Page 99 - 聖母軍團員手冊（英文版，2014年5月-2022年1月更新版）

Legion HANDBOOK D10944_1 26/02/2014 15:53 Page 98

98 ADDITIONAL GRADES OF MEMBERSHIP CHAPTER 16
(b) Who can refuse to Mary this sort of gift? For she who is
the Queen of the Legion is, as well, Queen of the Universe
and of all its departments and concerns, so that to give to her
is to give where the need is greatest, where one’s prayers will
accomplish most.
(c) In administering the store thus placed in her hands,
Mary Immaculate will have regard to the requirements of
one’s ordinary life and duties and to all existing obligations.
The question may arise: “I would wish to join, but I have
already given everything to Mary with complete abandon, or
to the Holy Souls, or to the Missions. Everything is gone.
There is nothing left over for the Legion, so of what use am I
to its auxiliary ranks?” The Legion answers: It is of great
benefit for the Legion to gain so unselfish a person. Your
anxiety to help the Legion is in itself an additional prayer, a
proof of special purity of intention, an irresistible call upon
the limitless generosity of the guardian of the Divine treasury.
Certain it is, that if you join, she will respond, and that the
new intention will gain while the old intentions will not lose.
For it is the art of this most wonderful Queen and Mother
that, though she has availed of our offer and helped others
liberally from our spiritual treasures, yet we ourselves have
grown strangely richer. Her intervention has meant the doing
of an extra work. A marvellous multiplication has taken place:
what St. Louis-Marie de Montfort calls a secret of grace and
thus describes: “Inasmuch as our good works pass through the
hands of Mary, they receive an augmentation of purity and
consequently of merit and of satisfactory and impetratory
value. On this account they become more capable of solacing
the souls in Purgatory and of converting sinners than if they
did not pass by the virginal and liberal hands of Mary.”
Every life has need of the potency of this admirable
transaction, where what we have is taken, placed at usury,
accomplishes its work, and then returns with increment. This
force can be found in the gift to Mary of a faithful auxiliary
membership.
(d) Possibly because of the number of souls in stress with
which it is in touch, Mary seems to have given to her Legion
some little of her own irresistible appeal to the heart.
Legionaries will not find it difficult to enlist their friends in