Those who live in intimate union with God, the peace of whose lives is untroubled by the constant irruption of sin, are peculiarly sensitive to that mode of the divine action that we call supernatural.  I suppose that it is not that God wishes to reveal Himself to souls only at crises of their experience or under exceptional conditions, but that only souls of an exceptional spiritual sensitivity are capable of this sort of approach.  Communications of the divine will through dream or vision of inner voice are the accompaniment of sanctity; one may almost say that they are the normal means in the case of advanced sanctity.  Most of us are too much immersed in the world, are too much the slaves of material things, to be open to this still, small voice of revelation.  Our eyes are dimned by the garish light of the world, and our ears dulled by its clamour, so that our powers of spiritual perception are of the slightest.  This is quite intelligible; and we ought not to fall into the mistake of assuming that our undeveloped spirituality is normal, and that what does not happen to us is inconceivable as having happened at all.  If we want to know the truth about spiritual phenomena we shall put ourselves to school to those whose spiritual natures have attained the highest development and in whose experience spiritual phenomena are of almost daily happening.

To the man “whose talk is of oxen,” whose whole life is absorbed in the study of material things, a purely spiritual manifestation comes as a surprise.  His instinctive impulse is to deny its reality as a thing obviously impertinent to his understanding of life.  But one whose life is based on spiritual postulates, who is, however feebly, attempting to shape life in accordance with spiritual principles, though he may never have attained anything that can be interpreted as a distinct revelation from God by vision or voice or otherwise, yet must he by the very basic assumptions of his life be ready to regard such manifestations of God as intelligible, and indeed to be expected.  So far from regarding divine interventions in life as impossible, we shall regard the Christian life which has no experience of them as abnormal, as not having realised its inheritance.  The degree and kind of such intervention in life will vary; but it is the fact of the intervention that is important:  the mode in a special case will be determined by the needs of that case.  As we think along these lines we reach the conclusion that what we call the supernatural is not the unnatural or the abnormal, but is a higher mode of the natural.

We are not surprised therefore to find that those whose spiritual development was such as to make it possible for God to choose them to fulfil special offices in relation to the Incarnation; who could be chosen to be, in the one case, the Mother of God-incarnate, and in the other, to be the guardian of the divine Child and His Blessed Mother, have the divine will in regard to the details of the trust committed to