It is in this way that the revealed doctrine of the incarnation exerted a stronger and a broader influence on Christians, as they more and more apprehended and mastered its meaning and its bearings. It is contained in the brief and simple declaration of St John, "The Word was made flesh;" but it required century after century to spread it out in its fulness and to imprint it energetically on the worship and practice of the Catholic people as well as on their faith. Athanasius was the first and the great teacher of it. He collected together the inspired notices scattered through David, Isaias, St. Paul, and St. John, and he engraved indelibly upon the imaginations of the faithful, as had never been before, that man is God, and God is man, that in Mary they meet, and that in this sense Mary [{80}] is the centre of all things. He added nothing to what was known before, nothing to the popular and zealous faith that her Son was God; he has left behind him in his works no such definite passages about her as those of St. Irenaeus or St. Epiphanius; but he brought the circumstances of the incarnation home to men's minds by the manifold evolutions of his analysis, and secured it for ever from perversion. Still, however, there was much to be done; we have no proof that Athanasius himself had any special devotion to the Blessed Virgin; but he laid the foundations on which that devotion was to rest, and thus noiselessly and without strife, as the first temple in the holy city, she grew up into her inheritance, and was "established in Sion and her power was in Jerusalem." Such was the origin of that august cultus which has been paid to the Blessed Mary for so many centuries in the East and in the West. That in times and places it has fallen into abuse, that it has even become a superstition, I do not care to deny; for, as I have said above, the same process which brings to maturity carries on to decay, and things that do not admit of abuse have very little life in them. This of course does not excuse such excesses, or justify us in making light of them, when they occur. I have no intention of doing so as regards the particular instances which you bring against us, though but a few words will suffice for what I need say about them:--before doing so, however, I am obliged to make three or four introductory remarks.
1. I have almost anticipated my first remark already. It is this: that the height of our offending in our devotion to the Blessed Virgin would not look so great in your volume as it does, had you not placed yourself on lower ground than your own feelings toward her would have spontaneously prompted you to take. I have no doubt you had some good reason for adopting this course, but I do not know it. What I do know is that, for the fathers' sake, who so exalt her, you really do love and venerate her, though you do not evidence it in your book. I am glad, then, in this place, to insist on a fact which will lead those among us who know you not to love you from their love of her, in spite of what you refuse to give her; and Anglicans, on the other hand, who do know you, to think better of us, who refuse her nothing, when they reflect that you do not actually go against us, but merely come short of us in your devotion to her.
2. As you revere the fathers, so you revere the Greek Church; and here again we have a witness on our behalf of which you must be aware as fully as we are, and of which you must really mean to give us the benefit. In proportion as this remarkable fact is understood, it will take off the edge of the surprise of Anglicans at the sight of our devotions to our Lady. It must weigh with them when they discover that we can enlist on our side in this controversy those seventy millions (I think they so consider them) of Orientals who are separated from our communion. Is it not a very pregnant fact that the Eastern churches, so independent of us, so long separated from the West, so jealous of antiquity, should even surpass us in their exaltation of the Blessed Virgin? That they go further than we do is sometimes denied, on the ground that the Western devotion toward her is brought out into system, and the Eastern is not; yet this only means really that the Latins have more mental activity, more strength of intellect, less of routine, less of mechanical worship among them, than the Greeks. We are able, better than they, to give an account of what we do; and we seem to be more extreme merely because we are more definite. But, after all, what have the Latins done so bold as that substitution of the name of Mary for the name of Jesus at the end of the collects and petitions in the breviary, nay, in the ritual and liturgy? Not [{81}] merely in local or popular, and in semi-authorized devotions, which are the kind of sources that supplies you with your matter of accusation against us, but in the formal prayers of the Greek eucharistic service, petitions are offered, not "in the name of Jesus Christ," but "of the Theotocos." Such a phenomenon, in such a quarter, I think, ought to make Anglicans merciful toward those writers among ourselves who have been excessive in singing the praises of the Deipara. To make a rule of substituting Mary with all saints for Jesus in the public service, has more "Mariolatry" in it than to alter the Te Deum to her honor in private devotion.
3. And thus I am brought to a third remark supplemental to your accusation of us. Two large views, as I have said above, are opened upon our devotional thoughts in Christianity; the one centring in the Son of Mary, the other in the Mother of Jesus. Neither need obscure the other; and in the Catholic Church, as a matter of fact, neither does. I wish you had either frankly allowed this in your volume, or proved the contrary. I wish, when you report that "a certain proportion, it has been ascertained by those who have inquired, do stop short in her," p. 107, that you had added your belief, that the case was far otherwise with the great bulk of Catholics. Might I not have expected it? May I not, without sensitiveness, be somewhat pained at the omission? From mere Protestants, indeed, I expect nothing better. They content themselves with saying that our devotions to our Lady must necessarily throw our Lord into the shade, and thereby they relieve themselves of a great deal of trouble. Then they catch at any stray fact which countenances or seems to countenance their prejudice. Now I say plainly I never will defend or screen any one from your just rebuke who, through false devotion to Mary, forgets Jesus. But I should like the fact to be proved first; I cannot hastily admit it. There is this broad fact the other way: that if we look through Europe we shall find, on the whole, that just those nations and countries have lost their faith in the divinity of Christ who have given up devotion to his Mother, and that those, on the other hand, who have been foremost in her honor, have retained their orthodoxy. Contrast, for instance, the Calvinists with the Greeks, or France with the north of Germany, or the Protestant and Catholic communions in Ireland. As to England, it is scarcely doubtful what would be the state of its Established Church if the Liturgy and Articles were not an integral part of its establishment; and when men bring so grave a charge against us as is implied in your volume, they cannot be surprised if we in turn say hard things of Anglicanism. [Footnote 20] In the Catholic Church Mary has shown herself, not the rival, but the minister of her Son. She has protected him, as in his infancy, so in the whole history of the religion. There is, then, a plain historical truth in Dr. Fisher's words which you quote to condemn: "Jesus is obscured, because Mary is kept in the background."
