It must not be supposed, however, that there was no protest against the constantly advancing tide of Mariolatry. Beside the Nestorians an the Eastern Iconoclasts, who were to a certain
| extent supported by the Frankish Church under
Charlemagne, there were various sects, Paulicians,} Cathari, and later the Waldenses and Moravians, which condemned the Invocation of Saints; and at least two eminent Churehmen in the 9th cent wrote against it, viz. Agobard, archbishop ot Lyons, and Claudius, bishop of Turin.§ Wyelif gradually came to the same conclusion, and some of his followers, e.g. Lord Cobham, were condemned to death for contradicting the teaching of the Church as to the worship of saints. The desire for reform in the prackice and teaching of the Church was strongly reinforced by the reaction from the medieval system, which came in with the Renaissance: and by the end of the 15th cent. there were many signs that the old ideas as to the Virgin were becoming untenable. This may be seen from the reference made to her in Dean Colet’s Preceptes of Livinge, ‘ Byleve and trust in ee Jesu. Worship hym ard his moder Mary,’ especia’ ly when viewed in the light of his favourite principle, ‘Keep to the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed, and let divines dispute about the rest’; as well as from the charge brought against him (1512), that he denied the worship of images.|| The opinion οὗ Erasmus is known from the Encomium Murie and Peregrinatio, in which he ridicules pilgrimages to the shrine of St. Mary of Walsingham, the prayers offered to her, and generally the specula- tions of the schoolmen as to her virginity and sinlessness. Even Sir Thomas More condemns image-worship in his Utopia, and in a letter to Erasmus expresses his disgust at the Mariolatry which he witnessed at Coventry, where a Francis- can was preaching that ‘whoever made daily use of the Psalter of the Blessed Virgin could never be damned,’ while the parish priest, seeing that men became emboldened to crime through trust in their devotions to the Virgin, made a vain protest, which only drew on him the charge of impiety. In another letter to a monk in defence of Erasmus, More mentions that he had himself known of a band of assassins, who used to kneel before the Virgin, and then proceed ‘piously to perpetrate their crime.’ He adds that he does not say this ‘to condemn those who occasionally salute the Holy Virgin, than which nothing is more _ beneficial.’ While all the Reformed Churches condemned the doctrine of Rome on this point, the Lutherans were less prominent in opposing it than the Swiss and the French, who often drew upon themselves
ersecution by their violence in destroying images. area the first Protestant martyr in France, was charged with asserting that it was eons, to invoke the Virgin Mary in place of the Holy Spirit, and to call her the source of all grace, or assign to her such titles as ‘Our hope’ and ‘ Our life,” which belong only to Christ. The doctrine
A omen tad fir Desiree a) in Hagenbach’s Hist. of Doctrines, vol. ii. p. 317, Eng. tr.
t See Conybeare’s Key of Truth, 1898.
§ Neander, Eng. tr. vi. 210. al See Lupton’s Injluence of Dean Colet on the Reformation 95.
MARY
of the Church of England is given in the 15th Art., Of Christ alone without sin, and in the 22nd, where it is said, ‘The Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of ἘΠ and also In- vocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the word of God.’ Both articles are unaltered from the form in which they were originally put forth in 1553, except that the hrase ‘Romish doctrine’ was substituted in 1562 or ‘doctrine of the school-authors’ in the earlier form.
Even the Council of Trent (1545-1563) gives evidence of this change of feeling in the guarded language used in Sess. xxv.: De tnvocatione, veneratione, et reliquiis Sanctorum et sacris imagini- bus, where it is enjoined that ‘the people be taught that the Saints reigning with Christ offer their prayers for men to God, and that it is good and useful to invoke them as suppliants, and to have recourse to their prayers for the sake of obtaining benefit from God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is our only Redeemer and Saviour.’ This is followed by a warning against superstition in such worship, and the caution that no innovation should be made except with the approbation of the bishop. The Roman Catechism speaks more particularly of the Virgin: ‘Rightly are we taught to pray to the most blessed Mother of God, ut nobis peccatoribus sua intercessione conciliaret Deum, bonaque tum ad hanc tum ad eternam vitam necessaria impetraret.’
The check on superstition was, however, only femparary. Mainly owing to the efforts of the Jesuits, Mariolatry is probably now more pre- valent in the Church of Rome than at any former time, if we may judge from the Decree of 8th Dec. 1854, the enormous crowds of pilgrims who flock to Lourdes, and the popularity of such books as the Glories of Mary, brought out in 1784 by St. Alphonsus de Liguori, of which the English trans- lation is ‘heartily commended to the taithful’ by the late Cardinals Wiseman and Manning. Even Cardinal Newman does not shrink from using the aed ‘deification’ in reference to the Romish