L-eSSGD 7 yaS - ^ b 0 11 m ? \ -> THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY. MATEjR dolorosa. Frontispiece THE HISTORY 07 SHE BLESSED VIRGIN MARI TRANSLATED FROM THB FRENCH OF THE ABBE ORSIN BY THB VERY REV F. G. HUSENBETH, D.D , V.G FBOVOBT OF KOBTHAMFTOK gi |lefa ©bilio*!. l»tfb |Uostratio«f DUBLIN M . H. GILL AND SON, Ltd. _ tTf'.V I-1 124890 CONTENTS. CHAPTER L AMZ UniTERSAL EXPECTATION OF THE BLBS3ED VIRGIN AND WE Messiah.. 1 CHAPTER XI. Tub Immaculate Conception . ... 36 Birth of Mary CHAPTER JIJ . -SI The Presentation . CHAPTER JV. . 6S Mary in the Templ3 CHAPTER V, « 72 Mary an Orphan , CHAPTER Vi . 89 CHAPTER VII Marriage of the Virgin . 101 The Annunciation , CHAPTER VIII. . . 123 The Visitation . CHAPTER IX. , . 186 CONTENTS. Vi CHAPTER X. PAOB Virginal Pregnancy of Mary . . , . 145 CHAPTER XI. Birth of thb Messlas .... , . 166 CHAPTER XR Adoration af the Magi . . .... 168 CHAPTER XIH. Tub Purifh ation . . .... 182 CHAPTER XIV. Ter Flight into Egyft ... . ldO CHAPTER XV. Rbtukn from Egypt ... - SOS CHAPTER XVI. Mary at the pbbaohing of Jesub . .... 214 CHAPTER XVIL Hart on Calvary . ........ 234 CHAPTER XVTTL D Haiti of Mary ... 257 The Definition of the Immaculate Conception . . .283 Letters Apostolic op Our Most Holy Lord Pius IX., by Divine Providence Pope, concerning the Dogmatic De¬ finition op the Immaoulath Conception op the Virgin Mother op God.316 Sermon op St Bernard on the Twelve Prerogatives op thb Blbshed Virqin Mary ...... 354 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Mater Dolorosa ...... Frontispiece Enthronement of the Virgin . , to face page 1 The Annunciation .... . , The Virgin, Christ, and St. John * . 165 Presentation in the Temple . « . M 185 The Crucifixion , , . „ The Entombment , . * • Adoration of the Virgo* . , , . „ 257 . „ 88J Adoration of tub Virgo* enthronement of the VIRGIN THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, MOTHER OF GOD. CHAPTER I. UNIVERSAL EXPECTATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN AND THE MESSIAS. I N those ancient times which go back to the very infancy of the world, when our first parents, terrified and trembling, heard beneath the majestic shades of Eden* the thundering voice of Jehovah, who condemned them to exile, to labour, and to death, in punishment of their mad disobedience,—a mysterious prophecy, in which the goodness of the Creator was visible, even amid the vengeance of an irritated God, came to revive the dejected minds of those two frail crea¬ tures, who had sinned through pride, like Lucifer. A daughter of Eve, a woman with masculine courage, was to crush the head of the serpent beneath her feet, and regene¬ rate for ever a guilty race:—that woman was Mary. From that time it was a tradition among the generations * The word Eden, with the Arabs as well as among the Hebrews, is the name of the terrestrial Paradise, and of the Paradise of the elect. Xn Hebrew it signifies a place of delights ; in Arabic, a place suitable for feeding flocks. THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, before the deluge, that a woman would come to repair the evil which the woman had done. This consoling tradition, which revived the hopes of a fallen race, was not effaced from the memory of men at the time of their great dispersion in the plains of Sennaar; they carried with them, beyond the mountains and seas, this sweet and distant hope, with the worship established by Noe, and the wreck of sciences and arts saved from the deluge.* Later on, when the primi¬ tive religion came to be weakened, and the ancient traditions were enveloped in clouds, that one of the Blessed Virgin and the Messias resisted, almost alone, the action of time, and rose above the ruins of the old creeds,—lost, as they were, in the fables of polytheism,—like that evergreen shrub which grows on the ruins of what was once Babylon the Great.f * It is certain that the race of primitive men, which was wild, but not savage, were early acquainted with the arts analogous to their wants and pleasures. Scarcely do the children of Adam form little groups of men, hut we see them establish public worship, manufacture tents, build cities, forge iron, cast bronze, invent musical instruments, and follow the course of the stars. The history of astronomy must be referred, according to Bailly, to a people before the deluge, of whom all memory has perished, and from whom some remains of astrono¬ mical science have escaped the general revolution. Lalande, who is afraid that this assertion should prove too much in favour of the sacred books, attributes the origin of this science to the Egyptians; but the Hebrews, who as neighbours, contemporaries, and ancient dwellers among the Egyptians, have a claim to arbitrate upon this question, decide for Bailly against his opponent, by informing us that the Egyptians owed their first knowledge of astronomy to traditions saved from the deluge.—(See Josephus, Antiq. of the Jews.) f There is but one solitary tree found amidst the ruins of Babylon ; the Persians give it the name of Athele : according to them this tree existed in the ancient city, and was miraculously preserved, on purpose that their prophet, Ali, son-in-law of Mahomet, might tie hi? horse to it after the battle of Hilla. It is an evergreen shrub, and so scarce in those countries that only one more is found of the same kind at Bassora.—(Rich’s Memoirs.) MOTHER OF GOD. 3 Indeed, if we traverse the different regions of the globe, if we search from north to south, from west to east, the religious annals of nations, we shall find the promised Virgin, and her divine parturition, to be the foundation of almost every theogony. In Thibet, in Japan, and in one part of the eastern penin¬ sula of India, it is the god Fo, who, to save mankind, becomes incarnate in the womb of a young woman betrothed to a king, the nymph Lhamoghiuprul, the most beautiful and most holy of women. In China, the Emperor Hoang-Ti is reckoned among the Sons of Heaven, whose mother conceived by the light of a flash of lightning. Another emperor, Yao, contemporary with the deluge, had for his mother a virgin, rendered fruitful by a ray of light from a star. Yu, the head of the first Chinese dynasty, owed his life to a pearl,*—that emblem of light all over the East,—which fell from heaven to the chaste womb of a young virgin. Heou-Tsi, the head of the dynasty of the Teheous, was born without prejudice to the virginity of his mother, who conceived him by divine operation one day when she was at prayer; and brought him forth without effort and without defilement, in a de¬ serted cave, where oxen and lambs warmed him with their breath.f The most popular goddess of the celestial empire, * “ The pearl,” says Chardin, “ has everywhere a distinctive name; in the East, the Turks and Tartars call it mardjatm , a globe of light; the Persians, marvid , produce of light.” t We find in the Chi-King two beautiful odes on this marvellous buth of Heou-Tsi; and the glozes and paraphrases of the learned on these verses agree in explaining them in a way which makes the resemblance to the divine parturition of Mary still more striking :— “Every one at his birth,” says Ho-Sou, “ destroys the integrity of his mother, and causes her the most cruel sufferings. Kiang-Yuen brought forth her son without suffering injury or pain. This was because Tien (Heaven) would display its power, and show how much the Holy One differs from men.”—“Having been conceived bv the 4 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, Schingmou, conceived by simple contact of a water-flower: her son, brought up beneath the poor roof of a fisherman, became a great man, and worked miracles. The Lamas say that Buddha was born of the virgin Maha- Mahai. Sommonokhodom, the prince, legislator, and god of Siam, in like manner owes his birth to a virgin, rendered fruitful by the rays of the sun. Lao-Tseu becomes incarnate in the womb of a virgin, black, marvellous, and beautiful as jasper. The zodiacal Isis of the Egyptians is a virgin- mother. That of the Druids is to bring forth the future Saviour.* The Brahmins teach that when a god takes flesh, he is bom in the womb of a virgin by divine operation; thus Juggernath, the mutilated saviour of the world,f and Chrichna, born in a grotto, where angels and shepherds come to adore him in his cradle, have each a virgin for their mother. The Babylonian woman, Dogdo, sees in a dream a bright messenger from Oromazes, who lays magnificent garments at her feet; a heavenly light falls upon the countenance of the sleeping female, who becomes beautiful as the Day-Star. Zerdhucht, Zoroaster, or rather Ebrahim-Zer-Ateucht, J the operation of Tien," says another commentator, Tsou-Tsong-Po, “ who gave him his life by miracle, he was to be bom without prejudice to his mother’s virginity.” * “Hinc Druidse statuam in intimis penetralibus erexerunt, Isidi seu virgini dedicantes, ex qua Alius ille proditurus erat (nempe generis humani Redemptor).”—(Elias Schedius, de Bits Germania, cap. 13.) f Juggernath, the seventh incarnation of Brahma, is represented in the shape of a pyramid, without feet and without hands. “ He lost them,” say the Brahmins, “ because he wanted to carry the world, in order to save it.”—(See Kircher.) J Zer-Ateucht signifies “ washed with silver: ” this surname was given to Zoroaster, because, say the Ghebers, he proved his mission to a Sabean prince, who persecuted him, by plunging into a bath of Saelted silver.—(See Tavernier, t. ii. p. 92.) MOTHER OF GOD. 5 famous prophet of the Magi, is the fruit of this nocturnal vision. The tyrant Nemroud,* informed by his astrologers that an infant, not yet born, threatens his gods and his throne, causes all the pregnant women in his dominions to be put to death: Zerdhucht, nevertheless, is saved by the in- genuity and prudence of his mother.f The Macenicans, who dwell in Paraguay, on the borders of the Lake Zarayas, * This Nemroud, whom Tavernier calls Neubrout, is, as some say, Nimrod, the famous hunter; according to others, the tyrant Zhohac, of the Persians, king of the first dynasty of the princes who reigned immediately after the deluge. According to the author of Mefathi aloloim, Nemroud would be the same as Ca'icaous, the second king of the second dynasty of Persia, called the Caianides. The Persian historians give him a reign of nearly two centuries, which is certainly rather long. Some make him a wicked man, who had the strange fancy to ascend to heaven in a chest drawn by four of those monstrous birds called kerkes, of whom the ancient Oriental authors make mention in their romances. After wandering about in the air some time, he fell down again upon a mountain so violently, say the ancient legends of Persia, that it was shaken by it even to its foundation. According to the Persians, this Nemroud had Zerdhucht, whom they confound with Abraham, thrown into a burning furnace; according to others, Nemroud was by religion a Sabean, and it was he that first established the worship of fire.—(D’Herbelot, Bibliotheque Orientale, t. iii. p. 32.) The Jews claim for Abraham, the father and stock of their people, this persecution of Nemroud, the honour of which the Persians give to Zerdhucht, their lawgiver. St. Jerom relates an ancient tradition of the Jews, which declared that Abraham had been cast into the fire by order of the Chaldeans, because he would not adore it.—(Hieron., Qusest. in Genes.) Certain Jewish rabbins, much more modern, confirm this tradition: R. Chain ben Adda relates that Abraham, having met with a young girl who carried an idol about her, broke it to pieces; a complaint was immediately laid before Nemroud, who required Abraham to adore fire. The patriarch answered very sensibly, that it would be more natural to adore water, which extinguishes fire, the clouds which produce the water, the wind which collects the clouds, and man, who is a being more perfect than the wind. Nemroud, enraged at this bold answer, ordered Abraham to be cast into the fire, which spared him. t See Tavernier, loc. cii. f THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN\ relate that at a very remote period a woman of rare beauty became a mother, and remained still a virgin; her son, after working extraordinary miracles, raised himself in the air one day, in presence of his disciples, and transformed himself into a sun.* Let all the scattered fragments of these mutilated creeds be collected together, and we shall reconstruct, in almost all its details, the history of the Blessed Virgin and of Christ. The Blessed Virgin, notwithstanding the royal blood which circulates in her veins, is of an obscure condition, like the mother of Zoroaster; like her also, she receives the visit of an angel bearing a message from heaven. The tyrant Nemroud, who was the worst of a number of very wicked princes, may pass for the type of Herod, and as resolutely seeks the death of the young Magian as the sanguinary spouse of Mariamne seeks the destruction of the infant Jesus: both let their prey escape. Born of a virgin who conceives him during fervent prayer, and brings him forth without defilement and without pain, in a poor stable, like the first¬ born of the noble and pious Kiang-Yuen, our divine Saviour lives in the midst of the poor classes, like the son of the Chinese goddess; angels and shepherds come to pay him homage, as was done to Chrichna, on the very night of his birth ; then, after stilling the tempests, walking on the waters, casting out devils, and raising the dead to life, he achieves his triumphant ascension in presence of five hundred dis¬ ciples, whose ej'es, all dazzled, lose sight of him in a cloud, precisely as related by the savage hordes of Paraguay. It is surely very strange that these marvellous legends, which have not been taken from the gospel facts, since they are incontestably more ancient, should form, when connected together, the actual life of the Son of God. Can truth then spring from error ? What are we to think of these curious resemblances ? Must we say, with the sneering philosophers * See MuraAftri. MOTHER OF GOD. of the school of Yoltaire, and a few German visionaries of rather more modern date, that the apostles borrowed these fables from the various creeds of Asia ? But, not to speak of the jealous care with which the books reputed divine were in those times concealed in the impenetrable obscurity of the sanctuaries,—not to speak of the profound horror which the Jews professed of idolatrous legends, and their disdainful contempt for the learning of foreigners,—how should poor men of the lower class, whose whole