go out far beyond her individual
life and sees in her experience but one item in God's dealing with
humanity in His age-long work of "bringing His wanderers home." We
should have far less difficulty and find our lives far more significant
if we could get rid of our wretched egotism and find it possible to lose
ourselves in the work of God. We should then find the work important
because it is God's work and not because we are associated with it. We
should also find it less easy to be discouraged because we should not
understand our failure to be the failure of God. Discouragement is but
one of the aspects of egotism, and not the most attractive.

We cannot rise to anything like a passion of holiness unless we have
found God to be all in all. Only so can we lose ourselves in God. And I
must, at whatever risk of over-dwelling, stress the fact that we can
only attain this point of view by dwelling on God and not on self. Let
God be the foreground of our thought. Let our souls magnify the Lord.
Let us dwell upon the "great things" God has done for us. In every life
there is such a wonderful manifestation of the divine goodness--only we
do not take time to look for it. It is well to take the time: to write
out, if need be, our spiritual history. We shall then find abundant
evidence of the goodness of God. It may be that it is a goodness that is
seen chiefly in offers, in opportunities to be something which we have
declined or have only imperfectly realized. Be that as it may, there is
no life, I am quite convinced, that has not a spiritual history which is
a marvellous history of what God at least wanted to do for it. It is
also a history of what He actually has done: a history of graces, of
rich gifts, of deliverances. It matters not that we have been so
heedless as to miss most of what God has done. The facts stand and are
discoverable whenever we care to pay enough attention to them to
ascertain their true meaning. When we do that, then surely we shall be
compelled to do, what blessed Mary never needed to do, fall at God's
feet in an act of penitence, seeing ourselves, perhaps for the first
time, in the light of God's mind.

The Magnificat, if we consider it as a personal expression, is a
wonderful expression of selfless devotion, where the perception of the
glory and majesty of God excludes all other thoughts. It is, too, a
thanksgiving for the personal gift which is her vocation to be the
Mother of the Saviour. Out of h