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Legion HANDBOOK D10944_1 26/02/2014 15:53 Page 18

18 THE DEVOTIONAL OUTLOOK OF THE LEGION CHAPTER 5
render them fruitful and persevering. We swing between the
opposite extremes of apathy and feverish anxiety because we
regard him as detached from our work. Instead, let us realise
that we only have the good purpose because he has
implanted it, and that we shall only bring it to fruition if he
sustains us all the time. The success of the enterprise in hand
is more by far to him than it is to us. Infinitely more than we,
does he desire that conversion we are seeking. We wish to be
saints. He yearns for it a million times more than we.
The legionaries’ essential mainstay must be this knowledge
of the companionship of God, their good Father, in their two-
fold work of sanctifying themselves and serving their
neighbour. Nothing can stand in the way of success except
want of trust. If there be but faith enough, God will utilise us
to conquer the world for him.
“For whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the
victory that conquers the world, our faith.” (1 Jn 5:4)
“To believe means ‘to abandon oneself’ to the truth of the word of
the living God, knowing and humbly recognising ‘how unsearchable
are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways’ (Rom 11:33). Mary,
who by the eternal will of the Most High stands, one may say, at the
very centre of those ‘inscrutable ways’ and ‘unsearchable judgments’
of God, conforms herself to them in the dim light of faith, accepting
fully and with a ready heart everything that is decreed in the divine
plan” (RMat 14).

1. GOD AND MARY
Under God, the Legion is built upon devotion to Mary,
“that ineffable miracle of the Most High.” (Bl. Pius IX) But
what is the place of Mary herself in relation to God? It is that
he brought her, as he did all the other children of earth, out
of nothing; and though he has since then exalted her to a
point of grace immense and incon ceivable, nevertheless, in
com parison to her Maker, she still remains as nothing.
Indeed, she is — far more than any other — his creature,
because he has wrought more in her than in any other of his
creatures. The greater the things he does to her, the more she
becomes the work of his hands.
Very great things he has done to her. From all eternity, the
idea of her was present to his mind along with that of the