knowledge was limited to steering a bark over the waters of the Lake of Gen- nestreth, and whose nets were still dripping with its fresh waters when they were promoted to the apostleship,—how should laborious artisans, obliged to work for their daily br«ad in the midst of their preaching, have turned over the satred books of the Hindoos, Chinese, Bactrians, Phoenicians, atfd Persians ? What likelihood was there that Simon Peter, tie sons of Zebedee, or that austere disciple of Gamaliel, who said boldly at Corinth, the rich and learned Greek city, “I judged not myself to know anything among you, buf Jesus Christ: and him crucified!” should have snatched from idolatry, which they were sent to destroy, some few of its old shreds, to join them on fraudulently to the life of Christ, so simple and so grand. Again, if the question were only of borrowing from the mythic legends of nations border¬ ing on Palestine,—such, for example, as the Egyptians and Phoenicians,—however unjust the accusation, it would have had at least some colour of probability; but no! these brilliant points which go forth from the womb of the dark¬ ness of idolatry to form, like so many little stars, the glory of the Son of the Virgin, come from places the most remote and least known of the earth. To say nothing of that Gaul, with its impenetrable forests, which concealed, at the western extremity of Europe, its mysterious doctrines under the shade of oaks ; of the Great Indies, so imperfectly known under Tiberius • ^f that Serica, with its towers of porcelain THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED YfAGlA* 8 whose far-distant provinces did not tempt even the greedy Romans,*—how could the apostles have communicated with far distant America, separated from the old continent by its green girdle of waves, and lost like a pearl amidst the waters ? But I will suppose that the apostles had—no matter how —a knowledge of these ancient myths scattered over ejrery part of the globe. I go further: I admit, setting aside the native simplicity, the blood-sealed testimony, the excited sanctity of these divine men—I admit that, carried awaj^, as Rousseau says, by the ardent glory of their Master, it 'did occur to their thoughts, for a moment, to embroider the texture of the gospel with certain fabulous circumstances; even so, the thing would have been beyond their power. With what face, for example, could they have attributed to that Herod whom all Jerusalem had known, whose glorias and tragical reign every one knew by heart, an atrociots deed revived, without the least probability, of some unknown king of Persia, who, perhaps, never had any existence but i* the imagination of the reveries of the Magi ? If the massacre of the innocents had been a story fabricated or copied by the apostles, can any one believe that the Bethlehemites, having such means of knowing what passed in the holy city, the lofty towers of which they saw in the horizon, would not have strongly protested against this audacious falsehood; that those subtile Pharisees, who had sought to ensnare Jesus himself in his speech, would have let it pass current without refutation; or that the Herodians would have en¬ dured with patience to have so black a stain falsely im¬ printed upon the renown of a prince of whom they had almost made a god,f and who had loaded them with riches and honours ? * It was in the reign of Augustus that the Roman people received the first embassy from the Seres, whom we now call the Chinese: the ambassadors declared that they had been three years on their journey, t The flatterers of Herod I., dazzled with the grandeur and magni- MOTHER OF GOD. 9 If all were silent, it was because tbe thing was too well proved, too public, too recent as yet to leave the field open to contradictions; it was because, at two hours’ journey from Jerusalem, were the mothers of those martyrs who had paid with their young lives for the honour of having been born at the same time with Christ; it was because whole villages had seen the murderous steel glitter, and heard the cries of death; it was because, at the first attempt to charge the Christians with falsehood, a whole population would have started up to exclaim, “But we ourselves were there I ”* It is the same with the divine parturition of Mary, with the visit of the shepherds sent by the angels, the glorious resurrection, and, in fine, with all the prodigies which signa¬ lised the coming of Christ. The apostles wrote even in the lifetime of those who had figured in the scenes which they related, and, before they consigned to writing those prodigies ficence of that prince, maintained that he was the Messiai. This it was that gave rise to the sect of the Herodians, of whom so much is said in the gospel, and whom the pagans knew, since Persius and his scholiast tell us, that even in the time of Nero, the birthday of King Herod was celebrated by his followers with the same solemnity as the Sabbath. * “ Neither Josephus nor the rabbins speak of the massacre of the innocents,” says Strauss. “Macrobius, who lived in the fourth century, is the only one who says a word about the massacre ordered by Herod.” Strauss is mistaken: the Toldos, whence Celsus derived some of the facts injurious to Christianity which he has interspersed in his writings, speak positively of it, and this fact is in the Talmud. See how Bossuet answers those who deny the gospel fact, and never was answer more decisive : “Where now are they,” says he, “who, to secure their faith, would have it that the profane historians of the time ought to have made mention of this cruelty of Herod as well as of others? As if our faith ought to depend on what the affected negligence or policy of the historians of the world made them say, or leave unsaid, in their histories! Let us leave all such feeble ideas; human views alone would have sufficed to prevent the Evangelist from bringing discredit upon his holy gospel, by recording therein a fact so public, if it had not been so certain.” io THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIE GHI, of the Messias, they had boldly preached them in the very temple of Jehovah, before that immense multitude of Hebrews from every province, who repaired thither to sacrifice, or to bring in the first-fruits; which would have composed th-j most dangerous audience in the world for them if they had spoken falsely. So far from fearing contradictions, which would not have been wanting in case of imposture, St. Peter speaks to this numerous assemblage like a man sure of the adhesion of them all; he is not afraid to appeal to the still recert recol¬ lections of those who hear him; he affirms those miracles which marked the mission of the Son of Mary with the seal of the divinity, even before the great council of the nation, which contributed its utmost to the crucifixion of Jesus. And the senators of Israel, terrified and furious, ordered St. Peter and St. John to be scourged, to compel them to keep silence; but they do not deny—the Talmud owns it—those prodigies, which they stupidly attribute to magic. Accord¬ ingly, they do not say to the apostles, when dragged before them by the keepers of the temple, “You are dreamers or liars.” They say to them, with an agitation which suffi¬ ciently proves their secret fears, “ Hold your peace! would you have the people stone us ? ” To which these two men, simple in heart, but great in soul, resolutely answer, “ We will not hold our peace! God commands us to speak, and it is better to obey him than men.” Imposture is not thus fearless. After examining the acts, the character, and position of the apostles, every impartial man will be forced to admit that they were neither deceivers, nor deceived, and that they are no way concerned in those coincidences which are remarked between the gospel facts and the traditions of ancient nations, more or less mixed up with fables. But then, how are these analogies to be explained ? Is it a game of chance, an accidental concurrence ? MOTHER OF GOD. tl It has not happened by chance that the mystery of the Incarnation of a God in the chaste womb of a Virgin is one of the fundamental points of belief in Asia; it is not merely accidental that the privileged women who bear in their wombs this emanation of the divinity are always pure, beautiful, holy; that they have names glorious and full of mystery, which signify in all the ancient tongues, beauty expected, virgin immaculate, faithful virgin, felicity of the human race, polar star ; and that they are so like each other, that one would say that they were moulded after some remote pattern, concealed from us by the night of time. In fine, it is not by mere chance that a ray of light unites the divine nature with the human. These opinions, where we recognise the stamp of the pri¬ mitive times, evidently go back to the infancy of the world. The antediluvian patriarchs,—that chain of aged men who lived as long as the cedars,—seeking to form an idea of that woman, blessed among all others, whose miraculous mater¬ nity was to save the human race, figured her to themselves under the features of Eve before her fall; they gave to her a majestic and sacred beauty, which could create no other sentiment in the souls of the children of men than that of religious veneration; they made her a lovely star, with a soft, mysterious, chaste, and veiled light, the rising of which svas to precede that of the Sun of Justice. The means by which God causes fecundity to descend into her virginal womb, agree in a striking manner among the different nations of the world. Take a view of all the ancient religions, you will see in them a sacred fire. Now fire was, among the Persians, the terrestrial emblem of the sun, and the sun itself was but the dwelling of the Most High—the glorious tent of the God of heaven.* The Hebrews, who shared this belief, acknowledged the * The Persians suppose that the throne of God is in the son, says Hanway, and hence their veneration for that luminary. it THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, divine presence, or Schekina, in the luminous cloud which hovered between the cherubim of the propitiatory; and believed that God was clothed with light as with a garment, when he manifested himself to men on solemn occasions. It was the opinion of the synagogue, and the tradition of the temple said, that in the midst of the bush of wild roses, which burnt without being consumed on Mount Horeb, where Moses, that great shepherd of men, was feeding at the time the Arabian flocks of his father-in-law, a very beautiful face was distinguished, resembling nothing that we see here below; and that this celestial figure, which was brighter than a flame and more brilliant than lightning, was undoubtedly the image of the eternal God.* After this, it is not difficult to understand the grounds of the opinion, generally spread, that a luminous ray was to bring fecundity to the womb of the Virgin reparatrix, who was the expectation of nations. With this graceful tradition of a pure virgin admitted to celestial nuptials, surrounded by mystery impenetrable, was connected the tradition of a God Saviour, born of her womb, who was to suffer and die for the salvation of the world.f This tradition was not perpetuated, like the other, by means of brilliant and poetical images, but by terror, which resists in a different way from poetry all attempts to efface it. The bloody sacrifice, which we find established, from the most distant times, among almost all nations, had no other object than to preserve among men the remembrance of the promise of the immolation of Calvary: it is easy to prove it. Worship, that manifestation of love, that homage of grati¬ tude, which Adam and Eve were bound to pay to God immediately after the benefit of their creation, consisted, no doubt, in Eden, of innocent prayers and offerings of fruits * Philo, Life of Moses. t This tradition, is found in the sacred books of China.—(See the work of P. Pr6mare, entitled, Selecta qusedam vestigia prsecipuorum Christiana! religionis dogmatum ex antiquis libris eruta.) MOTHER OF GOD. 13 and flowers alone.* But when, ungrateful as they were! they had broken the precept of easy observance, which the Lord had imposed upon them as a sweet yoke, and solely to make them sensible that they had a Master,—when they had lost, with the immortalising fruits of the tree of life,f their talisman against death, J and they descended from the charm¬ ing slopes of Eden to a land bristling with brambles and * Porphyr., de Abst., lib. ii. f God could attach to plants certain natural virtues with reference to our bodies, and it is easy to believe that the fruit of the tree of life had the power of renewing the body by an aliment so well propor¬ tioned and so efficacious, that by making use of it, men would not have died.—(Bossuet, Elev. sur les Myst., t. i. p. 231.) J Man was never immortal in this world in the 6ame way as the pure spirits, for a body formed from dust must naturally return to dust; he was so by a favour unexampled, and granted conditionally, which exalted him and maintained him in a position very superior to his proper sphere. Immortality here below was never acquired by man by right of birth; every terrestrial body must perish by the dissolu¬ tion of its parts, unless a special will of the Creator opposes this: such divine will was manifested in favour of our first parent. God planted, in the delightful garden where he had placed mortal man, the tree of life—a plant of heavenly origin, which had the property of repelling death, as the laurel, according to the ancients, repels lightning. To this mysterious tree was attached the immortality of the human race ; afar from this protecting tree, death recovered his prey, and man fell back from the height of heaven into his miserable coating of clay.— (Aug., Qusest. Yet. et Nov. Test., q. 19, p. 450.) No one, I imagine, will call in question that God acted upon his just right in banishing Adam from the earthly Paradise after his disobedience : but banish¬ ment involved the sentence of death upon man and his posterity; without the tree of life, he was no longer anything better than a frail and perishable creature, subject to the laws which govern created bodies: when the antidote fails, it is plain that poison kills. Again become mortal, Adam begot children like himself: the children must follow the condition to which their father had fallen. In this God did the human race no wrong; we are mortal by our nature; he has left us such as we were. To withdraw a gratuitous favour, when the subject of such favour tears up with his own hands the deed which confers it upon him, is not cruelty, it is justice. 