[Meditationes seu Contemplationes devotissimae]

...is so insensitive to these evils, or so alien from every feeling of piety, that he is not moved to weeping and tears over this mournful fall of the human race? "Who will give water to my head," cries Jeremiah, sanctified in the womb, "and a fountain of tears to my eyes, that I may weep day and night for the slain of my people?"

O day to be marveled at, full of all piety! Behold, for the reconciliation of man and for the peace to be restored between the most omnipotent, offended God and the miserable height of the guilty human, He established that the marriage of the supreme counsel should be contracted between the Son of God and the human creatures by a wondrous dispensation. Hence, "The kingdom of heaven is likened to a king who made a marriage for his son," which the celestial Father, the King, then made for His Son for the sake of the entire creation when He arranged for Him to be born in the womb of a human virgin. Gregory says: "And since consent makes a marriage," the messenger of mercies—namely, the celestial angel Gabriel—is sent from the Father of Lights to the Virgin named Mary, who, adorned with the gems of virtues and sublimated by gifts, was admirable to all, and who was so pious and so salutary to the disposition of this total, human person's birth, besides the consent. O admirable legation, which in every part is most worthy of veneration, which seemed neither to have a predecessor nor to have a successor! For what greater, what more sublime, and finally, what more salutary could be offered to the human race from heaven? Clearly, nothing. For nature did not have it, custom did not know it, human reason and mind does not grasp it. Heaven trembles, the earth is amazed, every creature, even the celestial, marvels. All this is announced to Mary through Gabriel and is fulfilled through Christ. For with the angel announcing and the Holy Spirit coming, immediately the Word is in the womb, immediately the Word is within the womb and becomes flesh, and while remaining in the immutable essence which is both with Christ and with the Holy Spirit—coeternal—He assumed [human nature] within virginal viscera, so that the impassible might suffer, and the immortal might die, and the eternal before the ages might be able to be temporal at the end of the ages. Through an ineffable sacrament, by a holy conception and by an inviolable birth, according to the truth of each nature, the same virgin would be both the handmaid of God and the Mother. Whoever you are, therefore, who glories piously and happily in the name of Christian, weigh the grace of this reconciliation with a just judgment. For you, once cast away; for you, excluded from the seats of paradise; for you, dying through long exiles; for you, dissolved into dust and ashes—while there was now no hope of living—through the incarnation of the Word, the power was given that you might return from afar to your Creator, recognize your Parent, be made free from a slave, be promoted from a stranger into a son, so that you who were born from corruptible flesh might be born from the Holy Spirit of God and might obtain through grace that which you do not have by nature.