And we may be sure that the months that followed the Annunciation would have been months of ever-deepening spiritual communion, resulting in a rapidly advancing spiritual maturity.  One necessary result would have been to prepare the blessed Mother to receive new manifestations of God’s Providence, and to fit them into the whole body of her experience.  She would not at any time be lost in helpless surprise before a new development of the purpose of God.  Surprised as she must have been when the Eastern Sages came to kneel before the Child she carried at her breast, and hail Him as born King of the Jews, she would have set to work to fit this new experience into what her acquired knowledge of the divine meaning had become.  And one can have no doubt that these visitors from afar would have told her enough of the grounds of their action to illumine for her the prophecies concerning her Son.

The special incidents that the Gospel select for record leave us always conscious that they are a selection and therefore must have special significance.  That we are told that the Magi offered certain gifts, rather than told the words of homage wherewith they presented them turns our attention to the nature of the gifts as presumably having a significance in themselves rather than because of any actual value.  In the gifts of these Gentiles come from afar to kneel before Him Whom they recognise as King of the Jews, we are compelled to see a certain attitude of humanity toward Him Who is revealed to be not only the King of the Jews, but Lord of Heaven and earth; they give what humanity needs must always give—­the gold of a perfect oblation, the incense of perpetual intercession, the myrrh of a humble self-abandonment.

These which are offered as the ideal tribute of humanity by the star-led Magi are found in their highest human perfection exemplified in the Mother of the Child to Whom the tribute is made.  Perfect are they in our Lord; and she who is nearest Him in nature is nearest Him in the perfection of nature.  We turn from God’s ideal as set out in our blessed Lord to see it reflected as in a glass in the life of her whose perfection is the perfect rendering of His grace.  Mary is so perfect because, by God’s election, she is “full of grace.”

We, alas! limp after the ideal at a long distance.  One pictures the life of sanctity under the familiar symbol of the race course, where many start in the race, and many, one by one, fall out by the wayside.  Those who go on the race’s end, go on because of certain qualities of endurance that we discover in them.  In those who run the spiritual race for the amaranthine crown these qualities of endurance are not natural, but supernatural:  they come not of birth but of rebirth.  They are qualities which we draw from God.  “It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy.”  The hand that sets the race confers the gifts that enable one to win it.  “So run that ye may obtain.”