14 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGJA. thorns, of which they were obliged to open the virgin soil for their support,—they added to the wild fruits and flowers, produced by the land of exile, the firstlings of their flocks. This deserves attention. Adam, who to perfection of form added a soul intelligent and exalted, in w T hich the Lord had planted the germ of every virtue and every science, could not be without humanity. His fatal complacency towards Eve exhibits him to us as loving even to weakness, and thereby susceptible in the highest degree of soft and benevo¬ lent affections. How came it then into his mind that the Creator could be pleased with the violent death of his creature, and that an act of destruction could be an act of piety ? The immolation of animals, which has not the smallest connection with the vows and prayers of man, and which the exclusively vegetable diet of the primitive patriarchs left without any other object but murder, must have stirred up in the head of the human race a thousand feelings of natural repugnance. For a long time these poor creatures, deprived of reason, but capable of attachment, had composed in Eden the court of the solitary monarch; then he sat with them at the same table, slept on the moss of the same bank, quenched his thirst at the same fountain, and his prayer ascended to heaven at sunrise and sunset together with the warbling of the Dirds, who seemed also to be singing their morning or evening hymn. These companions of his happy life, involved in his misfortune, shared in his banishment: * some, yielding * We know not exactly the time which Adam and Eve remained in the earthly Paradise; yet this abode must have been of some duration, and thus Milton understood it, whom we do not quote here in his character of a poet, but as a profound orientalist. If we recollect, moreover, that it was in Eden that Adam learned to distinguish and call by their names all the birds of the air, all the beasts of the earth, all the fishes which swim in the waters; that there he learned the virtues of plants, and what God thought proper to teach him of the course of the stars, we shall conclude that this was not the work of MOTHER OF GOD. IS to savage instinct, which had not declared itself in Paradise, fled into the depths of deserts and the hidden caves of moun¬ tains, whence they soon declared war unto death against their old master; others, inoffensive and gentle creatures, settled round about the grotto of their lord, to whom they offered their milk, their labour, their fleeces, and their me¬ lodious concerts, to satisfy his wants and charm away his sufferings. Well, it was among the ranks, not over nume¬ rous, of these humble friends, who had remained faithful to him in his distress, that Adam chose and marked out his victims; it was in the throat of the heifer which exhausted its udder to feed him, of the dove which took shelter in his bosom when the vulture hovered in the air, of the lamb which left its flowery pasture to come and lick his hand, that he had the heart to plunge the knife. Ah ! when man, un skilled as yet in killing, stretched at his feet a poor creature, gentle and timid, which struggled in a tide of blood amidst the chokings of agony, he must have stood pale and dis¬ mayed, like the assassin after his first murder! This thought came not from him; it was not an act of choice, but of painful obedience. Who imposed it ? He alone to whom it belongs to dispose of life and death—God. Adam committed a fault so enormous by its aggravating circumstances and disastrous consequences, that to express one day. The Persians and Chinese make the first man dwell in Paradise for several centuries. According to the opinion of the Arabs and rabbins, he remained there only half a day; but this half day of Paradise is equivalent, according to them, to five hundred years; for one day of Paradise answers to a thousand years. This space of time is too long, according to our ideas. It is commonly believed that Cain, whose birth is closely connected, in Genesis, with the expulsion of his parents, was bom in the year 13 of the creation, which would fix the abode in Paradise at about twelve years. This term, though rather short, would have sufficed for the first man to establish his authority over the animals subject to his sceptre, and to attach him to his humble subjects by the bonds of habit. |6 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, its full enormity, the Hebrew tradition relates that the sun was darkened with horror.* Satan attacked him in his strength, at the time when he knew nothing, as yet, but good; in the most beautiful abode of the earth, under the recent impression of the immense benefit of his creation, free, happy, tranquil, immortal, and capable of resisting if he had only pleased. From this high position it was that he fell into the frightful abyss of disobedience and ingratitude. The justice of God demanded a punishment proportioned to the offence: man was condemned to die a double death; and there was no hope for the human race, if a divine Being, predestined before the birth of time to the work of our redemption, had not undertaken to satisfy for us all. From that time he was called the Messias, and revealed as a Saviour at that very moment when the voice of God, “ that voice which breaketh down the cedars,” pronounced the sentence of the three guilty ones. “ Because thou hast done this,” said God to the serpent seducer, who proudly lifted up his head from our ruin, “ the seed of the woman, that is, a fruit produced from her, shall bruise thy head.” The Hebrew tradition adds that God, moved by the re¬ pentance of our first parents, revealed to them by an angel that a j ust man should be born of them, who should destroy the pernicious effects of the fruit of the tree of knowledge,! * It is in memory of the sin of Eve, at the sight of which, accord¬ ing to the Jews, the sun withdrew his light, that the Jewish women are specially commanded to light lamps, which bum in every house during the night of the Sabbath. “ It is just,” say the Hebrew doctors, “ that the women should rekindle the torch which they have extinguished, and that they should be burthened with this punishment in expiation of their sin.”—(Basnage, liv. vii. c. 13.) t It is generally supposed among Christians, that the tree of know¬ ledge was an apple-tree ; the Persians, on the contrary, maintain that this fatal tree was a fig-tree. In our days, the German Eichhorn makes it a species of manchineel. “ Making due deduction from the marvellous which surrounds the fall of man,” says the rationalist MOTHER OR GOD. by means of a voluntary oblation, and that he should be the salvation of those who should place their hope in him.* On the other hand, the Arabian traditions inform us that God, who is indignant and merciful, was pleased to make known to man the mode of imploring his pardon. This worship, revealed by God, was certainly sacrifice, a ceremony at once commemorative, expiatory, and symbolical, by which man confessed that he had deserved death, and by substituting innocent victims in his stead, recalled perpetually to his remembrance the great victim of Calvary. Thus then the institution of the bloody sacrifice, which was no human invention, reposed in reality upon a thought of the divine mercy; since it perpetuated among all nations that tradition of the Messias, without which the work of redemp¬ tion would have been a benefit lost. God matures his counsels in the course of ages, for a thousand years are with him as one day; but man is eager to obtain, for man endures but a short time. It appears that Eve had concluded, from the words of the angel, that she should be the mother of this Redeemer promised to her, and that in this thought she showed transports of extraordinary joy in bringing forth Cain,f whom she took for her Saviour. Undeceived by the perverse inclinations which he showed, she transferred her hopes to Abel, that so much beloved son, whose name recalls to mind the mourning and tears of his mother; \ then to Seth; but in vain, for the gates which writer, “ the fact remains that the constitution of the human body was, at first, vitiated by the use of a poisonous fruit.”—(Eichhom’s Argeschichte.) * Basnage, liv. vi. c. 25, p. 417. t Cain is called Cabel by all the Arabic authors ; this name, which means the first, is perhaps his proper name. The surname of Cain, which signifies traitor, may have been given to him afterwards.—■ (Savary, in a note to c. 5 of the Koran.) + Abel, which the Arabs write Habel, is, according to them, only the surname of that youthful shepherd who was the first type of Jesus a THE HIS TOR ¥ OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, angels guarded with fiery swords opened to her no more.* The just of the race of Seth, those pure and contemplative men, whom the Scripture calls the sons of God, and whom the Assyrian legends call genii, flattered themselves a long time with the same hope, for the Jewish tradition represents them to us as wandering about the heights bordering on the garden of Eden,f the gigantic cedars X of which they admired v/ith sighs, and where they flattered themselves that one of their just ones would enable them again to enter. But it was not the name of a virgin of the primitive times which was written in the immutable decrees of the Eternal; and the earth, yet trembling under the divine malediction, stood in need of being washed as by the ablutions of a baptism, before the feet of Him who was to bring good tidings on the mountains should leave upon them their sacred impression. Christ. In fact, it puts us in mind of that sorrowful event which threw the family of Adam into mourning, and properly signifies says Savary (loco citato ), “ He has left by his death a mother in tears.” Josephus, in like manner, says that the name of Abel signifies mourning.— (Antiq. Jud., p. 4.) * See Basnage, liv. vi. c. 25. The Arabic traditions place the terrestrial Paradise in that beautiful valley of Damascus which the oriental poets designate by the name of the Emerald of the Desert. Its admirable situation, its beauty, its fertility, justify this idea ; and a learned commentator on Genesis has not hesitated to consider this beautiful site as that of the garden of Eden, although the names of the Euphrates and the Tigris indicate a rather different situation. In support of this Arabic tradi¬ tion there is shown, at half-a-day’s journey from Damascus, a high mountain of white marble, overshadowed by beautiful trees, where there is a cavern, which is looked upon as the dwelling of Adam, Abel, and Cain; there is also seen the sepulchre of Abel, which is much respected by the Turks: the place where the fratricide was committed is marked by four columns.—(D’Herbelot, Bibliotheque Orientale, pp. 772 and 780; F. Pacifique, in his Commentaires sur la Bible.) J The great cedars of Eden have remained traditionally in the memory of the Hebrews, who have made the terrestrial Paradise their paradise. In most of their epitaphs we read these words—“ He has MOTHER OF GOD. to When the earth had absorbed the waters of the deluge, and the winds had dried it up, the new family of mankind, which revived under favourable promises, were eager to re¬ establish the worship practised by Enos. Noe added to it the seven precepts which bear his name, without forgetting those historical and religious traditions which his long existence before the flood had enabled him to collect. He told of man being formed of the earth, of his rebellion, his fall, his future restoration, for which the world would be in¬ debted to the miraculous parturition of a new Eve. At the sight of the bloody sacrifices offered for the unexpiated fault of their first fathers, he taught his descendants to lift up their eyes to a more august victim, seated at the right hand of Jehovah in the starry heights of heaven,—a victim of which the oblation of heifers and lambs was but the figure.* The nations at first faithfully preserved these primitive notions, which are constantly met with as the foundation of all creeds.f They built altars at the confluence of rivers, in gone down into the garden of Eden, to those who are among the cedars.”—(Basnage, t. v. liv. vii.) * “ The old law hears throughout the character of blood and death, as a figure of the new law established and confirmed by the blood of Jesus Christ.”—(Bossuet, Elev. sur les Myst., t. i. p. 428.) t The Indians, Chinese, Peruvians, and Hurons, acknowledge that the first man was formed from the earth. The Brahmins, who make enchanting pictures of their choream (paradise), place in it a tree the the fruit of which would confer immortality, if it were allowed to eat of it. The Persians relate that the evil genius Ahriman seduced our first parents under the form of a snalce. The history of the woman deceived at the foot of a tree, of the anger of God, and of the first fratricide, was a tradition among the Iroquois. The Tartars attribute our fall to a plant as sweet as honey, and of marvellous beauty; the Thibetans, to the fault of having tasted the dangerous plant sehimee, sweet and white as sugar: the knowledge of their state of nudity was revealed by this fruit. The tradition of the woman and the serpent was equally known in Mexico, &c.—(See Le Christ devant Is Siecle, by M. Eoselly de Lorgues, c. 9.) 