This is the common fact in our dealing with God.  We express it when we say that we never get beyond the need of faith.  We pray that one thing may be made clear, and the result of the clearing is the deepened sense of the mystery of the things beyond, just as any increase in the power of the telescope clears up certain questions which had been puzzling the astronomers only to carry their vision into vaster depths of space, opening new questions to tantalize the imagination.  We find it so always.  The solution of any question of our spiritual lives does not lead as perhaps we thought it would lead to there being no longer any questions to perplex us and to draw on our time and our energy; rather such solution puts us in the presence of new and, it may well be, deeper and more perplexing questions.  “Are there no limits to the demands of God upon us,” we sometimes despairingly ask?  And the answer is, “No:  there are no limits because the end of the road that we are travelling is in infinity.”  The limit that is set to our perfecting is the perfection of God, and if we grow through all the years of eternity we shall still have attained only a relative perfection.

So the successful passing of one test cannot be expected to relieve us from all tests in the future.  It is the dream of the child that manhood will set it free; and he reaches manhood only to find that it imposes obligations which are so pressing that he reverses his dream and speaks of his childhood as the time of his true freedom.  The meeting of spiritual tests is but the proving of spiritual capacity to meet other tests.  To our Lady it might well seem that the acceptance of the conditions of the Incarnation was the severest test that God could assign her; that in the light of the promise she could look on to joy.  But the future concealed a sword which should pierce her very heart.  The promise contained no doubt wonderful things—­this wonder of God’s blessing that she was now experiencing in the coming of the Holy Ghost, in the very embrace of God Himself:  this is but the first of the Joyful Mysteries which were God’s great gifts to her.  But her life was not to be a succession of Joyful Mysteries, ultimately crowned with the Mysteries of Glory.  There were the Sorrowful Mysteries as well.  They were as true, and shall we not say, as necessary, as valuable, a part of her spiritual training as the others.  She, our Mother, was now near God, with a nearness that was possible for no other human being, and it is one of the traditional sayings of our Lord:  “He that is near Me is near fire.”  And fire burns as well as warms and lights.  She is wonderful, the Virgin of Nazareth, in this moment when she becomes Mother of God:  and we share in the rapture of the moment when in the fulness of her joy she hardly notices S. Gabriel’s departure:  but we feel, too, a great pity for her as we think of the coming days.  So we kneel to her who is our Mother, as well as Mother of God, and say our Ave, and ask her priceless intercession.