Something practical the Magi can teach us today
We don't need to cross land and sea in order to do what they did – or adore whom they adored.
We don’t need to cross land and sea in order to do what they did – or adore whom they adored.
Editor’s Notes
How the Magi exemplify perfect correspondence to grace through faith, courage, and simplicity.
That their interior illumination grasped Christ as King, God, and Redeemer in one act of worship.
Why their journey inaugurates the Christian spirit of pilgrimage and devotion.
He shows us that the Epiphany honours God not only by what He gives, but by what His grace accomplishes in faithful souls.
For more context on this episode, see Part I.
The Epiphany
The Thirty Years—Our Lord’s Infancy & Hidden Life
Chapter X
St. Matt. ii. 1—12; Vita Vitæ Nostræ, § 12.
Burns and Oates, London, 1885. (1915 edition).
Headings and some line breaks added.
Graces of the Princes
We may thus consider the Epiphany as a mystery in which very great honour was done to God by the reflection and acknowledgment of so many of His great attributes.
There is another side from which this mystery may be considered, namely, the side of the great and signal virtues and graces which shine out in the holy Princes themselves. If God was wonderful in the external providence by which He called them, invited them, guided them to the feet of our Lord, and protected them against all dangers and deceits, He was also very wonderful in the graces by which His external providence was accompanied.
We are ignorant of their history before they appear as the faithful searchers for Jesus Christ, but from that moment they are perfect patterns of correspondence to Divine grace, having, moreover, a character of their own which reminds us of the noble faith and courage of Abraham, the father of the faithful, who left his home and his father’s house at the bidding of God, not knowing whither he was to go.
The whole of their history is full of these eminent graces. The sight of the star, together with their knowledge of the revealed promises of God concerning the salvation of the human race, might have been shared with them by others under the same circumstances. It requires a devout and very high estimate of the importance of salvation and the dignity of Him by Whose means it was to be imparted to mankind, to prepare them to close with the invitation as they did, indeed to see in it anything addressed to themselves in particular.
They must have had a love for the promised Saviour, a desire and yearning for the salvation which He was to bring with Him, a great courage and detachment from the things of this world, a strong and firm resolution, and much generosity; they must have been buoyed up by a strong and joyous faith, and their demeanour throughout shows how fully they possessed the golden grace of simplicity.
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