26 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN ', the shade of forests, on the summits of mountains, on the shores of the green ocean, and on the sandy downs where the wormwood expands its leaves to the winds of the desert. The soft moonlight from the beginning lighted those rustic temples, which had no other boundaries than the horizon, no other ceiling than the sky with all its stars. At that far distant period, God was worthily adored, and with ideas so exact, so sublime, so uniform, and so simple, that they evi¬ dently could be traced up to himself. Nevertheless, an element of superstitious terror,—founded upon the terrible and recent remembrance of the drowning of the globe, a remembrance visible, traces of which are found in most of the religious festivals of antiquity,*—like a principle of destruction, crept into the post-diluvian worship. Herded together on the elevated plains of Caucasus, and the mountains of Armenia, the descendants of Noe had long efused, with an obstinacy which the authority of Noe him¬ self had been unable to conquer, to go down again into the plain; so much did they dread a second deluge! In vain did the rainbow display in the cloud—as if to remove all fear from the children of men—its soft and benign colours, where the green of the emerald united with the blue of the sapphire; this happy prognostic, this beautiful sign of a God appeased, diminished, but could not banish, a terror which had taken deep root: the tower of Babel is the proof. This gigantL monument of human pride concealed beneath its insolent defiance an immense amount of fear. It was as a fortress of refuge against the occurrence of a new deluge, which that race, which began already to be corrupt, felt that it again deserved. And when the confusion of tongues forced the descendants of Noe to disperse,—when they saw their pre¬ caution, offensive as it was to the sworn clemency of the Lord, turn to their confusion,—they were only the more disposed to be alarmed afresh. * bee Boulanger, Antiq. devoilee. It must be owned, as some excuse for them, that the earth presented at that time a spectacle but little encouraging; the whole economy of creation was in confusion. The rivers, straying out of their courses, formed immense fens of water and putrid marshes* in the vast plains which before the deluge were rendered full of animation by the graceful tents of the shepherds. The cedars lay extended along the sea¬ shores, whilst the spoils of the ocean were found on the summits of high mountains eternally covered with snow. Nothing was seen on all sides but towers levelled with the turf,f and towns silent and in ruins. The ploughshare everywhere struck against bones and rubbish. The ven¬ geance of provoked heaven had weighed heavily upon the human race, in a manner so overwhelming, that man, whose heart was still beating with fear at the remembrance of the perils which he had encountered, felt more disposed to dread his sovereign Master with great fear, than to love him with confiding affection: he was afraid of God! He distrusted his promises and his goodness. Like the shipwrecked man who is drowning, he sought eagerly around him for something to help him, which might interpose and conjure in the hour * History has preserved us proofs of this displacement of rivers after the deluge. We read in Strabo, b. ii., that the Araxes, -which waters Armenia, was still without any outlet, and inundated the country, when Jason, the chief of the Argonauts, opened a subterranean channel, by which the Araxes flowed into the Caspian Sea. In the celebrated Chou-King of Confucius, the Emperor Yao says that the waters, which formerly rose up to heaven, still bathed the feet of the highest moun¬ tains, and made the plains which they overflowed incapable of cultiva¬ tion.—(Freret, Chron. des Chinois, l&re partie.) t The tower of Babel, so near to the great deluge, may give some idea of antediluvian architecture; they had employed in it brick and bitumen. If, as everything leads us to believe, this imm ense tower resembled the ancient and famous tower of Bel, at Babylon, it was surrounded by a staircase outside, of gentle ascent, which rose spirally to the platform, and gave this edifice the appearance of seven tower* heaped up, one upon another. 22 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, of need that sacred, but terrible wrath. Noe had spoken of a Being powerful and divine, whose tender love for men was infinite, who was to plead their cause before the Eternal, and take their crimes upon himself; but who was this anxiously desired Mediator, this powerful friend ? He was no longer known. The descendants of Sem thought they had found him in the stars which charmed their solitary vigils, and which they supposed to be animated by celestial intelligences; * they entreated those intelligences to protect them, and lighted fires on the heights of mountains in their honour.f This was the origin of Sabeanism, which degenerated into idolatry, when the reprobate race of Cham, attaching them¬ selves to the material object, adored fire, water, earth, agitated air; and, insolently deriding the worship practised by Noe, who knew nothing of images, consecrated statues of silver to the moon, and statues of gold to the sun.J * It is a very ancient belief in the East, that the stars are living creatures; the Jewish doctors had fallen into this error, which was oi much older origin than their people. Philo said that the stars were intelligent creatures, who had never done any harm, and were incapable of any. According to Maimonides, the stars knew God who made them, knew themselves, and their actions are always good and holy.— (Philo., de Mundi Opificio, de Gigant., de Somniis; Maimonides, More nevochim, pt. ii. c. 4, p. 194, et de Fundam. legis, c. 3, § ll. v The modern Persians still sacrifice to the angel of the moon. t According to It. Bechai, the Sabeans did not adore the sun; they only lighted fires on the earth to thank God for the torch which he lighted up for them in the heavens; and when they looked at the stars, they besought the angels whom God has placed there, to move them to be favourable to them.—(R. Bechai, Comm, in Genes., c. 1.) The fires still lighted in almost every country in Europe, and which in France are called fires of St. John, are remnants of Sabeanism. X The ancient Arabs, descended from Cham, despised Noe because he did not serve images; they consecrated statues of silver to the moon, and statues of gold to the sun; they divided the metals ani climates among the stars; they believed that they have great influence MOTHER OF GOD. *3 As time went on, the darkness thickened; religious systems were loaded with rites; the worship of tho true God was gradually mixed up with that of the stars and the elements; the invention of hieroglyphics completed the con¬ fusion ; and the few truths which escaped the subversion of religious belief were mysteriously hidden in the recesses of idolatrous sanctuaries, like sepulchral lamps, which burn only for the dead. They were withdrawn assiduously from the multitude,* who lavished their senseless adorations on stones, trees, rivers, mountains, and animals, a still more degrading worship, and which ended by placing their vices and passions in heaven. Then it was that impostors, speculating upon human credulity, confounded or purposely broke the thread of patriarchal traditions which already hung so loosely to¬ gether, and audaciously substituting remembrance for hope, assembled around the cradles of their fabulous kings, their false prophets and powerless divinities, the wonders of the Incarnation of the Word, and the primitive revelations of his exalted and tragical destiny. Thus, we maintain, those analogies are explained which at first appear incomprehensible. All the nations of polytheism, however, did not take the mystery of the Messias for an accomplished fact. The Druids, immediately before the Christian era, still erected, in the dark forests of Gaul, an altar to the Virgin “ who was to bring forth.” The Chinese, taught by Confucius, who over things which are devoted to them, and to the images consecrated to them.—(Maimonides, More nevochim, pt. iii. c. ii. p. 423.) * Plato, speaking of the God who formed the universe, says that he is forbidden to make him known to the people. The hooks of Numa, written upon the hark of the birch-tree, and found in his tomb many ages after his death, were secretly burnt as dangerous to polytheism. The Br ahmins , who, if certain travellers are to be believed, have a sublime idea of the Divinity, make the Hindoos nevertheless adore the most hideous idols that ever existed. The true religion alone ha# treated men as immortal and rational creatures. 24 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, had himself found this oracle in ancient traditions, expected the “ Holy One, born of a virgin and Son of God, who was to die for the salvation of the world,”* in the western regions of Asia, and sent after him, by a solemn embassy, less than half a century after the death of the Man-God. The Magi, on the faith of Zerdhucht, studied the constella¬ tions to find there the star of Jacob, which was to guide them to the cradle of Christ.f The Brahmins sighed after the avatar X of' him who was to “ purify the world from sin,” and prayed for him to Wichnou, as they laid upon his altar, sparkling with precious stones, odoriferous tufts of basil, the favourite plant of the Indian god. The proud sons of Romulus, those idolaters by pre-eminence, who had created whole legions of gods, read in those books of the Cumean Sibyl, contemporary with Achilles and Hector, so jealously and politically guarded, “ the virgin, the divine child, the adoration of the shepherds, the serpent vanquished, and the golden age restored to the earth.” In fine, towards the time of the Messias, all the nations of the East were in ex¬ pectation of a future Saviour ; and Boulanger, who thought better of it on his death-bed, after showing how general this expectation was, illogieally calls it an universal chimera.§ * According to the ancient sages of China, Bays the learned Schmitt, the Holy One, the miraculous man, will renew the world, change the manners, expiate the sins of the world, die overwhelmed with grief and opprobrium, and open the gates of heaven.—(See Redempt. du genre humairu) f Abulfarage (Historia Dynastiarum) says that Zerdhucht foretold to the Magi the birth of the Messias, bom of a virgin; he added that, at the time of his birth an unknown star would appear, which would conduct them to his cradle, and he commanded them to carry him presents. Sharistani, a Mussulman author, relates in like manner a prophecy of Zerdhucht, relating to a great prophet who should reform the world, as well in the matter of religion as in that of justice, and to whom the princes and kings of the earth should be subject. X Avatar, the fabulous incarnation of a Hindoo divinity $ “An unanimous testimony is of the greatest weight,” says MOTHER OF GOD. 25 But what were these pale glimmerings, too weak to dissi¬ pate the darkness of idolatry, compared with the stream of light which illuminated the elect people of God ? We are struck with astonishment at the sight of this chain of prophecy, the first link of which hangs on to the infancy of the world, while the last is fastened to the tomb of Christ.* The threat of Jehovah to the infernal serpent includes, as we have already observed, the first of the oracles relating to the Messias. We have also said, and the Jewish traditions confirm it, that this oracle was more particularly explained, in the sequel, to the exiles of Eden, when they were recon¬ ciled to heaven by repentance, t Noe, who was constituted by God heir of the faith, J transmitted these revelations to Sem; and Sem, whose long life nearly equalled those of his ancestors, might have repeated them to the father of the faithful. Then it was that a mysterious benediction, which comprised the promise of the Messias, announced that the blessed germ promised to Eve should be also the germ and offset of Abraham. The primitive traditions are soon suc¬ ceeded by the grand prophecy of Jacob. The dying patriarch, who has beheld in spirit the condition of the twelve tribes when they shall have been in Palestine, an¬ nounces to his sons, assembled round his death-bed, that Juda has been chosen, among all his brethren, to be the stock of the kings of Israel, and the father of that Shiloh so often promised, who is to be the King of kings, and the Lord of lords. The coming of Christ is designated in a pre¬ cise manner: he shall spring up from the midst of the ruins Bemardine de St. Pierre, “for there cannot be upon the earth an universal error.”—(Etudes de la Nature, etude viii. p. 398.) * It is a tradition taught in the synagogue, and admitted as true by the Church, that all the prophets, without one exception, prophesied solely for the time of the Messias.—(St. Cypr. de Vanit. Idol.) + Basnage, t. iv. liv. vii. X Epist. St. P. ad Pebr. ii. 26 THE HISTORY 01 THE BLESSED VIRGIN, of his country, when the schebet (the sceptre, the legislative authority) shall be in the hands of the stranger.* The prophet saved from the waters, who was divinely called to collect and consign to writing the history of the first ages and ancient traditions of the human race,—tradi¬ tions, the memory of which was still fresh among the nations,—does not fail to lend the support of his imposing testimony to the prophecy of Jacob: “ The Lord thy God,” said he, speaking to the people of God, “ will raise up to thee a prophet of thy nation, and of thy brethren, like unto me: him thou shalt hear. And he that will not hear his words which he shall speak in my name, I will be the revenger.” + * Christians apply this revelation of Jacob to the Messias, and prove from it to the Jews that he must have come long ago, since for eighteen centuries their tribes have been intermixed, their sacrifices abolished, their political existence extinct; that they no longer possess a territory, nor princes of their nation, and that in all the places where they are dispersed they submit to the laws of foreign nations. To elude the force of this argument, the Jews maintain nowadays, that the word schebet, which we translate by sceptre, equally signifies the rod which chastises the slave; and they set out from this to maintain that, even if this oracle did refer to the Messias, all that could be concluded from it would be that their chastisement would endure till his coming, who was to deliver them from it. In fine, they deny that the word Shiloh can be translated Messias. But their ancient books contradict them; this prophecy is understood of the Messias in the Talmud; and this is how the Paraphrase of Onkelos explains this passage: “ Juda shall not be without some one invested with supreme authority, nor without scribes of the sons of her children, till the Messias shall come.” Jonathan, to whom the Jews assign the first place among the disciples of Hillel, and whom they reverence almost as Moses, translates schebet in the same way by principality, and Shiloh by Messias ; the Paraphrase of Jerusalem also adopts this opinion. Thus the most ancient, most authentic, and most respectable commentaries among them supply victorious arms where¬ with to combat them. t Hence comes that hope of a new law which the Jews expect with the Messias, a law which they place far above that of Moses. “ The \aw which man studies in this world is but vanity,” say their doctors, MOTHER OF GOD. a? Now the synagogue always understood this very clear text as referring to the Messias : St. Philip applies it, with¬ out hesitation, to our divine Redeemer when he says to Nathanael, “ We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write, Jesus the son of Joseph of Nazareth.” Towards the end of the mission of Moses, and whilst Israel were still encamped in the desert, Balaam, whose curses a Moabite prince had bargained for in the Valley of Willows,* came in his turn to confirm the expectation of the Messias, and to designate in a clear and precise manner the great epoch of his coming. Standing upon the rocky summit of Phogor, surrounded by victims slain for a sacrifice of hatred, in sight of the accursed lake and the barren moun¬ tains of Arabia, the soothsayer from the banks of the Eu¬ phrates, moved by the spirit of God, perceives, as with the eye of a dream,f a wonderful vision; his expressions, inter¬ rupted by solemn pauses, are thrown out without order and without art upon the winds of the mountains, like fragments of some mysterious conversation held in a low tone with powers invisible: “ I shall see him, but not now. I shall behold him, but not near. A star shall rise out of Jacob, “in comparison -with that of Moses.”