It has often been observed that a woman's faith is more simple and intense than a man's. Women seldom know the agony of mental doubt. Scepticism is foreign to their nature. And the reason is that woman is more accustomed to submission than man. The habit of obedience is more easily formed, and obedience is the vital fruit of faith. And it is upon such faith as this that the Kingdom of God is built. To accept the voice of God as real, as Mary did, to obey meekly the Divine will, to be faithful to ideal hopes, to believe and love in spite of all the contradictions of fact and circumstance-this is the kind of faith that is most noble in human creatures, and it is the very faith which Christ Himself praises when He says to Thomas, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
Obedience is one of the distinctive glories of womanhood. In the very outset of the Bible, submission is revealed as her peculiar lot and destiny. If you were merely to look at the words as they stand, declaring the results of the Fall, you would be inclined to call that vocation of obedience a curse; but in the spirit of Christ it is transformed, like labour, into a blessing. There is a way of saying, like the Moslem, “Thy will be done” which hardens the heart: to say it as Mary said it is to find oneself suddenly gifted with wings. But no heart can truly say it in Mary's tone, unless it has first learned her secret and given itself entirely to the Divine guidance and the Divine indwelling. People do not give a carte blanche to strangers, but only to those whom they intensely love and implicitly trust. Is there any repose of mind equal to that which comes through perfect love? And is not our want of repose due chiefly to this, that we do not heartily say to God, “Be it unto me according to thy word”? O that we might hand life over to the kind management of our Father, for only then shall we be perfectly free!
Mary's vocation as the Christ-bearer ordains motherhood, whether actual or spiritual, to be the true calling of woman, and shows its great and sacred nature. In her entire acceptance of the work demanded she manifested the initial strength of her character. She beheld from the beginning the greatness of a Divine Purpose being fulfilled, and remained faithful in response as it was gradually developed before her.… Again, in social life, Mary took the part of service, by active kindness, and by bringing others into obedience to Christ. Thus, strong and brave under the inspiration of love, she followed to the foot of the Cross, there by suffering to learn something of the mystery of the Sacrifice which was being offered by her Son, and to offer also her best. There she receives the Divine commission, “Woman, behold thy Son.” All false independence disappears here, and life is ordained to be one of mutual service.… At the Cross Mary's beautiful human love had to receive its final touch of ideality, its transformation by a higher sacrificial Love, Divine, universal, as she realized more and more that he was truly the Son of God and the Saviour, with His Redemptive work to do, not only for her, but for all mankind. And so all special individual love is the training and starting-point for the true self-sacrificing love of service for all men.1 [Note: R. M. Wills, Personality and Womanhood, 131.]
