'Together with her we shall be indeed blessed': Bishop Bull echoing Augustine, Calvin, and Jewel

A final extract from a sermon by Bishop Bull (d.1710) entitled 'The Blessed Virgin's low and exalted condition', on the text Luke 1:48-49. In this extract Bull echoes Jewel (in debate with Harding) and Calvin in invoking Augustine's teaching on the Lord's words in response to the woman who declared "Blessed is the womb that bare thee". Here, in the closing words of his sermon, Bull again gives voice to a thoroughly Reformed understanding that the Blessed Virgin Mary, while reverenced as the Mother of the Lord, is not set apart from us in the economy of salvation but, rather, shares with us the "chiefest blessedness" of being in Christ:

The blessedness of the holy Virgin is not so altogether proper to her, or incommunicable to others, but that the meanest sincere Christian may share with her in the better part of it. Wonderful and full of comfort are the words of our Saviour, where, when a certain woman, hearing His excellent discourse, cried out, "Blessed is the womb that bare Thee, and the paps which Thou hast sucked," our Saviour answers, "Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it." Which is not a negation of the blessedness of His mother, (for that would be a plain contradiction to my text,) but a correction of the woman's mistake, who so admired the blessedness of the mother of such a son, that she scarce thought of any other blessedness. Our Saviour therefore tells her, "that blessed are they also, yea, and chiefly, that hear the word of God, and keep it" ...

Indeed, the Virgin herself was more blessed by conceiving Christ in her heart by faith, than by conceiving Him in her womb. And in this her chiefest blessedness, the meanest Christian, that is a sincere one, may be a sharer with her. Christ may be thus formed, nay, He must be so, in every one that shall be saved. And if we be true Christians, though all generations do not call us blessed, as the holy Virgin, yet together with her we shall be indeed blessed beyond all generations, even for ever and ever.