[Footnote 20: I have spoken more more on this subject in my "Essay on Development," p. 438. "Nor does it avail to object, that, in this contrast of devotional exercises, the human is sure to supplant the divine, from the infirmity of out nature; for, I repeat, the question is one of fact, whether it has done so. And next, it must be asked, whether the character of Protestant devotion toward our Lord has been that of worship at all: and not rather such as we pay to an excellent human being? . . . Carnal minds will ever create a carnal worship for themselves; and to forbid them the service of the saints will have no tendency to teach them the worship of God. Moreover. . . . great and constant as is the devotion which the Catholic pays to St. Mary, it has a special province, and has far more connection with the public services and the festive aspect of Christianity, and with certain extraordinary offices which she holds, than with what is strictly personal and primary in religion." Our late cardinal, on my reception, singled out to me this last sentence for the expression of his especial approbation.]
This truth, exemplified in history, might also be abundantly illustrated, did my space admit, from the lives and writings of holy men in modern times. Two of them, St. Alfonso Liguori and the Blessed Paul of the Cross, for all their notorious devotion [{82}] to the Mother, have shown their supreme love of her divine Son in the names which a have given to their respective congregations, viz, "of the Redeemer," and "of the Cross and Passion." However, I will do no more than refer to an apposite passage in the Italian translation of the work of a French Jesuit, Fr. Nepveu, "Christian Thoughts for every Day in the Year," which was recommended to the friend who went with me to Rome by the same Jesuit father there with whom, as I have already said, I stood myself in such intimate relations; I believe it is a fair specimen of the teaching of our spiritual books:
"The love of Jesus Christ is the most sure pledge of our future happiness, and the most infallible token of our predestination. Mercy toward the poor, devotion to the Holy Virgin, are very sensible tokens of predestination; nevertheless they are not absolutely infallible; but one cannot have a sincere and constant love of Jesus Christ without being predestinated. . . . The destroying angel which bereaved the houses of the Egyptians of their first-born, had respect to all the houses which were marked with the blood of the Lamb."
And it is also exemplified, as I verily believe, not only in formal and distinctive confessions, not only in books intended for the educated class, but also in the personal religion of the Catholic populations. When strangers are so unfavorably impressed with us, because they see images of our Lady in our churches, and crowds flocking about her, they forget that there is a Presence within the sacred walls, infinitely more awful, which claims and obtains from us a worship transcendently different from any devotion we pay to her. That devotion might indeed tend to idolatry if it were encouraged in Protestant churches, where there is nothing higher than it to attract the worshipper; but all the images that a Catholic church ever contained, all the crucifixes at its altars brought together, do not so affect its frequenters as the lamp which betokens the presence or absence there of the blessed sacrament. Is not this so certain, so notorious, that on some occasions it has been even brought as a charge against us, that we are irreverent in church, when what seemed to the objector to be irreverence was but the necessary change of feeling which came over those who were there on their knowing that their Lord was away?
The mass again conveys to us the same lesson of the sovereignty of the incarnate Son; it is a return to Calvary, and Mary is scarcely named in it. Hostile visitors enter our churches on Sunday at mid-day, the time of the Anglican service. They are surprised to see the high mass perhaps poorly attended, and a body of worshippers leaving the music and the mixed multitude who may be lazily fulfilling their obligation, for the silent or the informal devotions which are offered at an image of the Blessed Virgin. They may be tempted, with one of your informants, to call such a temple not a "Jesus Church," but a "Mary Church." But, if they understood our ways, they would know that we begin the day with our Lord and then go on to his mother. It is early in the morning that religious persons go to mass and communion. The high mass, on the other hand, is the festive celebration of the day, not the special devotional service; nor is there any reason why those who have been at a low mass already, should not at that hour proceed to ask the intercession of the Blessed Virgin for themselves and all that is dear to them.
Communion, again, which is given in the morning, is a solemn, unequivocal act of faith in the incarnate God, if any can be such; and the most gracious of admonitions, did we need one, of his sovereign and sole right to possess us. I knew a lady who on her death-bed was visited by an excellent Protestant friend. She, with great tenderness for her soul's welfare, asked her whether her prayers to the [{83}] Blessed Virgin did not, at that awful hour, lead to forgetfulness of her Saviour. "Forget him!" she replied with surprise; "why, he has just been here." She had been receiving him in communion. When, then, my dear Pusey, you read anything extravagant in praise of our Lady, is it not charitable to ask, even while you condemn it in itself, did the author write nothing else? Did he write on the blessed sacrament? Had he given up "all for Jesus?" I recollect some lines, the happiest, I think, which that author wrote, which bring out strikingly the reciprocity, which I am dwelling on, of the respective devotions to Mother and Son: