Before Time Was

THE  VIRGIN  MOTHER

ACCORDING TO THEOLOGY

REV. JOHN BAPTIST PETITALOT
― 1889 ―

       Let us go back in thought before time was. Nothing exists but God; outside His eternal Being all is silent; it is the silence of nothingness. God has not yet moved from His unalterable repose. He has not yet launched the stars into space. He has not established the earth on its foundations. He has not yet pronounced that all powerful fiat which will bring order out of chaos, dispel the darkness, divide the waters, cover the land with herbs and plants, and fix in the firmament those shining lights which are to preside over day and night. He has not produced any living soul, neither the fishes that swim in the sea, nor the birds that fly in the air, nor the reptiles and animals that dwell on the land; nor that being who is to command the fishes in the sea, the birds of heaven, the reptiles and the animals on the land, man―the king of creation; man who is to bear on his brow and yet more in his soul the image and likeness of his Creator.

     Nothing exists but God, for God has not yet created the world. But the decree of creation is eternal like its Creator, and creation in its fulness already exists in the mind of God. And foremost in this eternal thought Christ, inseparable from His Mother, presents Himself: Christ, the First-born of every creature; Mary Mother of Christ, the first-born of women. For the Church puts into her mouth those beautiful words of the Proverbs, ch. viii.: The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His ways. . . . The depths were not as yet and I was already conceived. . . . Before the hills I was brought forth. 

THE VIRGIN MOTHER

ACCORDING TO THEOLOGY

REV. JOHN BAPTIST PETITALOT, 1889