A church dictionary

by Walter Farquhar Hook

Selden tells us, it was usual anciently to bring the mortuary along with the corpse, when it came to be buried, and to offer it to the Church as a satisfaction for the supposed negligence and omission the deceased had been guilty of in not paying his personal tithes; and from thence it was called a corpse present.

A mortuary is not properly due to an ecclesiastical incumbent from any but those of his own parish; but by custom, in some places, they are paid to the incumbents of other parishes, when corpses are carried through them. The bishops of Bangor, Landaff, St. David’s, &c. had formerly mortuaries of priests, abolished by 12 Anne, stat. ii. c. 6. And it was customary, in the diocese of Chester, for the bishop to have a mortuary, on the death of every priest dying within the archdeaconry of Chester, of his best beast, saddle and bridle, and best gown or cloak, hat, and upper garment under the gown. By 28 Geo. II. c. 6, mortuaries in the diocese of Chester were abolished, and the rectory of Waverton attached to the see in lieu thereof. By the 21 Hen. VIII. c. 6, mortuaries were commuted into money payments, which were regulated as follows:—“No parson, vicar, curate, parish priest, or other, shall for any person dying or dead, and being at the time of his death of the value in moveable goods of ten marks or more, clearly above his debts paid, and under the sum of £30, take for a mortuary above 3s. 4d. in the whole. And for a person dying or dead, being at the time of his death of the value of £30 or above, clearly above his debts paid, in moveable goods, and under the value of £40, there shall no more be taken or demanded for a mortuary, than 6s. 8d. in the whole. And for any person dying or dead, having at the time of his death of the value in moveable goods of £40 or above, to any sum whatsoever it be clearly above his debts paid, there shall be no more taken, paid, or demanded for a mortuary, than 10s. in the whole. The Welsh bishoprics and the diocese of Chester were excepted from the operation of this statute, and therefore subsequent acts were passed with respect to them.

MOTETT, in Church music, a short piece of music highly elaborated, of which the subject is taken from the psalms or hymns of the Church. It somewhat resembles our anthems. The derivation is from the Italian Mottetto, a little word or sentence; originally signifying a short epigram in verse; and afterwards applied as now defined, as the words of the Motett properly consist of a short sentence from Holy Scripture.—Jebb.

MOTHER OF GOD. (See Mariolatry, Virgin Mary, Nestorians.) “The Virgin Mary,” says Pearson on the Creed, “is frequently styled the Mother of Jesus in the language of the evangelists, and by Elizabeth, particularly, the Mother of her Lord, as also, by the general consent of the Church, because he which was born of her was God, the Deipara: which, being a compound title, begun in the Greek Church, was resolved into its parts by the Latins, and so the Virgin was plainly named the Mother of God.”

We admit that the Virgin Mary is the mother of God; but we protest against the conclusion that she is, on that account, to be treated with peculiar honour, or to be worshipped; for this expression is used not to exalt her, but to assert unequivocally the Divinity of her Son: He whom she brought forth was God, and therefore she is a bringer forth or mother of God.

The term was first brought prominently forward at the Council of Ephesus, (A. D. 431,) the third of those four general councils, the decisions of which are authoritative in the Church of England; and it was adopted as a formula against the Nestorians. The Nestorian controversy originated thus. In the year 428, Nestorius was bishop of Constantinople, and he had brought with him from Antioch, where he had before resided, a priest named Anastasius, his chaplain and friend; this person, preaching one day in the church of Constantinople, said, “Let no one call Mary mother of God, for she was a woman, and it is impossible that God should be born of a human creature.” These words gave great offence to many both of the clergy and laity; for they had always been taught, says the historian Socrates, to acknowledge Jesus Christ as God, and not to sever him in any way from the Divinity. Nestorius, however, declared his assent to what Anastasius had said, and became, from his high position in the Church, the heresiarch.

