathy with the thoughts of God.  When we come to her with our request for her intercession we feel that we are sure of her sympathy and her understanding.  Her experience of human life, we think, was not very wide:  can she whose life was passed under such narrow conditions understand the complex needs of the modern man or woman?  It is true that her actual experience of human life was not very wide; but her experience of God is very wide indeed, and she is able to understand our experience better than we can understand it ourselves because of her understanding of God’s mind and will.  It is seeing life through God’s eyes that reveals the truth about it.