ture of the Child to be born is
filled with mystery. We can imagine S. Mary in the days to come finding
her child-bearing quite intelligible in comparison with the mystery that
brooded over His nature.

This is the common fact in our dealing with God. We express it when we
say that we never get beyond the need of faith. We pray that one thing
may be made clear, and the result of the clearing is the deepened sense
of the mystery of the things beyond, just as any increase in the power
of the telescope clears up certain questions which had been puzzling the
astronomers only to carry their vision into vaster depths of space,
opening new questions to tantalize the imagination. We find it so
always. The solution of any question of our spiritual lives does not
lead as perhaps we thought it would lead to there being no longer any
questions to perplex us and to draw on our time and our energy; rather
such solution puts us in the presence of new and, it may well be, deeper
and more perplexing questions. "Are there no limits to the demands of
God upon us," we sometimes despairingly ask? And the answer is, "No:
there are no limits because the end of the road that we are travelling
is in infinity." The limit that is set to our perfecting is the
perfection of God, and if we grow through all the years of eternity we
shall still have attained only a relative perfection.

So the successful passing of one test cannot be expected to relieve us
from all tests in the future. It is the dream of the child that manhood
will set it free; and he reaches manhood only to find that it imposes
obligations which are so pressing that he reverses his dream and speaks
of his childhood as the time of his true freedom. The meeting of
spiritual tests is but the proving of spiritual capacity to meet other
tests. To our Lady it might well seem that the acceptance of the
conditions of the Incarnation was the severest test that God could
assign her; that in the light of the promise she could look on to joy.
But the future concealed a sword which should pierce her very heart. The
promise contained no doubt wonderful things--this wonder of God's
blessing that she was now experiencing in the coming of the Holy Ghost,
in the very embrace of God Himself: this is but the first of the Joyful
Mysteries which were God's great gifts to her. But her life was not to
be a succession of Joyful Mysteries, ultimately crowned with the
Mysteries of Glory. There were the Sorrow