y which the Saviour had
already entered once and through which He would come again at the Last
Day--a vague prophecy, allotting a yet larger future role to Mary, which
threw Serge into a dreamy imagining of some immense expansion of divine
love.

This entry of woman into the jealous, cruel heaven depicted by the
Old Testament, this figure of whiteness set at the feet of the awesome
Trinity, appeared to him the very grace itself of religion, the one
consolation for all the dread inspired by things of faith, the one
refuge when he found himself lost amidst the mysteries of dogma. And
when he had thus proved to himself, point by point, that she was the way
to Jesus--easy, short, perfect, and certain--he surrendered himself anew
to her, wholly and without remorse: he strove to be her true devotee,
dead to self and steeped in submission.

It was an hour of divine voluptuousness! The books treating of devotion
to the Virgin burned his hands. They spoke to him in a language of love,
warm, fragrant as incense. Mary no longer seemed a young maiden veiled
in white, standing with crossed arms, a foot or two away from his
pillow. She came surrounded by splendour, even as John saw her, clothed
with the sun, crowned with twelve stars, and having the moon beneath her
feet. She perfumed him with her fragrance, inflamed him with longing for
heaven, ravished him even with the ardent glow of the planets flaming on
her brow. He threw himself before her and called himself her slave. No
word could have been sweeter than that word of slave, which he repeated,
which he relished yet more and more as it trembled on his stammering
tongue, whilst casting himself at her feet--to become her thing, her
mite, the dust lightly scattered by the waving of her azure robe. With
David he exclaimed: 'Mary is made for me,' and with the Evangelist
he added: 'I have taken her for my all.' He called her his 'beloved
mistress,' for words failed him, and he fell into the prattle of child
or lover, his breath breaking with intensity of passion. She was the
Blessed among women, the Queen of Heaven glorified by the nine Choirs
of Angels, the Mother of Predilection, the Treasure of the Lord. All the
vivid imagery of her cult unrolled itself before him comparing to her an
earthly paradise of virgin soil, with beds of flowering virtues, green
meadows of hope, impregnable towers of strength, and smiling dwellings
of confidence. Again she was a fountain sealed by the Hol