—(Medrasch-Rabba, in Eccl. xi. 8.) * The plain of Babylon, intersected by rivers and canals, and on that account very marshy, abounded in willows. Hence it is called in Scripture the “ Valley of Willows.” t If we did not know that the prophecy of Balaam is very ancient, the very manner in which it is made would sufficiently indicate it. Balaam, the Chaldean astrologer, does not prophecy like the seers of Juda; he requires avast horizon, whence he perceives at once the earth, the sea, and the sky; he expresses himself like a man who relates to himself the things that he sees at the moment when he speaks, and which make the strongest impression upon him. This kind of prophecy somewhat resembles what the Scotch highlanders call second sight. 28 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, and a sceptre shall spring up from Israel, and shall strike the chiefs of Moab.” Incoherent words are followed by a magnificent but gloomy picture of the conquests of the kingly people. It is not without purpose that the prophetic vision exhibits Borne at the highest point of its colossal power; then it is that Christ is to visit the earth, and immo¬ late himself for us upon the disgraceful tree. The prophet paints this epoch of blood in strong colours; one would say that cities and empires yet unborn present themselves to him on the mirage of the desert. He beholds the fleet of the Caesars leaving the ports of Italy, and directing its prows, favoured by victory, towards the flat shores of the Syrians ; he sees the ruin of that Judea which is not to be in existence till long after, and where the people of God as yet possess nothing but a few sepulchres which they can call their own; in fine, he follows with his eye the fall of the Roman eagle, seven hundred years before the birth of the sons of Ilia, and when the wild goats of Latium are browsing peacefully upon the shrubby declivities of the seven hills. Ages roll on, and other ages after them, without any other promises from Jehovah; but the oracles relating to the Messias are confided to tradition, which retains them faith¬ fully, or deposited in the sacred law. Israel maintains an obscure contest, but one incessant and furious, against those idolatrous nations which surround and press upon his tribes ; at times he gives way to that strange propensity which draws him into idolatry, and then the fatal sword of the Amorrhite and the Moabite is unconsciously drawn in the Lord’s cause, and avenges unintentionally the injury done to the God of Jacob. But during these varied fortunes, the people do not forget the coming of Christ; they live in the faith of the Messias; in default of new revelations, their very life becomes prophetic. Institutions, political and religious, local customs and private manners all tend to the same object, all flow from the same source, all are connected with MOTHER OF GOD *) the generation of the Saviour, born of a virgin of Juda. It was the coming of the Messias, which the prophet Samuel came to pray for on his knees, in the holy of holies, before the Schekina, his bright and divine emblem; as did also the high priests, who succeeded one after another, later on, in the temple of Solomon. It is with the expectation of the Messias that that law of Deuteronomy is connected, which provides that the brother shall raise up a heir to his brother who has died without children, that his name may be pre¬ served in Israel. It is that lost hope of being related one day, more or less remotely, to that heavenly envoy, which causes that young and meek virgin of Galaad to lament on the mountains of Judea, who carries with her no other regret to the blood-stained sepulchre where her father’s race has become extinct.* It is to this belief, so general among the Hebrews, that the Thecuite woman alludes, when de¬ nouncing to King David the secret plot which was contriving against her sole surviving son; she poetises her fears as a mother, and at the same time a Jewish matron, by that touching sentence, “My lord, they seek to quench my spark which is left! ” Nothing but the present incredulity of the Jews could equal in depth the faith of their ancestors. The great con¬ cern of those men of ancient times was the coming of the Messias; those who died at a period still so remote from that in which the divine promises were to be accomplished, died in the firm persuasion that they would be one day fulfilled; * Some rabbins maintain that the daughter of Jephte was not sacrificed, but merely condemned to perpetual celibacy. This asser¬ tion is contradicted by that text of Scripture which says: “ That from year to year the daughters of Israel assemble together, and lament the daughter of Jephte, the Galaadite, for four days.”—(Judges xi. 40.) People do not mourn for a person living. Flavius Josephus also affirms the immolation of the daughter of Jephte.—(Ant. Jud., t. ii. lib. v. c. 9.) 30 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, on the threshold of eternity they hailed that hope from afar off, as Moses, the great prophet, hailed, with a sigh, that “land of milk and honey” which the Lord closed against nim. From the time of David, and under the kings his children, the thread of prophecy is joined again, and the mystery of the Virgin and the Messias is more than ever declared by predictions magnificent and clearer than the sun. The holy king, whom the God of Israel had preferred to the race of Saul, sees the virginity of Mary, and the extra¬ ordinary birth of the Son of God. Thy birth, says he, not defiled, like that of the children of men, shall be pure as the morning dew. Then, lifting up his eyes on high, he beholds Him whom God has given him for his son according to the flesh, seated on the right hand of Jehovah, on a throne more durable than the heavens and the stars. In the earlier prophecies, the Blessed Virgin, though always pointed out, was nevertheless a little in the shade, and, so to speak, in the background of the picture; but from the days of David, the radiant form of Mary no longer presents features so irregular, and she who was to cause the blood of Abraham, of Jacob, and of Jesse the Just to flow in the veins of the God-Man, is delineated more exactly. David had spoken of her virginal parturition. Solomon delighted in tracing her image with sweet strokes of the pencil, which leave far behind the graceful descriptions of the peris of the East, those smiling and airy divinities which cross the dreams of the shepherd of Arabia. He sees her rising up in the midst of the daughters of Juda, “ as a lily among thorns; ” her eyes are sweet and soft, “ like those of doves; ” from her lips, red “ as a scarlet lace,” proceeds a voice pure and melodious, like the sound of harps exciting Israel to the combat; her step is light “as the smoke of perfumes,” and her beauty rivals in splendour “ the rising moon.” Her tastes are simple and full of poetry; she loves MOlHBR OF GOD 3 ' to stray in the fresh valleys, “ where the vines are in blos¬ som,” and the figs appear in knots, like emeralds, on the leafless branches; her eyes perceive the red buds of the pomegranate, the tree of Paradise, 4- and she delights in listening to the plaintive strain of the turtle. Silent and retired, she withdraws from the sight of all, and hides herself in her dwelling, like the dove “ which makes its nest in the clefts of the rock.” She is chosen for a mystical hymen, in preference to the virgins and queens of all nations; a crown is promised to her by Him “ whom her soul loveth,” and the happy band which unites her to her royal spouse “is stronger than death.” f Elias, in prayer on Mount Carmel, to obtain the end of that long drought which for three years parches the earth and dries up the springs, discovers the promised Virgin, under the form of a transparent cloud, which rises from the bosom of the waters to announce the return of rain. The blessings of the people hail this favourable augury, \ and the prophet, who penetrates into divine things, builds an oratory to the future Queen of Heaven. § Isaias declares to the house of David, whose chief, Achab, trembles under the threats of the stranger, “ like a forest beaten down by a tempest,” that God will give an encouraging sign of the * The orientals give the pomegranate the name of “ fruit of Para¬ dise.” t All the holy fathers notice that the “Canticle of Canticles” is only a continued allegory of the Mother of God. t When rain falls in Palestine, there is general joy among the people; they assemble in the streets, they sing, they are fall of agitation, and cry out as loud as they can, “ O God ! O blessed! ”— (Volney, Voyage en Syrie.) § The oratory which Elias erected on Mount Carmel was dedicated hy him to the Virgin who was to bring forth, Virgini pariturae. This chapel was called Semnceum, which means a place consecrated to an empress, who can he no other than Mary, the Empress of heaven and earth.—(Hist. duMont Carmel, succession du Saint Proph&e, c. 31.) THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN,\ 32 future condition of Judea—a future to be yet long and glorious. “ A virgin shall conceive ; * she shall bring fortfc a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel, that is, God with us. This child, miraculously given to the earth, shall be an offset from the stock of Jesse, a flower sprung from his root.f He shall be called God, the Mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of peace. He shall stand for an ensign of people, him the Gentiles shall beseech, and his sepulchre shall be glorious.” * This great oracle of Isaias has been the subject of a long and perplexing dispute between the Jews and the Christians, The rabbins, who have commented on the text since Jesus Christ, anxious to change the nature of the proofs which condemn them, and obscure the words of the prophet, have contended that the word /talma, which is found in the Hebrew text, signifies merely a young woman, although the Septuagint has translated it by virgin. The fathers have triumphantly refuted this objection. “The seventy interpreters,” says St. John Chrysostom, “are they who most deserve credit; they made their version more than a century before Jesus Christ; they were many together; their time, their number, and their union render them far more worthy of credit than the Jews of our days, who have maliciously corrupted many places of the holy Scriptures.”—(St. Joan. Chrys., Serin. 4, o. i.) St. Jerom, the most profound Hebrew scholar of all the interpreters and all the commentators of Scripture, pronounces, as he says, without fear of contradiction from the Jews, that halma, wherever the word occurs in the divine Scriptures, signifies exclusively a virgin in all her innocence, and nowhere a married woman.— (Comm. St. Hieron. in Is., lib. iii.) Luther, who made so deplorable use of really great learning, cries out with the fury and vehemence for which he is so well known: “ If any Jew or Hebraist can show me that halma signifies in any place a woman of any kind, and not a virgin, he shall have from me one huudred florins, if please God I can find them.”—(OSuvres de Luther, t. viii. p. 129.) Mahomet himself has borne testimony to the virginity of the Mother of God. “And Mary, daughter of Imram, who has kept her virginity; and we have sent of our spirit into her, and she has believed the words of her Lord and his Scriptures.”—(Koran, Surate 66.) f Jesse, called also Isai, was the son of Obed and father of David. 11 is memory is in high veneration among the Hebrews, who regard him as an accomplished iust one. MOTHER OF GOD. 33 The mystery of the Messias was entirely unveiled to the prophets; some of them see Bethlehem rendered illustrious by his birth; others foretell his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, and even describe the peaceful and slow-paced animal on which he rides. They see him enter the temple that sacred priest according to the order of Melchisedech; they know the number of pieces of silver which the butcher* of the synagogue will drop into the hand of the base wretcL who sells his master to them;* they see the punishment of slaves, the draught of gall offered to the agony of a God, and the robe, woven by the hands of a Mother, cast lots for by rude soldiers; they hear the nails which tear the bleeding flesh, and are driven with a harsh, rough sound into the accursed wood. And then the scene changes, like those pictures of Raphael, where the subject begun upon the earth is continued beyond the clouds. The Man of Sorrows, the humble Messias, whom his own relations have treated with scorn, whom his own people have not known, looks down from the highest heavens upon his prostrate enemies: all the nations of the earth remember their God, forgotten for so many ages ! The nations rally at the standard of the cross, and the empire of Christ shall have no bounds but those of the world. Nothing is wanting to the completion of the prophecies: Jacob has determined the coming of the Shiloh at that precise moment when the Jews shall cease to be governed by their own laws, which implies the ruin of a state; Balaam adds that this ruin will be the work of a people come from Italy, and the satrap Daniel reckons up precisely the weeks which are to elapse to that time. “ All that happens in the world has its sign before it,” as * This, passage, in which God himself states the exact number of pieces of silver of this infamous compact, bears the impress of bitter and terrible irony. “ And the Lord said to me : Cast it to the statuary, a goodly price that I was priced at by them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver,” &c.