When the heresy had spread into Egypt, it was refuted by St. Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, in a pastoral letter, which he published for the direction of his people. “I wonder,” he says, “how a question can be raised, as to whether the Holy Virgin should be called mother of God; for if our Lord Jesus Christ is God, how is not the Holy Virgin, his mother, the mother of God? This is the faith we have been taught by the apostles.” He next proves that he who was born of the Virgin Mary is God in his own nature, since the Nicene Creed says that the only begotten Son of God, of the same substance with the Father, himself came down from heaven and was incarnate; and then he proceeds, “You will say, perhaps, is the Virgin, then, mother of the Divinity? We answer, It is certain that the Word is eternal, and of the substance of the Father. Now, in the order of nature, mothers, who have no part in the creation of the soul, are still called mothers of the whole man, and not of the body only; for surely it would be a hypercritical refinement to say, Elizabeth is mother of the body of John, and not of his soul. In the same way, therefore, we express ourselves in regard to the birth of Emmanuel, since the Word, having taken flesh upon him, is called Son of Man.” In a letter to Nestorius himself he enters into a fuller explanation: “We must admit in the same Christ two generations: first, the eternal, by which he proceeds from his Father; second, the temporal, by which he is born of his mother. When we say that he suffered and rose again, we do not say that God the Word suffered in his own nature, for the Divinity is impassible; but because the body which was appropriated to him suffered, so also we say that he suffered himself. So too we say he died. The Divine Word is in his own nature immortal. He is life itself; but because his own true body suffered death, we say that he himself died for us. In the same way, when his flesh is raised from the dead, we attribute resurrection to him. We do not say that we adore the man along with the Word, lest the phrase ‘along with’ should suggest the idea of non-identity; but we adore him as one and the same person, because the body assumed by the Word is in no degree external or separated from the Word.”—Conc. Eph. part i. v. 8. “It is in this sense,” he says afterwards, “that the Fathers have ventured to call the Holy Virgin mother of God, not that the nature of the Word, or his Divinity, did receive beginning of his existence from the Holy Virgin, but because in her was formed and animated a reasonable soul and a sacred body, to which the Word united himself in hypostasis, which is the reason of its being said, ‘he was born according to the flesh.’”

It was jealousy for the Lord Jesus Christ, and anxiety to maintain his honour, and to assert his Divinity, which influenced the Fathers at the Council of Ephesus, and not any special regard to the creature through whose instrumentality he was brought into the world. And the decisions of that council, because they can be proved to be scriptural, the Church of England accepts. The council vindicated this title, not because it was a high title for Mary, but because to deny it is to deny that he is God whom she brought forth. The heresy of Nestorius related to the incarnation or junction of the two natures in Christ, which he affirmed not to be a union, but merely a connexion; whereas the object of the Council of Ephesus was to assert “the real and inseparable union of the two natures in Christ, and to show that the human nature, which Christ took of the Holy Virgin, never subsisted separately from the Divine person of the Son of God.”

To the use of the term, however, though we contend for its propriety, divines of the Church of England are not partial, because, by the subtilty of the Romish controversialists, it has been so used, or rather misused, as to make it seem to confer peculiar honour and privileges upon the Virgin Mary. The primitive Christians, like ourselves, were contented with speaking of the Virgin as “the mother of my Lord;” and this phrase sufficed until, as we have seen, heretics arose who understood the word Lord in an inferior sense, and then it became necessary to assert that God and Lord, as applied to our blessed Saviour, are synonymous terms. And sound theologians will still occasionally use the term Mother of God, lest Nestorianism should be held unconsciously by persons who wish to be orthodox, and people forget the great truth expressed by St. Paul, that “God purchased the Church with his own blood;” and that Christ is “over all, God blessed for ever.”

The Council of Ephesus caused the Nicene Creed, and several passages out of St. Cyprian, St. Basil, Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, and many others, to be read in council. And from them they gathered, and therefore pronounced, that according to the Scriptures, as interpreted by the catholic Church, Christ, though he have two natures, yet he is but one person, and by consequence that the Virgin Mary might properly be called Θεοτόκος, because the same person who was born of her is truly God as well as man: which being once determined by an universal council to be the true sense and meaning of the Scriptures in this point, hath been acknowledged by the universal Church ever since, till this time.—Bishop Beveridge.