But that, which sums all, is the Eglantine,
     Which of the field is cleped the sweetest briar,
     Inflamed with ardour to that mystic shine,
     In Moses’ bush unwasted in the fire.

     Thus love, and hope, and burning charity,
     (Divinest graces) are so intermixt
     With odorous sweets and soft humility,
     As if they adored the head, whereon they are fixed.

PART TWO

CHAPTER II

THE ANNUNCIATION I

And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art
highly favoured, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou
among women.

S. Luke, I. 28

Oh God, whose will it was that thy Word should take flesh, at the message of the Angel, in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, grant to us thy suppliants that, we who believe her to be truly the Mother of God, may be assisted by her intercession with thee.  Through &c.

ROMAN.

When we attempt to reconstruct imaginatively any scene of Holy Scripture it is almost inevitable that we see it through the eyes of some great artist of the past.  The Crucifixion comes to us as Duerer or Guido Reni saw it; the Presentation or the Visitation presents itself to us in terms of the imagination of Raphael; we see the Nativity as a composition of Corregio.  So the Annunciation rises before us when we close our eyes and attempt to make “the composition of place” in a familiar grouping of the actors:  a startled maiden who has arisen hurriedly from work or prayer, looking with wonder at the apparition of an angel who has all the eagerness of one who has come hastily upon an urgent mission.  The surroundings differ, but artists of the Renaissance like to think of a sumptuous background as a worthy setting for so great an event.

We keep close to the meaning of Scripture if we set the Annunciation in a room in a cottage of a Palestinian working man.  And I like to think of S. Mary at her accustomed work when Gabriel appeared, not with a rush of wings, but as a silent and hardly felt presence standing before her whom the Lord has chosen to be the instrument of His coming.  Wonder there would have been, the kind of awe-struck wonder with which the supernatural always fills men; and yet only for a moment, for how could she who was daily living so close to God fear the messenger of God?  The thought of angels and divine messengers would be wholly familiar to her.  They had been the frequent agents of God in many a crisis of her people’s history, and appeared again and again in the story of her ancestors on whose details she had often meditated.  Yet in her humility she could but think it strange that an angel should have any message to bear to her.