—(Zach. xi. 13.) D li THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, a man of genius has said, who now remains so solitary and so formidable beneath his tent. “ When the sun is about to rise, the horizon is tinted with a thousand colours, and the east appears all on fire. When the tempest comes, a dull murmur is heard on the shore, and the waves are agitated as if by themselves.” The figures of the Old Testament, as the fathers of the Church acknowledge, are the signs which an¬ nounce the rising of the Sun of Justice and of the Star of the Sea. To Christ, the Son of God, belongs power; to Mary, grace and merciful goodness. She is the tree of life re¬ planted in the abodes of men by the hands of God himself, and the earnest of a happiness preferable to that which our first parents enjoyed in Eden; the dove of the ark which brings the olive branch to the earth; the fountain sealed up, the waters of which have not been defiled by anything impure; the fleece which receives the dew from heaven; in fine, the frail and odoriferous bush of wild roses through which Moses perceived the Deity—the bush, which so far from being consumed by fire, which destroys all things, was in some measure preserved by it, and lost neither leaf nor flower from contact with the heavenly flame.* Like that enchanting figure which an antique painter formerly composed, by borrowing a thousand scattered traits | from the most beautiful women of Greece, the chaste spouse f of the Holy Ghost repeated in her single person all that the j most celebrated women of the old law had offered to the admiration of their contemporaries. Beautiful as Rachel * Philo, who has made this remark, and who discovers in burning bush a mysterious allegory, applies it erroneously to the Jewish nation by forced resemblances. Josephus, who sought in like manner to understand this mystery, has succeeded no better. Those wild roses, emblematical of chaste virgins who diffuse their mode t perfume in solitude, and whom the contact of the Divinity causes to shine without prejudice to the holy purity of their white and delicate blossom, are the most striking image of Mary, that mystical Rose of the new law. MOTHER OF GOD. and Sarah, she knew how to unite the prudence of Abigail with the courageous resolution of Esther. Susanna, chaste as the flower of which she bore the name ; * Judith, whose crown of lilies was stained with the blood of Holophernes ; t Axa, whose hand was the prize for a conquered city; and that mother, so great and so unfortunate, who saw all her sons die for the law,—were but faint images of her who was to unite in herself all the perfections of woman and angel. After an expectation of four thousand years, the time marked out by so many prophecies arrives at last; the shadows of the old law disappear, and Mary arises in the horizon of Judea, like the star which is the harbinger of day. CHAPTER II. THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION. A woman destined from all eternity to be the means of saving the world by deifying our nature, and to contain in her chaste womb Him whose “tabernacle is the sun, and who bows the heavens beneath his feet ”—a woman expected from the creation of the globe, revealed by G-od himself in Paradise, and the avowed end of all the holy generations who have succeeded one after the other from the days of the patriarchs,! can be no ordinary creature, and must have * The name of Susanna signifies lily. —(Favyn, ii. 2.) + The ancients attributed to lilies the power of neutralising enchant¬ ments and averting dangers. “ Judith bound her forehead,” say the rabbins, “with a wreath of lilies, that she might make her way into the tent of Holophernes without fear.”—(Comm. RE. in Judith.) t According to St. Augustin, the progeny to which all the patriarchs aspire is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ in Mary, to whom alone their fecundity could extend. “And in fact,” says he, “if 36 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, prerogatives superior to humanity. The pious belief in the immaculate conception of Mary flows from this feeling oi reverence. Descendants of an unfortunate head,—degraded by our rebellious father, disgraced by the sentence which con¬ demns him instead of receiving from him the life of grace, we have received from him the death of sin, and, by a fearful destiny, we are condemned before we are born. This misery, inherent in the human race, cursed as one man in its origin, is common to all, and the Scripture has made no exception in favour of any child of Adam ; but the piety of the faithful could not bear the idea that the Mother of God should be subject to the disgraceful condemnation which marks us with the seal of hedl in the wombs of our mothers ; they have been persuaded that the Sovereign Judge must have suspended the general effect of his severe law in favour of her who came into the world for no other purpose than to contribute to the accomplishment of the most secret, most incomprehensible of the counsels of God—the incarnation of the Messias. Notwithstanding the silence of the gospel, it has been generally believed that the Virgin, with a view to her divine maternity, was held back, as it were, on the brink of the abyss which the fatal disobedience of our first parents opened under our feet, and that her conception was immacu¬ late as her life. This belief, which the Greeks borrowed from Palestine, and adopted with enthusiasm,* led to the institution of the nature in all her efforts tends to Jesus Christ, who is the Lord of ages, it is not that she flatters herself that she shall attain to the son of God by her own power alone; the extent of her power stops at the humble Mary, who is to bring forth the blessed germ, not by the power of her forefathers, hut by the virtue of the Most High.”—(St. Augustin, 5, contr. Jul. 9.) * We read in the Menologies, so ancient in the use of the Greeks , these words, which clearly set forth their belief in the mystery of the immaculate conception:—By a particular providence, the Lord was pleased that the Blessed Virgin should he as pure, from the first MOTHER OF GOD. 37 Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which v/as celebrated with great pomp at Constantinople as early as the sixth century.* In the West, on the other hand, this doctrine met with opponents, and powerful ones; *'or St. Anselm, St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas of Aquin, Albert the Great, and many other learned and Aviso personages, all great theologians, and what is more, very devout to Mary, maintained that she had been conceived in sin, and subject to the general law,+ although shortly after she had been entirely purified from it, by a special and surpassing favour, which began her glorious state of Mother of God. But the belief in the immaculate conception of the holy Virgin prevailed in the end over the opinion of the great doctors of the middle ages ; what the eagles of the schools had not seen was discovered to the unlearned. The writings of the apostles and doctors were turned over afresh; what they have bequeathed to us from age to age concerning the grandeurs of Mary, was more scrupulously examined, and this research caused strong light to fall on this obscure point of the history of the Mother of Christ. And, in fact, when we go back to the apostles, we already see the title of most holy and immaculate applied to Mary.J moment of her life, as it became her who was to become worthy to conceive and bring forth Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.” * St. Andrew of Crete makes mention of this Feast of the Immacu¬ late Conception, the office of which had been composed by St. Sabbas, to which St. Germanus, Patriarch of Constantinople, added an antiphon. t The adversaries of the immaculate conception glory in reckoning in their ranks St. Anselm, St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas, Albert the Great, &c. Great as these names are, we must not allow ourselves to he dazzled by them; for by comparing these doctors with themselves, we find that they positively maintained opinions both for and against , which shows that their opinion was not decided on this point, or else that they had strange distractions. + St. James the Great and St. Mark, in their Liturgies- j8 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, The apostle St. Andrew, quoted by the Babylonian Abdias, expresses himself in these terms :—“ As the first Adam was made of the earth before it was cursed, so the second Adam was formed of virgin earth which was never cursed.” The saints and martryrs who lived in the third century St. Hippolytus,*' Origen,f St. Dionysius of Alexandria,$ give to the holy Virgin the qualification of “pure,” and “ im¬ maculate.” St. Cyprian § is more precise, and says plainly that “ there is a very great difference between the rest of mortals and the Virgin, and that all she has in common with them is their nature, and not their fault. In the fourth century St. Ambrose, who compares tho Virgin to “a straight and shining stem, where there was never found the knot of original, or the bark of actual sin ; ”|| St. John Chyrsostom,1T who proclaims her “most holy, immaculate, blessed above all creatures; ” St. Jerom,** who poetically makes her “ the cloud of the day which never knew darkness; ” St. Basil,ff whose footsteps the defenders of the immaculate conception have always gloried in follow¬ ing,—have never varied as to that purity of the lily which applies so well to the queen of angels. In the fifth century, St. AugustinJJ cannot bear that even the name of Mary should be mentioned when there is any * St. Hipp. in an oration “ On the Consummation of the World.” f Orig. Horn, in St. Matt. X St. Dion, in an epistle mentioned in the Biblioth. des PP. St. Cypr., de Nat. Virg. || “ Virgo in qua nec nodus originalis, nee cortex actualis culpaj fuit.”—(St. Arnbr., de Inst. Virg., c. v.) U St. J. Chrysostom, in his Liturgy. ** Commentaries of St. Jerom on Ps. lxxvii. “ Deduxit eos in nute diei: nubes est beata Virgo, quae pulchre dicitur nubes diei, quia non fuit in tenebris, sed semper in luce.” ft St. Basil, in his Liturgy. XX It must be observed that St. Augustin was then defending the doctrine of original sin against the Pelagians, MOTHER OF GOD. 39 question of sin; anrl St. Peter Chrysologus* * * § affirms that “ah have been saved in the Virgin.” St. Fulgentius, who lived at the beginning of the sixth century, says that the “ holy Virgin was entirely excepted from the primeval sentence.”! “It is wrong,” says St. II- defonsus,! Archbishop of Toledo, who flourished in the same century, “to seek to subject the mother of God to the laws of nature ; it is manifest that she was free from original sin, and that she removed the malediction of Eve.” St. John Damascen,§ speaking expressly of her conception, says that she was “pure and immaculate .” In the ninth centurj Theophanes, Abbot of Grandchamp ; in the tenth, St. Ful- bert, Bishop of Chartres ; towards the middle of the eleventh, Yvo,|| one of the most shining lights of that time, and a little later, St. Bruno,1 founder of the Carthusians, are evi¬ dently in favour of the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin. Islamism itself declares for the immaculate conception, and the Arab commentators on the Koran have adopted, in their way, the opinion of those Catholic divines who have declared themselves for that doctrine. “ Every descendant of Adam,” says Cottada, “ from the moment of his coming into the world, is touched in the side by Satan : Jesus and Mary * St. Peter Chrysol., de Annunciat., Serin. 140. f St. Fulg., Serm. de laudibus Mari®.—Serm. de duao. nat. Jesu. Christi. % St. Ildefonsus, in his book De Virginit. Marias. § St. J. Damascen, De Nativ. Marise., Or. la. || The two holy bishops of Chartres, Fulbert and Yvo, declared themselves in favour of the immaculate conception. Yvo maintained it in the pulpit, and Fulbert says in his Paraphrase on the Angelical Salutation to the Virgin, “Ave, Maria, electa et insignis inter Alias, quae immaculata semper extitisti ab exordio tuae creationis, quia paritura eras Creatorem totius sanctitatis.” It St. Bruno, in his explanation of these words of Ps. ci., “ Dominus de coelo in terrain aspexit,” which he applies to the Blessed Virgin. 4o THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, however, must be excepted; for God placed a veil between them and Satan, which preserved them from his fatal contact.” These testimonies in favour of the immaculate conception of Mary become more feeble and less abundant in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; few authors of note wrote then in this sense, and many men eminent for their learning and sanctity maintained the contrary opinion. To make up for this, the Feast of the Conception of the Virgin was esta¬ blished in several kingdoms. William the Conqueror established this feast in Normandy as early as 1074; and from the reign of Henry I., his son, King of England and Duke of Normandy, it was celebrated at Rouen with extraordinary solemnity. “ It was insti¬ tuted,” say the ancient chroniclers, “ on account of the holy apparition made to an abbot wo rthy of credit, who had en¬ countered the perils of the sea during a tempest.” An old history of the antiquities of Rouen adds, that “from the very time of the institution of the feast, an association was founded of the most respectable personages of the town, who still elect every year one of their number to be the prince of the confraternity, who, holding the puy, or platform for all speakers, in all languages, gives excellent and val uable prizes to those who most elegantly, faithfully, and appro¬ priately shall have celebrated the praise of the Virgin Mary on the subject of her holy conception, by hymns, odes, son¬ nets, ballads, royal songs, &c.