Gracie Hemmingway could not learn to dance. It certainly was not for lack of trying. She spent quite a lot of her pocket-money in having lessons, but it all seemed wasted.

“Why your parents ever called you Grace I can’t think,” the lady at the dancing class said to her one day: “for a more clumsy, awkward girl I never came across.”

It was a very stupid thing to say, besides being unkind, because of course the teacher of dancing was mixing up two meanings of the word “grace.” Babies are not christened Grace because they are graceful, but because at the font they are filled with God’s grace. But poor Gracie did not understand this, and was much, upset, and came almost to hate the sound of her name, and wished she had been called anything but that.

One Sunday afternoon at Christmas time she and her brother Arthur took the bus into Coketown to pay a visit to their great friends, the Bulls, but when they arrived at the house there was Ivy Bull all dressed in white with a blue veil just going out to church. There was going to be a procession and devotions at the Crib, she explained, and the children of Mary in their special dress were going to walk together. (“How pretty and ‘graceful’ she looks,” thought Gracie a little sadly: and as for Arthur, he could not take his eyes off her.) Finally it [1/2] was settled that Gracie should go to the service with Ivy, while Jack and Arthur went for a walk, and then they could all come back and have tea together.

Gracie was much interested in the service: she had never seen anything like it before.

“What does it mean,” she asked on the way home, “when the priest says, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace?”

“He’s coming to tea,” said Ivy: “you’d better ask him.”

Gracie thought she would rather bite off her tongue than do any such thing, and wished she had not spoken. After tea, however, at a pause in the conversation, Ivy, with a mischievous look, suddenly said:

“Father, this young lady wants to know what ‘full of grace’ means.”

Gracie blushed the colour of Mrs. Bull’s sofa-cushion, and looked for a moment as though she wanted to scratch someone. But nothing pleased Father Joyce more than giving a little lecture on a theological point. He pushed back his chair and began:

“You could not possibly want to know anything more important. Your question goes down to the very root of the faith. There’s a great deal to be said about it, but I must answer as shortly as I can.

“Grace means God’s favour to us, which is first given to us gratis—that is to say, quite freely, and not in the least because we have deserved it. So when St. Gabriel called our Lady ‘full of grace’ it meant that God had freely chosen her for the greatest work that any [2/3] woman was ever given to do. Of course she was fitted for it, but that was only because God had chosen her from the beginning for this great work, and kept her free from stain of sin. God did not choose her because she was good: but she was good because God had chosen her. And this is always the way. God does not take us into his favour because we deserve it: but he chooses whom he will for special positions in his kingdom, and gives them the opportunity to become fit for those positions. This is like the way in which to-day he chooses some people to be priests, and some to be parents, and some, perhaps to die young, and some to be statesmen, and so on, and gives them the opportunity to do these things well, if only they do not refuse. So you will see that in the English Bible those words of St. Gabriel are differently translated. ‘Hail, thou art highly favoured,’ he says, showing that Mary’s great position was due in the first place to God’s choice, and not to her own merit.

“So we can see that there are different ways in which God enables people to serve him: but always it is God who is first in the field: he chooses us to work for him, he helps us to do the work, and if we only use his help he will see to it that we do not fail in the end. ‘Ye have not chosen me,’ says our Lord, ‘but I have chosen you.’ And St. Paul says: ‘He who hath begun a good work in you will perform it unto the end.’

“So grace means God’s favour and goodwill towards us: and without his favour and goodwill we can do nothing at all to please him. If [3/4] God left us to ourselves we should fail every time: but then, you see, God does not leave us to ourselves. It is he who puts good thoughts and desires into our hearts, and if only we accept them and act on them he gives us the power to persevere in them to the end.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t studied these things, Father Joyce,” broke in Arthur Hemmingway at this point: “but it sounds to me as though you meant that God had favourites.”

“Well, I think in a way God does have favourites. It certainly seems as though some people had the chance of rising higher in spiritual things than others. I don’t really see how we can get away from.the fact: it is all part of the way in which things are unequal in this world: some birds are eagles and some are only sparrows. You must not say that is unfair. It would be unfair if God judged us all alike. But, of course, as you remember, our Lord tells us that those who have known God’s will in this world will be more severely judged in the next than those who have not. And I am not sure that it is not rather a terrible thing to.’ be one of God’s ‘favourites’: it seems to be true of them all, as it was of the most highly-favoured of them all, that ‘a sword shall pierce through their hearts.’ “

“There’s a prayer we have on Sunday evenings, which has something about ‘means of grace,’” put in Ivy: “I never quite understand about that.”

“Ah, there you have got rather a different sense of the word. In the Bible, as I told you, it means God’s choice of certain people to be [4/5] Christians, and of certain Christians to hold special places in his kingdom. That choice has nothing to do with any merit of ours at all: but we have to live up to it, and we can only do that by God’s help. So that is another meaning of grace—the help God gives to us.

“The principal way in which God helps us to serve him is that he actually unites us to Jesus Christ, so that we dwell in him and he in us. This begins at Baptism. When I baptised you, Ivy, it was like planting a seed. It was a living seed of Christ’s own wonderful life which God gave you, ‘free, gratis, and for nothing,’ as the boys say. It was God’s free gift, to make you holy. And Baptism was the means by which it came to you.

“Now as long as this seed is alive, our spiritual life is growing. We can even say that God is pleased with us for the sake of Christ who dwells within us. We are living in what is called a state of grace: we are in favour with God, and he helps us to do our duty. Of course, if we go and destroy the seed of life by neglect or deliberate wickedness, we fall away from Christ, and God cannot then be pleased with us any more. We fall back into the state of sin. But, in order that this may not happen, he has provided a way by which we may feed and nourish that life and help it to grow. That is the Holy Communion, which is a very great means of grace.

“But even if we have actually destroyed our spiritual life, God is always waiting to bring us back into the state of grace if we will only repent: and the means which he uses for this is Absolution.

[6] “So we can say that the means by which we are put into the state of grace are Baptism and Absolution. And the chief means by which we are kept in the state of grace is Holy Communion.

“But look here, Father,” said Jack Bull, “this is what puzzles me. You say we fall away from grace if we are deliberately wicked. Well, if, as you said before, we can’t even want to do right without God’s grace, how can we ever get back to God at all?”

“That’s a good question, Jack. You’ll be a theologian soon. But it’s quite simple, really. Suppose you had upset your father you would be out of his good graces. Perhaps a whole day would pass before he was ready to take you back again. Then when you came in the evening he might look you up and down and say, ‘Well, you rascal, aren’t you properly ashamed of yourself?’ That would be an act of grace on his part. (Of course, I. am taking it for granted you were in the wrong, Jack!)”

“He always is,” growled Mr. Bull.

“Of course. Well, now, just in the same way, if we are trying to please God, and using the Sacraments rightly, we are in a state of grace—in God’s ‘good graces,’ as you might say. But there are many other ways in which God gives us grace or help, and these are what we might call acts of grace on his part. (The proper expression, if you want to know, is ‘Actual grace.’) And God is always offering this to us, whether we are in a state of grace or not.

“So what it comes to is this. If we are in the state of grace, we are receiving help and life and strength from God all the time. But [6/7] whether we are or not, God is always offering us fresh graces. Even if we are living in wickedness, he is offering us the grace of being sorry for it: just as we say in ordinary language that so and so ‘had the grace’ to be ashamed of himself. And if we are living in grace already, there are all manner of fresh actual graces—free gifts of help—which he is ready to give us all the time, if we will only keep on praying and trying to serve him better.”

Gracie Hemmingway was not the only one who had something to think about that Sunday night.