As the highest of
all creatures, as highly favoured above all, as she whom God chose to be
the Mother of His Son, the devout thought of generations of Christians
has felt that their recognition of her relation to God in the
Incarnation called for a special degree of honour rightly to express it.
The thought of the faithful lingers about all that was in any degree
associated with the coming of God in the flesh: so great was the
deliverance thereby wrought for man that man's gratitude ever seeks new
means of expression and ever finds the means inadequate to his love.
Many of the expressions that are found in devotional writers associated
with the cultus of the Blessed Virgin Mary are an outcome of this
attitude of mind. To those who are unused to them they seem exaggerated;
in the vast mass of the devotional writings of Catholic Christendom
there is no difficulty in finding expressions which _are_ exaggerated;
but it is well to remember when thinking of this that the exaggeration
is the exaggeration of love. The tendency of love _is_ to exaggerate the
forms of its expression. It is, however, we feel on reflection, an error
to judge by the exaggeration rather than by the love. It is perhaps well
to ask ourselves whether we are saved from exaggeration by greater
sanity or by lesser love.
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