RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Lord's Suppei Lorimer
born and brought up and received the angelic message, in which she lived after the ascension of her Son. The apostles, then, the legend goes on, made a church of it; St. Luke decorated it with a wooden figure of the Virgin holding the Child in her arms; and it was continuously used for worship until the fall of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Then, to save it from destruction by the unbelievers, angels appeared, caught it up into the air, and deposited it first at Raunitza in northern Dalmatia, between Fiume and Tersato (1291). Its genuineness was accredited by the healing of some sick people who prayed within it and by an apparition of the Virgin to Bishop Alexander of Tersato, who was himself miraculously healed of a long illness. Three years later the angels again picked it up and carried it to the opposite coast of Italy (Dec. 10, 1294) setting it down in a wood belonging to a pious woman named Laureta, from whom the shrine took its name. It was once more removed a mile nearer to Recanati, and reached its final resting-place Sept. 7, 1295. The second half of the fifteenth century saw a marked increase in devotion to the shrine. The earliest papal sanction of the devotion dates from Sixtus IV. (1471), who, as well as Julius II. (1507), uses the expression "as it is piously believed and the report is " in reference to the translation of the house. Sixtus V. (1587) founded a knightly order (Ordo et religio equitum Lauretanorum pontificiorum) for the protection of pilgrims, which as late as the eighteenth century had between two and three hundred members. Innocent XII. (d. 1700) sanctioned a special mass and office in honor of Our Lady of Loreto; and other popes granted special privileges, which, together with the munificent gifts of many Roman Catholic sovereigns, contributed to the spread of the devotion. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, not less than 200,000 pilgrims are said to have come to Loreto each year; but by the end of the eighteenth this number had much diminished, and in 1797 the French troops carried off nearly the whole of the enormous treasures of the shrine. Napoleon, however, made restitution of a part of them in 1800; and since the Roman Catholic revival of the nineteenth century the annual number of pilgrims has again exceeded 100,000. The artistic decoration of the shrine was carried on with great richness under Julius II., Leo. X., Clement VII., and Sixtus V. Numerous other shrines intended as reproductions of this have grown up in different parts of the world and attract many pilgrims. The Litany of Loreto, consisting of a long series of invocations of the Virgin under various titles, dates from the second half of the sixteenth century; the invocation Auxilium Christianorum, ora pro nobis was added in commemoration of the victory of Lepanto in 1571. The litany is now one of the most popular Roman Catholic devotions. (O. Zockler.)
Bibliography: The account by Baptista Mantuanus is contained in his Opera, iv. 216 sqq., Antwerp, 1576. Consult further: B. Bartoli, Le Glorie maestose del santuario di Loretn, Macerata, 1712; Kirwan's Romanism at Home, pp. 99-107, New York, 1852; P. Arrighi, Hist, de la demeure de la S. Vierge a Nazareth dans la basilique de Lorete, Paris, 1889; W. Garratt, Loreto, the New Nazareth, London, 1890; The Loretto Manual, Dublin, 1891; W. F. H Garratt, Loreto, the New Nazareth and its Jubilee, London, 1895;
Lichtenberger, ESR, viii. 371-372; KL, viii. 145-152. A long list of the polemical writings of Protestants and of the apologetics of Roman Catholics is given in Hauck- Herzog, RE, xi. 647.
LORETO SISTERS. See English Ladies; and Women, Congregations of.
LORIMER, GEORGE CLAUDE: American Baptist; b. in Edinburgh, Scotland, June 4, 1838; d. at Aix-les-Bains (40 m. s.s.w. of Geneva), France, Sept. 8, 1904. He came to the United States in 1856 and studied at Georgetown College, Ky. He was pastor at Harrodsburg, Ky. (1859); Paducah (1860-68); Albany, N. Y. (1868-70); Boston (1870-79); Chicago (1879-90); Boston (1891- 1902); and New York (1902-04). He was the author of: Under the Evergreens (Boston, n. d.); Great Conflict: Discourse concerning Baptists and Religious Belief (1877); Isms old and new (Chicago, 1881); Jesus, the World's Saviour (1883); Studies in Social Life (1886); Baptists in History (Boston, 1893); Argument for Christianity (Philadelphia, 1894) ; Messages of Today to the Men of Tomorrow (1896); Christianity and the Social State (1898); Christianity in the 19th Century (1900); Master of Millions (New York, 1903) ; and The Modern Crisis in Religion (1904); and edited the People's Bible History (2 vols., Chicago, 1896).
LORIMER, PETER: English Presbyterian; b. in Edinburgh June 27, 1812; d. at Whitehaven (36 m. s.w. of Carlisle), Cumberland, July 29, 1879. He was the son of a master builder who occupied a good position in his native city. He received the elements of his education at George Heriot's Hospital, Edinburgh, and proceeded from the hospital to Edinburgh University. Here he passed through the classes of the arts curriculum with much credit, and also took his theological course, the professor of divinity at the time being Dr. Thomas Chalmers, to whom, as a teacher, Dr. Lorimer always acknowledged the highest obligations. In 1836 he was ordained as minister of the Presbyterian Church, River Terrace, London, connected with the Church of Scotland. In 1843, with his congregation, he cast in his lot with the Free Church. In 1845 he was appointed professor of Hebrew and Biblical criticism in the theological college of the English Presbyterian Church, then newly established in London, and in 1878 he was made principal. His most important writings are: a life of Patrick Hamilton (Edinburgh, 1857), the first of a projected series of works on the precursors of Knox; The Scottish Reformation (London, 1860); Jehn Knox and the Church of England (1875), founded on the Knox papers preserved among the Morrice manuscripts; two lectures on The Evidential Value of the Early Epistles of St. Paul (1874); The Evidence to Christianity Arising from its Adaptation to All the Deeper Wants of the Human Heart (1875); and a translation with notes of vol. i (containing Wyclif's personal history) of G. V. Lechler's Johann von Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der Reformation (John Wiclif and his English Predecessors, 2 vols., London, 1878; new eds. 1881, 1884).
W Lee|, revised by Henry Cowan.
Bibliography: DNB, xxxiv. 138.
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