* Thus the Virgin, full of grace, presided over the revival of poetry, and her immaculate conception furnished pious sub¬ jects for the country of the minstrels. From Normandy the Feast of the Conception of the Virgin came amongst the English. The first council of Oxford, * Antiquites et Singularites de la ville de Rouen, by N. Taillepied, MOTHER OF GOD. 4 ' held by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the year 1222, places it in the number of holidays kept without servile work. In France, in the year 1288, a bishop of Paris, Renoul de Hombiere, left by his will a considerable sum to found the office of this Feast of the Holy Virgin, which was introduced at the same time in the Lyonnais. In fine, a manuscript martyrology of the thirteenth century, found in the library of the Dominicans of Dijon, marks the Feast of the Conception of Our Lady, on the 8th of December ; “ which shows plainly enough,” say the learned Benedictines who have read this ancient MS., “ that this feast was already celebrated almost everywhere in the Church in the time of St. Dominic.” The doctrine of the immaculate conception had been ba¬ nished from the pulpits and schools for a long space of time, when certain divines who had been convinced that this belief came down from the highest and purest sources of Christianity, undertook to revive it. The Fransiscans, who first began to make public profession of it by writing* and word of mouth, supported it by reasons so strong and convincing that not only the mass of the faithful, but the most learned bodies in Europe adhered to it with enthusiasm. The Sorbonne, which was then called the “ firmament of science, the sup¬ port of truth and piety in the Church of God,” ordained that all who should be promoted to the degree of doctor should engage upon oath to maintain this religious belief.! This * Montfaucon, who travelled through Italy about the year 1698, having paid a visit at Pavia to the library of the Chevalier Beleridus, renowned for his piety, was much surprised to see that this immense collection of books was entirely composed of treatises written by the Franciscans in defence of the immaculate conception. t The decree of the Sorbonne is as follows:—“ We decree and declare that no one shall be admitted in future into our faculty without promising on oath to defend all his life this doctrine of the immaculate conception.” “ Statuentes ut nemo deinceps huic nostro 42 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN , was done successively by the universities of Mentz, Cologne, Valentia, Alcala, Coimbra, Salamanca, and Naples. Among those religious orders who did honour to France for so many centuries, the Dominicans alone, or nearly alone, showed themselves hostile to the pious doctrine of the immaculate conception; but the learned Benedictines, who are held in veneration by the Protestants themselves for their immense scientific labours; the Carthusians, the Car¬ melites, the Order of St. Augustin, of Cluny, of Citeaux, of the Premonstratensians, and a multitude of others, whom it would be tedious to enumerate here, adhered with en¬ lightened piety, ardent zeal, and profound conviction to the doctrine of the immaculate conception. Councils have been favourable to this belief. That of Basle, in its session of 27th of September, 1429, says that “ the doctrine which teaches that the glorious Virgin Mary was conceived without sin is a pious doctrine con- lsrmable to the worship of the Church, to Catholic faith, to right reason, and to Holy Scripture.* The Council of Avignon confirmed, in 1457, the decree of the Council collegio adscribatur, nisi se hujus doctrinse assertorem semper pro viribus futurum, simili juramento, profiteatur.” * “ There has arisen in this holy council (that of Basle) a difficult question on the conception of the glorious Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and on the commencement of her sanctification; some saying that her soul was for some time, or at least for some moments, actually subject to original sin; others maintaining, on the contrary, that the love which God had for her extended to the first moment of her creation; that the Most High, who himself established her, and the Son, who formed her to be his mother upon earth, loaded he* with singular and extraordinary graces; that Jesus Christ redeemed her in a superior and quite peculiar manner, by preserving her from the original stain, and sanctifying her in the first momont of her conception. Having therefore examined discreetly the reasons and authorities which, for several years, have been alleged on one side and the other, in the public acts of this holy council—having moreover given attention to many other things on the same subject— MOTHER OF GOD. 43 of Basle; and in their session of 1564* the fathers oi the Council of Trent declared that in the decree which they had made in 1546, on original sin, they had never intended to include the blessed and immaculate Mother ol God. Notwithstanding the prudent reserve which the Holy See prescribed to itself in an affair where famous doctors and illustrious divines appeared on both sides, it could not help making it appear to which side its sympathies leaned. From the year 1483, Pope Sixtus IY. had expressly forbidden any disputation in pulpits and schools upon the conception of Our Lady.f This might be taken for a simple act of neu¬ trality if this pontiff had not approved of the Office of the Conception, composed by a religious of Verona, and granted an indulgence of a hundred days to all who should assist at all being weighed and maturely considered, we decide and declare that the doctrine which teaches that the glorious Virgin Mary, Mother of God, by a special favour, and by a prevenient and opera¬ tive grace, was never subject to original sin, but that she was always holy, immaculate, and exempt from all sin, original and actual; we declare that the doctrine which teaches all this is a pious doctrine, conformable to the worship of the Church, to the Catholic faith, to right reason, and to the Holy Scripture ; and that as such it ought to be approved, held, and followed by all Catholics, so that it may not be lawful for any one henceforth to preach or teach the contrary. Renewing, moreover, the institution of the Feast of the Holy Concep¬ tion, which, by an ancient and laudable custom, is celebrated on the eighth day of December, both at Rome and in other churches, we will and ordain that this feast be celebrated on the same day, under the name of the Conception of the Virgin, in all churches, monasteries, and communities of the Catholic religion, and that the faithful express themselves upon it in canticles of praise and joy.” The council attaches even indulgences to this solemnity. * “ Declarat hsec sancta synodus non esse intentionis suae compre¬ hended in hoc decreto, ubi de pecoato originali agitur, beatam et Immacuiatam Dei genitricem.”—(Concil. Trid. Sess. v. 1546.) t See the Constitution of Sixtus IV.. which begins by “ Grave nimis.” 44 ’'HE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGlH, it.* The successors of this great pope uniformly trod in the path which he had struck out and followed. In 1506, Cardinal Xim enes established in Spain, with the consent of Pope Julius II., a confraternity of the Conception. The same pope confirmed by a brief dated 17th of September, 1611, an Order of religious women, founded under the same title by Innocent VIH.f In the hymns which Zachary, Bishop of G-ordia, composed by order of Leo X. and Clement VII., it is said that Our Lady was created in a state of grace. In 1569 Pope Pius V. granted permission to the Franciscans to celebrate the Office of the Immaculate Conception, attaching to it the same indulgences as to the feast of the Blessed Sacrament. Paul V., by a bull in the year 1616, forbid any one to maintain, in public lectures, the contrary opinion to that of the immaculate conception; and Gregory XV., in 1622, extended this prohibition even to private dis¬ courses and particular conversations. It only remained for the popes to celebrate this feast in Borne itself, and this was done by Alexander VII. in 1661. It results from this con. duct of the Holy See that all its sympathies are on the side of the doctrine of the immaculate conception. Nevertheless, it would not condemn the contrary opinion, doubtless out of regard for high and holy names. One voice of immense weight, the great voice of Bossuet, has been heard in this cause; the buckler of religion has been nobly held up before the Blessed Virgin. “ The opinion of the immaculate conception,” says he “ has an indescribable power to persuade pious souls. Next to the articles of • See the Constitution of Sixtus TV., beginning with “ Cum prasexeelsa . . . Extrav. Commun.” t In this Order of the Immaculate Conception, each sister conse¬ crated herself expressly to this mystery by these words, which are bj no means ambiguous : “ I, Sister N-, for the love and service ot Jesus Christ our Lord, and of the immaculate conception of his Blessed Mother, promise,” &c. MOTHER OF GOD. 45 faith, I see hardly anything more certain. Hence I am not surprised that this school of divines of Paris should oblige all her children to defend this doctrine. For my own part, 1 am delighted in these days to follow up her intentions. After having been fed with her milk, I willingly submit to her decrees, and the more so as they are, as it appears to me, the will of the Church: she has a most honourable opinion of the conception of Mary; she does not oblige us to believe it to have been immaculate, but she gives us to understand that such belief is pleasing to her. There are things which she commands, in which we make known our obedience; there are others which she insinuates, where we may testify our affection. It becomes our piety, if we are true children of the Church, not only to obey the command¬ ments, but to bend to the smallest signs of the will of a mother so good and so sacred.”* Devotion to the immaculate conception of the Virgin was popular in Western Europe from the middle ages—that is certain ; and since then it has made immense progress : but be it said, without offence to France and Italy—those two nations so eminently devout to the Virgin—Spain has shown the greatest zeal and ardour in the propagation of this doctrine. The church of Spain, protesting against the pre¬ tensions of the church of Normandy, which claims the in¬ stitution of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady in the West, professes to have celebrated it in the seventh century ;f—what is certain is, that in 1394, Don John I. of Arragon, who instituted it, by his royal authority, in the several provinces of Spain which had shaken off the yoke of Islamism, affirms that many of his predecessors had * Bossuet, On the Conception. t “La Iglesia Espanola fue la primera que celebro la Tnmaculada Concepcion de la santisima Virgen; cuya festa tuvo lugar en ella desde el siglo septimo.”—(El maestro Villados, en el cap. de los Feitiv, Ecles, t. i. part 2 ' 46 7 HE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, celebrated this feast before him*. We shall not decide between the two churches; but if the church of Spain has only doubtful claims to the institution of this feast of Mary, * The following is the decree of Don Juan I., of Arragon:— “We, Don Juan, by the grace of God King of Arragon and Valentia, &c.—Why are some persons astonished that the Blessed Mary, Mother of God, should have been conceived without origi¬ nal sin, while we doubt not that St. John Baptist was sanctified in his mother’s womb by that same God, who, coming from the highest heaven, and from the throne of the most Holy Trinity, was made flesh in the blessed womb of a virgin P What graces do we think the Lord could refuse to the woman who gave birth to him by the splendid prodigy of her fruitful virginity ? Loving his mother as he loves her, he must have surrounded her conception, her nativity, and the other phases of her life, with the most glorious privileges, “ Why call in question the conception of a virgin so privileged, and of whom the Catholic faith obliges us to believe grandeurs and wonders which we cannot sufficiently admire P Is it not a much greater subject of admiration for all Christians to see that a creature has given birth to her Creator, and that she became a mother without ceasing to be a virgin P How then shall the human mind suffice to praise this glorious Virgin, whom the Almighty predestined to possess, without the least corruption, the advantages of the divine maternity, conjointly with the glory of the purest virginity; and to be exalted above all the prophets, all the saints, and all the choirs of angels, as their queen P Could there then have been wanting any purity and any grace to that excellent Virgin in the first moment of her conception, so that the stain of original sin might have been imputed to her—her to whom the angel of the Lord sent from heaven spoke these words, ‘ Hail, Mary, full of grace! the Lord is with thee • blessed art thou among women ! ’ Let then those who speak thus improperly hold their peace: let those who have nothing but vain and frivolous arguments to propose against the immaculate conception, so privileged and so pure, of the Blessed Virgin, be ashamed to publish them, because it was fitting that she should be endowed with so great purity, that next to that of God, none like it could be imagined. It is indeed fitting that she who had for her Son the Creator and Father of all things should have been, and should be ever, most pure and most perfect, having from the beginning and before all ages, by an eternal decree of God, been chosen among all creatures to MOTHER OF GOD . 