our task — that of condensing into a few pages the Life of her who is the Second Eve, the Mother of the True Life, most dear to every one who holds Christ to be the Second Adam, the Messiah, the Restorer and Saviour of our race.
II.
The birth-place of Mary was that same town of Nazareth, in Lower Galilee, where was also the home of Joseph, and where, during the first thirty years of His life, the Word Incarnate was to live in obscurity and toil. S. Justin Martyr, himself a native of Palestine, who defended the faith by his writings and died for it, within fifty years after the death of S. John the Evangelist, says, that Mary was descended in a direct line from King David. Her father's name was Joachim. The Jewish writers give him also the name of Heli; the Arabic traditions of Palestine and the early commentators of the Koran call him Imram or Amram. His wife's name was Anna or Hanna, according to these same authorities. She was of the tribe of Levi.
Of these two venerable personages S. John Damascene writes as one who is only giving utterance to the living, uninterrupted testimony of the populations of Lower Galilee, when he eulogizes their virtues. This universal veneration, as soon as the Christian Religion was allowed to be professed openly, found its expression in the churches erected in the East under the invocation of S. Joachim and S. Anna. The Emperor Justinian, in 550, had one built in Constantinople, which bore the name of S. Anna down to the conquest of the city by the Turks. The reverence thus paid from the beginning of Christianity to the immediate ancestors of our Lord, is founded both on their own recorded holiness of life and on the exquisite jealousy with which the Christian conscience watched over everything nearly related to the great fact of the Incarnation. The early heretics denied its reality; asserted that the body born of the Virgin and nailed to the cross was only a shadowy body, but no substantial human flesh; in a word, that Christ was no true man, and only had the outward appearance of one. Hence the scrupulousness with which every circumstance was examined that bore on the all-important fact of His being in very deed, " bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh," as well as " True God of True God."
The veneration paid to His Mother and her parents was reflected on Christ Himself, while it strengthened in the mind of the believer the faith in the God made Man. Hence the piety, borne witness to by Justinian at Constantinople and by S. John Chrysostom at Antioch, was the same that inspired the youthful Martin Luther, long ages afterward, to vow to S. Ann to embrace a monastic life. It was that which prompted the populations of Brittany to pay such devout homage to Sainte Anne d'Auray, and the first Canadian colonists to build, on the shore of the S. Lawrence, that famous chapel before which, departing and returning, every vessel cast anchor, in order that the crew might go thither to worship Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary, to beseech, on their journey across the deep, the protection of Mary's sainted mother, or to thank her for their delivery from storm and shipwreck. All this was natural to true believers.
It is said that the child Mary was se.n, like Samuel to the pious Anna of the Old Testament, as a reward to ardent prayer after long sterility. The Moslem traditions, echoing those of the Galilean populations, affirm that the mother of the Blessed Virgin, when she first knew that her prayer was heard, knelt in thanksgiving, and said: "O Lord, I vow to consecrate to Thee the child which Thou hast given me: accept graciously my offering, O Thou to whom everything is known." And this same voice of Arab tradition, echoing the constant belief of the early Christians of Palestine, attests also the privilege claimed for Mary oy the Church, and solemnly decreed as an article of faith on December 8, 1854 — that of having been, by a special application of the saving grace of her Son, preserved from the stain of original sin. This is what is called her "Immaculate Conception." It was most fitting that the Second Eve, the humble and self-sacrificing parent of our redeemed humanity, should have been, at the very instant when soul and body were united, as free from every stain of moral evil as the first Eve, when the Almighty hand formed her body from out the substance of sinless Adam, and poured the breath of life into it. Even the Jewish traditions, long before the coming of Christ, affirmed the current belief from the days of the Patriarchs and from the beginning, that the stain of Adam's sin was not to touch the Messiah or His Mother. Mohammed himself bore witness to the universal existence of this belief among the nations descended from Abraham, whether Christian or not.
Anna's blessed child was born on September 8, in the year of Rome 734, that is, twenty years before the Christian era. In the Koran (chapter iii.), it is said that when the babe was born, her mother said: " O God, I have brought into the world a daughter, and have named her Miriam (Mary). I place both her and her posterity under Thy protection; preserve them from the designs of Satan."
The solemn ceremony of naming a new-born babe was performed by the Jews on the eighth day after the birth. Hence it is that the solemnity of the Holy Name of Mary is celebrated by the Church on the Sunday within the Octave of the Nativity, or that following the 8th of September. When the child had attained her third year, her parents, in fulfilment of their vow to consecrate her to God, took her from Nazareth to Jerusalem, and gave her up to the priests to be educated within the vast precincts of the temple, where other children, similarly dedicated by vow to the life of Nazarites, were brought up together.
From the first age of Christianity a house was pointed out to pilgrims and visitors as the house of S. Ann. Over this spot, as over every other made sacred by memories connected with our Lord and His Mother, the faithful kept loving watch throughout the evil days of Moslem domination. And we should not forget that, inasmuch as S. Ann herself was held in great reverence by the followers of the Koran, so when Jerusalem fell into their hands, they hastened to change into a mosque or place of Mohammedan worship, the oratory built on the site by the Christians. So did they manifest their veneration for all other places held most dear by Christians; their special regard for burial-places forbidding them from appropriating to their own religious uses the church raised over the Holy Sepulchre by S. Helena. When the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and established a kingdom in Palestine, their piety led them to build churches and monasteries at all spots in the Holy City and throughout the kingdom hallowed by the memory of our Lord, His Mother, and His ancestors. Thus they erected a monastery with a church on the traditional sit« of the house of S. Ann; when Jerusalem fell afterward into the hands of Saladin, the church and monastery became a mosque, held in very great respect by its new masters.
Even so near the splendid mosque of Omar (El-Aksa), which a this day occupies the site of the temple, is a smaller one, Es-Sakhra ("the Rock"), built on the spot where Mary and the other maidens, bound by Nazarite vows, lived during their seclusion. Thus, we have monumental records recalling the childhood and girlhood of our Lady.
The Crusaders converted the humble chapel which stood on this " Rock," into a splendid church, surmounted by a gilt cupola and a lofty cross. Here, then, was spent the life of the Blessed Virgin
