This essay is at once a description and a defense of G. K. Chesterton's vivid poetic portraits of Mary as the Mother of the Church, the God-bearer inviting veneration by Christians of all sorts and conditions. In “The Nativity,” she is the Maiden whose Son's birth gives every child ultimate worth, and whose birth-pangs figure her earthly agony as well as her enduring mercy. In “The Arena,” she is the Lady who presides over a field of playful Christian battle—not as Nero beheld the blood sports of his Domus Aurea, but as the Virgin atop the golden dome of her own university, Notre Dame.
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