coveted. This at least is less unnatural than the other hypothesis, which makes him act disrespectfully after years of respectfulness. Or again, if calls into the Church or into religious orders were to be part of the rule of his religion, as they undoubtedly are, Mary might with her Son have premeditated this method of bringing before his disciples that law, in as forcible a manner as possible. So that if such a dramatic way of bringing this before us is contrary to protestant views, it is not contrary to Catholic dogmas, which teach, that when calls of this kind are concerned, parents are to be made nothing of'.

17. Two reflections more shall be added here in the same order as before. The one is this; that supposing it true that our Lady was intended to have that prodigious influence which Catholics ascribe to her, you will then see why Christ lingered so long at Nazareth, thirsting as he was for our salvation, and able as he was to teach the most learned. That permanent and deep-seated habit of influencing him was not to be learnt in a day: he stayed with her till it was thoroughly and fully developed, firmly and unchangeably fixed in her, so that there was no no possibility of effacing it. Nobody who believes Mary to be merely a good woman, can object to her requiring time to learn a habit the immensity of her power will prevent even Catholics from objecting to her requiring time to learn authority over the human nature of the Word itself, not ashamed of obeying such a law. Nobody who believes her a good woman will believe, that sixteen or eighteen years after Christ's death could

Ambr. in Luc. vi. §. 36. Præscripturus cæteris quoniam qui non reliquerit patrem et

matrem suam non est Filio Dei dignus, sententiæ huic primus ipse se subjicit.

have effaced from her memory a habit relative to such a Person: Catholics, who believe the real presence of that Person in the Mass, will see how day by day she exercised some phase of that habit, and kept it alive. The other reflection is this, that if Mary's habits of authority or influence lasted after death, much more would they through the life of her Son. Consequently, whenever devotional writers assert that she exercised that power at the Crucifixion, such assertion gains strength from knowing that she had such a habit. We may take it for granted, that he who has put himself under an authority, will consult that authority upon all important occasions.

CHAP. VI.

THE AGONY OF OUR BLESSED SAVIOUR IN THE GARDEN.

It is the doctrine of Catholic divines, that Almighty God alone is able to penetrate the substance of other beings, and thus to influence them by an access to their whole souls infinitely more intimate than that, which any created nature is capable of enjoying. But he does not avail himself of this sovereign power to compel by a tyrannical force those wills which he has created free, but to persuade them with what by a common figure may be called the irresistible eloquence of his Holy Spirit: he does not despotically destroy the freedom of a soul to make it do his will, but majestically wins it over to himself, as it were overpowering it with the sweet-smelling fragrance of that eternal substance which he applies to it according to his divine discretion. Controversies there are without end upon grace and free-will, but it is certain that no Catholic can deny the existence of free-will, or so state the doctrine of grace as to reduce freewill to a non-entity. This being so, it is plain, that if a person either put himself under obedience to a superior in whose holiness he had perfect confidence, or did so from confidence in the principle of obedience itself, he does not thereby cease to obey a man, and obey God who rules that man. The superior himself has a will, which, though ruled by God, is yet his own will, and the subject is subject to that will. It is true to say, that the subject obeys the will of that

superior. Nevertheless, it might be possible that we should have to judge, whether a person did wisely in making himself the subject of such and such a superior: we might have to consider, not whether or no he had carried out the will of the superior, but whether the original act by which he put himself under that will was a wise one. In judging whether he had obeyed or no, we should consider his former habits of obedience, and what the superior's will either decidedly was, or probably was: and then we should decide upon the likelihood of his having obeyed, and speak of the superior's will, and not of his holiness, of what he had ordered, and not of what God had done for him. In judging of the wisdom of choosing such a superior, it would be proper to consider God's part of the matter rather, how far his soul was in a habitual state of grace, how far it was subdued to harmony with God's will. The character which the subject also had displayed for tact and discretion beforehand, might materially influence our judgment upon the goodness of his choice.

2. Now it is a very common thing for Catholic preachers to represent our Lord as going to ask Mary's leave to be crucified, and this often shocks a neophyte, as if it were absurd to make the salvation of mankind depend upon the will of a woman. This is not indeed a doctrine of the Church, but a sufficiently common opinion to claim some notice here. It is just conceivable, that a good Catholic should not hold this pious opinion when propounded to him and certain, that no one would be excluded from the Church, because he was not prepared to receive it, before his admittance to her lights and graces. Still it is an opinion so naturally resulting

from the whole tenor of this book, and so inevitable a consequence from the theory of habits here applied even to Jesus and Mary, that it would be in every way undesirable to avoid the discussion of it. It is absurd for us who have supposed the influence of these habits to last on in some shape even into a future state, to deny their agency here.

3. The discretion of our Lord in choosing the superior he did choose, scarcely any one but an infidel will question. Neither does it seem that any one could reasonably be condemned for putting himself under an authority pronounced by an Angel to be full of grace, or highly favoured, if you please. Nor would it be surprising that Christ knew of what had happened before his birth, even if we forgot his divinity, seeing he knew what Satan's thoughts were, and might therefore be presumed to know the contents of an Angel's memory: seeing also he knew what future things the Angels did not know, and therefore would not be ignorant of the past. If then we supposed that one of the first acts of his human will upon its creation was to choose Mary for his superior, it would not be indiscreet in him to do so. Honour thy Father and thy Mother is the first commandment with promise, and he who had come in the flesh to obtain what as God he had promised, could not discreetly omit the means of obtaining that promise. His privations at Nazareth were the school of suffering in which he learnt obedience. When he entered into his rest and the true land of promise, he carried with him not only his compassion for us, but the fruits of that protracted obedience to his Mother. If we were even to deny the wisdom of his choice of her for a superior, still if it were made a question whether in the particular instance