familiar to Israel at the time,38 even tho ugh the Individuation of the Holy Ghost may not
have been fully apprehended. Only, that they expected such influences to rest exclusively
upon those who were either mighty, or rich, or wise.39 And of this twofold manifestation
of miraculous 'favour' - that she, and as a Virgin, should be its subject - Gabriel, 'the
might of God,' gave this unasked sign, in what had happened to her kinswoman Elisabeth.
37. Weiss (Leben Jesu, 1882, vol. i. p. 213) rightly calls attention to the humility of her
self-surrender, when she willingly submitted to what her heart would feel hardest to bear
- that of incurring suspicion of her purity in the sight of all, but especially in that of her
betrothed. The whole account, as we gather from St. Luke ii. 19, 51, must have been
derived from the personal recollections of the Virgin -Mother.
38. So in almost innumerable Rabbinic passages.
39. Nedar. 38 a.
The sign was at the same time a direction. The first, but also the ever-deepening desire in
the heart of Mary, when the Angel left her, must have been to be away from Nazareth,
and for the relief of opening her heart to a woman, in all things like- minded, who perhaps
might speak blessed words to her. And to such an one the Angel himself seemed to have
directed her. It is only what we would have expected, that 'with haste' she should have
resorted to her kinswoman, without loss of time, and before she would speak to her
betrothed of what even in wedded life is the first secret whispered.40
40. This is answer to the objection, so pertinaciously urged, of inconsistency with the
narrative in St. Matt. i. 19 &c. It is clear, that Mary went 'with haste' to her kinswoman,
and that any communication to Joseph could only have taken place after that, and after
the Angelic predictio n was in all its parts confirmed by her visit to Elisabeth. Jeremy
Taylor (u. s. p. 64) has already arranged the narrative as in the text.
It could have been no ordinary welcome that would greet the Virgin-Mother, on entering
the house of her kinswoman. Elisabeth must have learnt from her husband the destiny of
their son, and hence the near Advent of the Messiah. But she could not have known either
when, or of whom He would be born. When, by a sign not quite strange to Jewish
expectancy,41 she recognised in her near kinswoman the Mother of her Lord, her
salutation was that of a mother to a mother - the mother of the 'preparer' to the mother of
Him for Whom he would prepare. To be more precise: the words which, filled with the
Holy Ghost, she spake, were the mother's utterance, to the mother, of the homage which
her unborn babe offered to his Lord; while the answering hymn of Mary was the offering
of that homage unto God. It was the antiphonal morning-psalmody of the Messianic day
as it broke, of which the wo rds were still all of the old dispensation, 42 but their music of
the new; the keynote being that of 'favour,' 'grace,' struck by the Angel in his first
salutation: 'favour' to the Virgin; 43 'favour,' eternal 'favour' to all His humble and poor
ones;44 and 'favour' to Israel, stretching in golden line from the calling of Abraham to the
glorious future that now opened.45 Not one of these fundamental ideas but lay strictly
within the range of the Old Testament; and yet all of them now lay beyond it, bathed in