priate organs.
"There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit." Whatever the
operations of God through the Body of Christ, the same divine energy is
making them possible. "All these worketh that one and selfsame Spirit,
dividing to every man severally as he will."

That the Holy Spirit should manifest Himself in her life was, of
course, no new experience for S. Mary. Her conscious vocation to be the
Mother of God had begun when the Holy Ghost had come upon her, and she
had conceived that "Holy Thing" which was called the Son of God. And we
cannot think that the Spirit Who is the Spirit of sanctity had ever been
absent from her from the moment of her wonderful conception when by the
creative act of the Spirit she was conceived without sin, that is, in
union with God. But as there are diversities of gifts, so the coming of
the Spirit on Pentecost would have meant to her some new or increased
gift of God.

For the Church as such this coming of the Spirit meant the entrance of
the work of the Incarnation upon a new phase of its action. We may, I
suppose, think of the work of our Lord during the years of His Ministry
as intensive. It was the work of preparing the men to whom was to be
committed the commission to preach the Kingdom of God. They had been
chosen to be with Him, and their training had been essentially an
experience of Him, an experience which was to be the essence of their
Gospel and which their mission was to interpret to the world. "Who is
this Jesus of Nazareth Whom ye preach? What does He mean?" was to be the
question that they would have to answer in the coming years; and they
would have to answer it to all sorts of men; to Jews who would find this
conception of a suffering and rejected Messiah "a stumbling-block"; to
the Greeks who would find "Jesus and the resurrection" "foolishness"; to
all races of men who would have to be persuaded to leave their
ancestral religions and revolutionise their lives, and before they would
do so would wish to know what was the true meaning of Christ in whose
name their whole past was challenged. As we watch the perplexity, the
bewilderment, of these Apostles in the face of the collapse of all their
hopes on the first Good Friday, as we see them struggling with the fact
of the Resurrection, and attempting to adjust their lives to that; and
then listen to their preaching and follow their action in the days
succeeding Pentecost, we have brought home to us the nature of