* Eirenicon, 168-172.
t See articles Mary and Rosary in Dict. of Christian Antiquities.
t The festivals thus denoted are marked with red letters in the Church of England calendar.
§ The festivals thus denoted, as well as that of St. Anne, the mother of the Me ΕΝ (July 26), are marked as black-letter feasts in the Church of England calendar.
292 MARY
cerned, and this rule was extended to the laity in 1229. The month of May is also dedicated to her honour
1). Development in opinion is illustrated by de- velopment in art. During the first five centuries there is nothing to show that the Virgin was in any way raised above other saints. She appears simply in scenes taken from Seripture, e.g. the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Mother and Child (of frequent occurrence after the Nestorian controversy), or possibly as a single figure in the attitude of prayer. In an Adoration dated A.D. 435, Christ is seated alone on a throne with angels above Him, while His mother occupies a subordinate position on one side near two of the Magi. The nimbus is given to Christ, the angels, and king Herod, not to Mary.* It is not till the 6th cent. that we find evidence of pre-eminent dignity ascribed to her in the painting of an Ascension, contained in a Syriac MS dated 586, where she stands in the centre of the apostles beneath the ascending figure of Christ. In this pistare she, as well as our Lord and the angels,
as the nimbus, but the apostles are without it. With one remarkable exception, it is not till the 9th cent. that we find her enthroned as Queen of Heaven in the centre of the apset—a position formerly reserved for Christ. The exception referred to is ‘the mosaic of the apse of the cathedral of Parenzo in Istria, the work of Bisho Euphrasius, A.D. 535-543. She is throned an nimbed and supported by angels, holding her Son in her lap.’¢ The climax is reached in the 12th cent., when we find the Virgin enthroned with Christ, as His equal, in a mosaic of the Church of St. Maria in Trastevere.
Mrs. Jameson, in her Legends of the Madonna, distinguishes between representations of real or supposed historical scenes, and purely ideal or devotional paintings. Among the latter may be noted those which exhibit the Virgin as Virgo Sapientie, Sponsa Dei, the Pieta atannae with dead Christ), Mater Dolorosa, Regina Celi, Mater Misericordiaz, in which character she is sometimes represented as endeavouring to shield mankind from the wrath of her Son.
The most famous of the ancient portraits of the Virgin was that attributed to St. Luke, which was sent to Pulcheria from Jerusalem in 438. This was subsequently regarded as a kind of palladium, and accompanied the emperor to the battlefield, till the capture of Constantinople in 1453.
From what has been said, it appears that no kind be ueeeleaaam for the worship of Mary is to
be found in the Bible, or in the theory or practice of the Early Church. Indeed the silences no less than the utterances of Scripture might seem provi- dentially ordered so as to forbid any such develop- ment in after-ages. It may be argued, however, that there is an @ posteriori justification in history. The idolatry of the Canaanites, against which the Mosaic law was primarily directed, was the deification of cruelty and vice, a true worship of devils. The idolatry of Greece at its best was the deification of beauty and intellect,sometimes favour- able to virtue, as we may see in Herodotus, but more frequently to vice, if we may trust the witness of Plato. The worship of the Virgin is the deifica- tion of beauty and goodness. Regarding this from the historical point of view, who can Δ ΠῚ the immense gain to humanity of the substitution of such worship for any pre-existing idolatry? Con- trasting it even with some other forms of Christi- anity, say with the more rigid Calvinistic school, we * See Marriott, Testimony of the Catacombs, p. 40.
ἡ This is seen in two churches built a Pope Paschal 1. 1 Dict. of Christian Antiquities, vol. ii. p. 1154.
MARY
can see reasons why the continued existence and pre. valence of Mariolatry should have been permitted ‘for the hardness of men’s hearts’ by Divine Provi- dence. Tenderness, gentleness,reverence, sympathy; enthusiastic devotion to high objects; a deepened sense of the gracious dignity of motherhood ; joy in all beauty, whether of art or nature, as the outward manifestation of the Supreme Beauty ; a kindly natural piety breathing trust and hope; some faint reflexion of the modest meekness, the resigned submission, the pure unruffled calm of the maiden of Nazareth,—such we might anticipate would be some of the effects of the contemplation of so noble an ideal. And such, no doubt, have been its effects in thousands of simple believers to whom Mary has been the authorized representa- tion of the Divine goodness. But even sa, there are certain qualities of mind and character, such as veracity, justice, fairness, honesty, an open eye, robust common-sense, large-minded considerate- ness, which are liable to fall into the background, when the feminine ideal, often coloured by medi- wval modes of thought, bulks so large in the fore- ground. And if the only acceptable worship is that in spirit and in truth, must we not expect that a worship, founded in mere human invention and the capricious movements of an unchastened iety, would give proof of its unsoundness by its Fruits? We shall not therefore be surprised to find that, where the sovereignty of Mary has tended to eclipse the sovereignty of God, the idea of goodness has been exchanged for that of mere weak indulgence, while the thought of the All-Holy and All-Just has been first shrunk from and then forgotten. If Christ has entrusted to His mother the whole treasury of grace, what need is there to look beyond her? The repetition of a few prayers, the offering of a few candles, even the presence of a picture of the Virgin, acts asa sort of charm to win her favour, even for the vicious and criminal.* The sense of personal re- sponsibility, of the inexorable claims of duty, of the heinousness of sin, has been perilously weak- ened by the fatal error which led to the separation of the spheres of merey and justice, assigning the former to the Madonna, the latter to ‘her Son. The God of love, the meek and lowly Saviour, are robbed of their highest prerogatives, while the Virgin and the Saints, whose perfection on earth consisted in conforming their wills to the Divine will, are too often represented in popular Catholi- cism as seeking to resist and control that will. That the above view of the dangers of Mariolat is no mere delusion of the Protestant mind, but is shared more or less by many Anglicans who claim to adopt the Catholic position, as well as by some of highest authority among Roman Catholics them- selves, is shown by Pusey’s Hirenicon and Letter to Newman, and by Newman’s reply to the former, in which he says (p. 108), ‘ Now at length coming to the statements . . . which offend you in works written in her (Mary’s) honour, I will frankly say that I read some of them with grief and almost anger... . And if J hate those perverse sayings so much, how much more must she in proportion to her love of him?’ Again he says (p. 119), ‘ They (these statements) seem to me like Agel dream. [ could not have conceived them to be said. I know not to what authority to go for them, to Scripture, or to the Fathers, or to the decrees of Councils, or to the consent of schools, or to the tradition of the faithful, or to the Holy See, or to reason.’ And he refers to Gerson, and Petavius, and others, who condemn the ‘prurience of innovation,’ and the frivolous and sophistical reasonings ‘in which so many indulge in order to assign any sort of grace they please, however unusual, to the Blessed Vir- * Many instances will be found in Liguori’s Glories of Mary.