consideration is due to facts which we must necessarily accept, whether we deal with antiquarian theology or artistic criticism; namely, that the worship of the Madonna did prevail through all the Christian and civilized world for nearly a thousand years; that, in spite of errors, exaggerations, abuses, this worship did comprehend certain great elemental truths interwoven with our human nature, and to be evolved perhaps with our future destinies. Therefore did it work itself into the life and soul of man; therefore has it been worked out in the manifestations of his genius; and therefore the multiform imagery in which it has been clothed, from the rudest imitations of life, to the most exquisite creations of mind, may be resolved, as a whole, into one subject, and become one great monument in the history of progressive thought and faith, as well as in the history of progressive art.

Of the pictures in our galleries, public or private,—of the architectural adornments of those majestic edifices which sprung up in the middle ages (where they have not been despoiled or desecrated by a zeal as fervent as that which reared them), the largest and most beautiful portion have reference to the Madonna,—her character, her person, her history. It was a theme which never tired her votaries,—whether, as in the hands of great and sincere artists, it became one of the noblest and loveliest, or, as in the hands of superficial, unbelieving, time-serving artists, one of the most degraded. All that human genius, inspired by faith, could achieve of best, all that fanaticism, sensualism, atheism, could perpetrate of worst, do we find in the cycle of those representations which have been dedicated to the glory of the Virgin. And indeed the ethics of the Madonna worship, as evolved in art, might be not unaptly likened to the ethics of human love: so long as the object of sense remained in subjection to the moral idea—so long as the appeal was to the best of our faculties and affections—so long was the image grand or refined, and the influences to be ranked with those which have helped to humanize and civilize our race; but so soon as the object became a mere idol, then worship and worshippers, art and artists, were together degraded.

It is not my intention to enter here on that disputed point, the origin of the worship of the Madonna. Our present theme lies within prescribed limits,—wide enough, however, to embrace an immense field of thought: it seeks to trace the progressive influence of that worship on the fine arts for a thousand years or more, and to interpret the forms in which it has been clothed. That the veneration paid to Mary in the early Church was a very natural feeling in those who advocated the divinity of her Son, would be granted, I suppose, by all but the most bigoted reformers; that it led to unwise and wild extremes, confounding the creature with the Creator, would be admitted, I suppose, by all but the most bigoted Roman Catholics. How it extended from the East over the nations of the West, how it grew and spread, may be read in ecclesiastical histories. Everywhere it seems to have found in the human heart some deep sympathy—deeper far than mere theological doctrine could reach—ready to accept it; and in every land the ground prepared for it in some already dominant idea of a mother-Goddess, chaste, beautiful, and benign. As, in the oldest Hebrew rites and Pagan superstitions, men traced the promise of a coming Messiah,—as the deliverers and kings of the Old Testament, and even the demigods of heathendom, became accepted types of the person of Christ,—so the Eve of the Mosaic history, the Astarte of the Assyrians—

"The mooned Ashtaroth, queen and mother both,"—

the Isis nursing Horus of the Egyptians, the Demeter and the Aphrodite of the Greeks, the Scythian Freya, have been considered by some writers as types of a divine maternity, foreshadowing the Virgin-mother of Christ. Others will have it that these scattered, dim, mistaken—often gross and perverted—ideas which were afterwards gathered into the pure, dignified, tender image of the Madonna, were but as the voice of a mighty prophecy, sounded through all the generations of men, even from the beginning of time, of the coming moral regeneration, and complete and harmonious development of the whole human race, by the establishment, on a higher basis, of what has been called the "feminine element" in society. And let me at least speak for myself. In the perpetual iteration of that beautiful image of THE WOMAN highly blessed—there, where others saw only pictures or statues, I have seen this great hope standing like a spirit beside the visible form; in the fervent worship once universally given to that gracious presence, I have beheld an acknowledgment of a higher as well as gentler power than that of the strong hand and the might that makes the right,—and in every earnest votary one who, as he knelt, was in this sense pious beyond the reach of his own thought, and "devout beyond the meaning of his will."

It is curious to observe, as the worship of the Virgin-mother expanded and gathered to itself the relics of many an ancient faith, how the new and the old elements, some of them apparently the most heterogeneous, became amalgamated, and were combined into the early forms of art;—how the Madonna, when she assumed the characteristics of the great Diana of Ephesus, at once the type of Fertility, and the Goddess of Chastity, became, as the impersonation of motherhood, all beauty, bounty and graciousness; and at the same time, by virtue of her perpetual virginity, the patroness of single and ascetic life—the example and the excuse for many of the wildest of the early monkish theories. With Christianity, new ideas of the moral and religious responsibility of woman entered the world; and while these ideas were yet struggling with the Hebrew and classical prejudices concerning the whole sex, they seem to have produced some curious perplexity in the minds of the greatest doctors of the faith. Christ, as they assure us, was born of a woman only, and had no earthly father, that neither sex might despair; "for had he been born a man (which was necessary), yet not born of woman, the women might have despaired of themselves, recollecting the first offence, the first man having been deceived by a woman. Therefore we are to suppose that, for the exaltation of the male sex, Christ appeared on earth as a man; and, for the consolation of womankind, he was born of a woman only; as if it had been said, 'From henceforth no creature shall be base before God, unless perverted by depravity.'" (Augustine, Opera Supt. 238, Serm. 63.) Such is the reasoning of St. Augustine, who, I must observe, had an especial veneration for his mother Monica; and it is perhaps for her sake that he seems here desirous to prove that through the Virgin Mary all womankind were henceforth elevated in the scale of being. And this was the idea entertained of her subsequently: "Ennobler of thy nature!" says Dante apostrophizing her, as if her perfections had ennobled not merely her own sex, but the whole human race.[1]

[Footnote 1: "Tu se' colei che l'umana natura Nobilitasti."]

But also with Christianity came the want of a new type of womanly perfection, combining all the attributes of the ancient female divinities with others altogether new. Christ, as the model-man, united the virtues of the two sexes, till the idea that there are essentially masculine and feminine virtues intruded itself on the higher Christian conception, and seems to have necessitated the female type.

The first historical mention of a direct worship paid to the Virgin Mary, occurs in a passage in the works of St. Epiphanius, who died in 403. In enumerating the heresies (eighty-four in number) which had sprung up in the early Church, he mentions a sect of women, who had emigrated from Thrace into Arabia, with whom it was customary to offer cakes of meal