herself without sin. Of all those to whom we are privileged to turn in the joys and tragedies of our lives for the sympathy which helps through enlightened, loving prayer, we most naturally resort to her who is all love and all sympathy, Mary, the Mother of Jesus, blessed among women forever. Although we are told nothing of these days that S. Mary spent with her cousin Elizabeth, we do gather that she remained with her until her child was born and that she saw S. John in his mother's arms, and was a partaker in the joy of the aged parents. She was present when Zacharias, his speech restored, uttered the _Benedictus_ in thanksgiving for the birth of his son. It was then, having seen her own Son's Forerunner that S. Mary went back to Nazareth filled more than ever with the sense that God's hand was in the events that were taking place, and of the approach of some crisis in her nation's history. It must have been that she talked intimately with Zacharias and Elizabeth and with them tried to imagine what was the future in which these two children were so closely concerned. When we consider the _Magnificat_ and the _Benedictus_ not as the "Gospel Canticles" to be sung in Church but as the utterances of pious Israelites under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, we feel how very vivid must have been their expectation of God's action in the immediate future, and with what intense love and interest they thought of the parts to be taken by their children in the deliverance God was preparing. How often they must have pondered the God-inspired saying: "He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David; and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end." "And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways; to give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins, through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the Dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace." We think too of a more intimate sympathy that there would have been between these two women, drawn now so close together, not only by the blood bond, but by the bond of a common experience. What wonderful hours of communing during these three months! The peace of the hills of Judah is all about them and the peace of God is in their souls. What ecstatic joy, what ineffable love was theirs in these moments as they thought of the children who were God's precious gift to them. I fancy that there were many hours when they ceased to think of the mystery that hung over these children's destiny, and became just mothers lost in love of the coming sons. As we try to think out their relation to each other it presents itself to us as a relation of sympathy. Sympathy is community of feeling; it is maimed and thwarted when there is feeling only on one side. We speak of our sympathy in their affliction for others whom we do not know and who do not know us, but that is a very imperfect rendering of the perfect