It seems well to insist on this instinctive movement of the soul in Blessed Mary because it is one item of the evidence that the Catholic Church has to offer for its belief in her sinlesssness.  Any momentary rebellion, no matter how soon recovered from, or how sincerely regretted, against the will of God, would be evidence of the existence of sin.  But where sin is not, where there is an unstained soul, there the knowledge of the will of God will send one running to its acceptance; there will be active acceptance and not just submission to God’s will.  Submission implies a certain effort to place ourselves in line with the will of God; it often seems to imply that we are accepting it because we cannot do anything else.  But with Blessed Mary there is a glad going forth to meet God; the word “Behold” springs out to meet the will of God half-way.  It is as though she had been holding herself ready, expectant, in the certainty of the coming of some message, and now she offers herself without the shadow of hesitation, as to a purpose which was a welcome vocation:  “Behold the Handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”  How wonderful is the humility of obedience!

And humility—­we must stress this—­is not a virtue of youth; it is not one of the virtues which ripen quickly, but is of slow development and delayed maturity.  Modesty we should expect in a maiden, and lack of self-assertion; and perhaps obedience of a sort.  But those do not constitute the virtue of humility.  We are humble when we have lost self; and Mary’s wondering answer reveals the fact that she is not thinking of herself at all, but only of the nature of the divine purpose.  That that purpose being known she should at all resist it would seem to her a thing incredible, for all her life she had had no other motive of action.  Her will had never been separated from the will of God.

This state of union which was hers by divine election and privilege, we achieve, if we achieve it at all, by virtue of great spiritual discipline.  We are, to be sure, brought into union with God through the sacraments, but the union so achieved is, if one may so express it, an unstable union; it is union that we have to maintain by daily spiritual action and which suffers many a weakening through our infidelity, even if it escape the disaster of mortal sin.  We sway to and fro in our struggle to attain the equilibrium of perfection which belonged to Blessed Mary by virtue of the first embrace of God which had freed her from sin.  Our tragedy is that we have almost universally lost the first engagements of the Spiritual Combat before we have at all understood that there is any combat.  The circumstances of life of child and youth are such that we become familiar with sin before we have the intelligence to understand the need of resisting, even if we are fortunate enough to have such an education as to awaken a sense of sin as opposition to God.  There is nothing more appalling than the tragedy of life thus defiled and broken and put at a disadvantage before it even understands the ideals that should govern its course.  When the vision of perfection comes and we face life as the field where we are to acquire eternal values, we face it with a poisoned imagination and a depleted strength.  Our battle is not only to maintain what we have, but to win back what we have lost.