What we need to feel is the constant action of the Holy Spirit—­that He wants to speak through every man.  And it helps to clear our minds if we go to our Bibles with the expectation of finding here, not exceptions to all rules which obtain in common life, but types of the divine action.  The isolation of Bible history has done much to create a feeling of its unreality.  What has happened only in the Bible can, we are apt to feel, safely be disregarded in daily life in the twentieth century.  But if what we find there is customary modes of divine action in life, exceptional in detail rather than in principle, the attitude we shall take will be wholly different.  We shall then study them with the feeling expressed in S. Paul’s saying, “These things are written for our learning,” and we shall expect to find in us and about us the same order of divine action, we shall learn to look on our lives as having their chief meaning in the fact that they are possible instruments of God; we shall learn to regard failure as failure to show forth God to the world.

In a way we can read our facts backward:  the fact that “Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost,” and the fact that Mary under the same divine impulse gave utterance to the words of the Magnificat, is a revelation of the character of these two women which would satisfy us of their sanctity had we no other evidence of it.  The choice of them by God to be His instruments is evidence of the divine approval; and that approval can never be false to the facts; what God treats as holy must be holy.

So we come to holy Mary’s Song with the feeling that in studying it we shall find in it a revelation of S. Mary herself.  She is not an instrument on which the Holy Spirit plays, but an intelligent being through whom He acts.  She, like S. Elizabeth, is filled with the Holy Spirit—­she had never been in the slightest degree out of union with God—­but still the Magnificat is her utterance; it represents her thought; it is the measure, if one may so put it, in modern terminology, of her degree of spiritual culture.  Much that we say about S. Mary, her simplicity, her social place, and so on, seems to carry with it the implication of the ignorance and spiritual dullness that we associate with the type of poverty we are accustomed to to-day.  But the poor folk whom we meet in association with our Lord are neither ignorant nor spiritually dull; and it would be a vast mistake to think of Blessed Mary as other than of great intelligence and spiritual receptivity, or as deficient in understanding of the details of her ancestral religion.  We have no reason to be surprised that she should sing Magnificat, or to think that the Holy Spirit was speaking through her thoughts which were quite beyond her comprehension.  Inspired she was, but inspired, no doubt, to utter thoughts that had many times filled her mind.