47 which was called in France and England the Feast of the Normans, she cannot be denied the honour of having been the first to erect churches and altars under the title of the contain in her womb Him whom the whole world and the whole immensity of the heavens cannot contain. “But we, who among all Catholic kings have received from this Mother of Mercies so many graces and benefits without having deserved them, we firmly believe that the Conception of this Blessed Virgin, in whose womb the Son of God vouchsafed to be made man, was entirely holy and immaculate. “ Thus we honour with a pure heart the mystery of this immaculate and blessed conception of the most holy Virgin, Mother of God; and we, and all those of the royal family, celebrate the festival of it every year with solemnity, in the same manner as our most illustrious predecessors of glorious memory have celebrated it, having had established for it a perpetual confraternity. Wherefore we ordain that this Feast of the Immaculate Conception shall he celebrated annually for ever, with great solemnity and respect, in all the kingdoms of our obedience, by all the Catholic faithful, whether religious or secular, priests or others, of whatever state or condition they may be; and that henceforth it shall not be lawful, and we even forbid all preachers, and all those who publicly lecture on the gospel, to say anything, to publish and advance anything, which in any way whatever might prejudice or be injurious to the purity and sanctity of this blessed conception; but, on the contrary, we ordain that preachers and other persons who have had opposite opinions shall ksep strict silence, since the Catholic faith does not place us in any necessity of maintaining and professing the contrary opinion : and that others who hold our holy and salutary opinion in their heart shall publish it in their discourses, and eagerly testify their devotion by celebrating, by the praises of the Most High, the glory and honour of his holy Mother, who is the Queen of Heaven, the gate of Paradise ;— she who has care of our souls, the secure haven of salvation, and the anchor of hope of all sinners who have confidence in her. By the tenor of these presents we expressly establish, in perpetuity that if it happens in future that any preacher, or any other person among our subjects, of what state or condition soever he may be, does not observe this ordinance, without any necessity for any other decree from us, let him be banished from his convent or house ; and while he remains in this contrary opinion, let him depart as our enemy from the whole extent of our kingdoms. Willing also and ordering, of our 48 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, Mystery of the Immaculate Conception. As early as the year 1525, the Spaniards of Mexico placed the splendid cathedral of Puebla de los Angelos under the invocation of the immaculate Virgin, whose holy image glittered with precious stones upon an altar of massive silver, surrounded by a forest of elegant columns, with plinths and capitals of burnished gold. The faithful of Mexico erected an altar and a statue to her in their metropolitan church with true Peru¬ vian magnificence. A little later, the Mexican cathedrals of Merida, Maracaibo, and Nabana, were founded under the invocation of the immaculate Virgin, and Peru did not remain behind. This striking adherence to the doctrine of the conception without sin was yet not sufficient for the zeal of the people subject to the dominion of Spain; in 1618 the Viceroy of Naples, his court and army, made a vow, in the Church of Our Lady the Great, to believe and defend the immaculate conception of the Virgin. A memorial column, surmounted by a magnificent statue of Our Lady, with the symbolical signs of her victory over original sin, was erected in testimony of this public engagement thus chival¬ rously contracted. knowledge and mature deliberation, under pain of incurring our anger and indignation, all and each of our officers, who are on this side and beyond the sea, those who are there now and who shall be there hereafter, to keep and cause to be kept with great diligence and respect our present edict, as soon as they shall have cognizance thereof; and that each, in his district, shall cause it to be published sorrectly, solemnly, and with sound of trumpet in all the usual places, so that no one may plead ignorance of it; and that the devotion of the immaculate conception of the most Blessed Virgin, which Christians have long cherished in their hearts, may more and more increase ; and that those people of an opposite opinion may no more in future be heard to open their mouths. In testimony of which we command these presents to be expedited, authorised by our seal, which is attached to them.—Given at Valentia, on the 2nd of February, the day on which we celebrate the Feast of the Purification of this most holy Virgin, in the year of Our Lord 1394, and Ihe eighth of our reign.” MOTHER OF GOD. 49 The Spanish nation, which has always particularly sig nalised itself in this devotion, has so thoroughly adopted it, that not a single preacher mounts the pulpit without pre¬ facing his sermon with a profession of faith in the conception without stain,* * * § and that it has been introduced even into the familiar forms of speech pronounced when people meet.t Finally, in 1771, while the destructive blast of philosophy violently shook the belief of Christians in France and several other countries of Europe, the King of Spain, Charles III., instituted an order in honour of the Virgin conceived without sin, and solemnly declared her, with the concurrence of the Cortes, and a brief from the Holy See, “ Universal Patrona de Espana e Indias.”} In France, in spite of the licentiousness and infidelity which the flood of revolutions left behind it as it subsided, this belief gains ground, and penetrates even to the most secluded hamlets. The diocess of Paris is especially distinguished for its zeal in embracing this pious belief, which flourishes be¬ neath the protecting shade of its archbishops, § and which is * “ Alabado sea el santisimo Sacramento del altar, y la inmaculada concepcion de la Virgen Maria, concebida sin pecado original en el primer instante de sn ser natural.” t In going into a Spanish house, the first words which visitors pronounce, before they wish “ Good day,” are these, “ Ave Maria purisima; ” the masters of the house immediately answer, “ Sin pecado concebida, santisima.” X “Por la devocion que desde nuestra infancia hemos tenido 4 Maria santisima en su misterio de la inmaculada concepcion, desea oo poner bajo los divinos auspicios de esta celestial protectora la. Nueva Orden, y mandamos que sea reconocida en ella por patrona .”—(Leg. 12, t. iii. lib. vi., Noviss. Eec.) § “C’est un fait que nous sommes jaloux de constater, et nous desirons que la connaissance en parvienne jusqu’aux lieux les plus recul6s du monde Catholique: dans notre diocese cette devotion a jetb avec le temps des racines de plus en plus profondes, et les malheurs sont encore venus l’affermir, I’accroitre, et l’dtendre avec un mer- Veilleux progres.”—(See the Mandement of the Archbishop of Paris, £ SO THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN ,, confirmed by the supernatural things related of the miracu¬ lous medal struck in honour of the mystery of the immaculate conception. If the tradition of the apostles, the favourable disposition of the Church, the authority of councils, the adherence of universities and religious orders, the assent of kings and nations, the dedication of temples and altars, the foundation of offices, the institution of confraternities and of royal orders may be taken into account in a controversy which has astonished the very pagans,* the cause of the immacu¬ late conception of Mary, so long before the tribunal of Catholic opinion, appears to us to be won; and we do not believe that it would be rash to suppose that God, pre¬ serving his divine Mother from the original stain, may have said to her, as Assuerus said to Esther, “ This law is not made for thee, but for all others.” Addition by the Translator . [The foregoing chapter was written by the author before the ever memorable 8th of December, 1854, when it was solemnly defined by the infallible authority of the Catholic Church, that “ it is a dogma of faith that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace of God, in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was pre¬ served exempt from all stain of original sin.”] on occasion of the consecration of the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette.) * “ What then! ” exclaimed Julian the Pelagian, addressing nimsolf to a bishop •who maintained the universality of original sin, “ what then ! do you subject the birth of Mary to the empire of the devil P”—(St. Aug., lib. iv. Op. imperf.) MOTHER OF GOD. 51 CHAPTER III. BIRTH OP MARY. Towards the decline of the religion and affairs of the Hebrews, at the time marked out by the prophets, and when the regal sceptre was in the hands of a stranger, according to the grand prediction of Jacob, there was at Nazareth, a town of lower Galilee, not far distant from Mount Carmel, a just man, named Joachim,* * * § of the tribe of Juda, and of the race of David f through Nathan; his wife—who, accord¬ ing to the opinion of St. Augustin, was of the priestly tribe J —was called Ann, a name which signifies in Hebrew gracious.§ They were both just before Jehovah, and walked in his commandments with a perfect heart; || but the Lord seemed * One of Mary’s historians, Christopher de Castro, has found—after the Rabbins, St. Hilary, and other fathers of the Church — that the father of Mary had two names, Heli and Joachim. The Arabs and Mussulmans know him by that of Amram, son of Matheus, and distin¬ guish him from another Amra m, father of Mary, the sister of Moses.— (D’Herbelot, Bibliotheque Orientale, t. ii.) t According to the Proto-gospel of St. James and the Gospel of •ne Nativity of Mary, Joachim was of the race of David. Justin, who flourished only fifty years after the death of St. John the apostle, who was horn in Palestine, and who had been able to collect the traditions yet recent, says, in like manner, that Mary descended in a right line from King David. t St. August., De consensu Evangel. § The Mahometans, inheritors of the Arab traditions, knew the olessed mother of the Holy Virgin under her proper name, which is Hannah; she was, according to them, the daughter of Nakhor, and the wife of Amram.—(D’Herbelot, Bibliotheque Orientale, t. ii.) il St. Ann and St. Joachim were publicly honoured in the Church in the early ages. St. John Damascen highly eulogises their virtues. p THB HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, to have turned away from them the light of his countenance, for one great blessing was wanting to their life: they were without children, which made them sad, because in Israel sterility was a reproach. Joachim, who loved his wife for her wonderful meekness and eminent virtues, would not add to her misfortune by giving her a bill of divorce, which the law at that time granted so easily; * he kept her in his house, and this pious couple, humbly resigned to the divine decrees, passed their days in labour, prayer, and almsdeeds. So many virtues could not fail of their reward: after twenty years of barrenness, Ann conceived, as it were by miracle, and brought forth that blessed creature who was more perfect, more holy, and more pleasing in the eyes of the Lord than all the elect put together. It was about the beginning of the mop#i of Tisri,f which is the first of the civil year of the Jews, while the smoke of holocausts ascended to heaven for the expiation of the sins of the people, that the predestined Virgin was born who was The Emperor Justinian I. had a church built at Constantinople under the invocation of St. Ann, about the year 550. The body of the saint ■was brought, it is said, from Palestine to Constantinople in 710.—(See Godescard, t. v. p. 319.) Luther was very devout to St. Ann before his heresy; it was to that saint that he promised to embrace the monastic state, before the corpse of one of his comrades, who was just killed by lightning before his eyes. * It was the Pharisees who had introduced this abuse of divorce^ so strongly condemned by our Lord (St. Matt. xix. 8): they taught that a wife might be put away for the most trifling causes; for ex¬ ample, for having over-dressed the meat for her master of the household, or merely for not being handsome enough. This was the opinion of Hillel and Akiba.—(Basn., liv. vii. c. 22.) f The 8th of September, according to the teaching of the Church. —Baronius makes Mary bom in the year of Borne 733, twenty-one years before the common era, on the 8th of September, on a Saturday, at daybreak. Le Nain de Tillemont says that the Virgin was bom in the year 734: this opinion is most followed. MOTHER OF GOD. 53 to repair the primeval transgression.* Her birth was silent and unknown, like that of her divine Son ; her parents were of the people, although descended from a long succession of kings, and led, to all appearances, an obscure life: this mystical Rose, which St. John saw later on clothed with the sun as with radiant garments, was to expand to the burning wind of adversity, upon a stem poor and despoiled.1 The cradle of the Queen of angels was neither ornamented with gold, nor covered with Egyptian counterpanes richly embroidered, nor perfumed with spikenard, myrrh, and aloes, like those of the Hebrew princes; it was composed of flexible twigs, and swathing bands of coarse linen compressed the little arms which were one day so tenderly to nurse the Saviour of the world. The children of kings, while still wrapped up in their swaddling clothes of purple, see the great men of the state bow their heads before them, and say to them, My lord! The woman who was the Spouse and the Mother of God, gave her first smile to some poor women among the people, who perhaps said sorrowfully to each other, as they thought of the unfortunate and despised con¬ dition to which men had condemned them, Here is one slave more! * This is what the Turks relate of the birth of the Blessed Virgin: —The wife of Amram (Joachim) said to God, “ 0 Lord, I have conse¬ crated to thee by vow the fruit of my womb; receive it with goodness, 0 thou who knowest and understandest all things.” When she had brought forth, she added, “ O Lord, I have brought a daughter into the world; I have named her Miriam (Mary), I place her under thy protection, her and her posterity, that thou mayest preserve them from the artifices of Satan.”—(The Koran, ch. 3.) t Isaias had foretold it: saying, “There shall come forth a rod out of the trunk of Jesse; ” for this word trunk, in the Hebrew expres¬ sion, as St. Jerom observes (on Is. c. ii.), signifies a trunk without branches and without leaves, to denote, continues this holy doctor, that the august Mary was to be born of the race of David, when that family should have lost its splendour, and should have fallen away from it entirely 54 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN,\ In Israel, they gave the child on the ninth day after its birth, in the midst of the assembled family, the name which it was to bear among men: the daughter of Joachim received from her father the name of Miriam (Mary), which is trans¬ lated from the Syriac by lady, sovereign mistress , and which signifies in Hebrew, star of the sea. “And, surely,” says St. Bernard, “the Mother of Go? could not have a name more appropriate, nor one more ex pressive of her high dignity. Mary is, in fact, that beautiful and brilliant star which shines upon the vast and stormy sea of the world.” This divine name conceals within itself a powerful charm, and one of such marvellous sweetness, that we have but to pronounce it, and the heart is moved; only to write it, and the style is adorned. “ The name of Mary,” says St. Anthony of Padua, “is sweeter to the lips than a honey¬ comb, more flattering to the ear than a sweet song, more delicious to the heart than the purest joy.”* Eighty days after the birth of a daughter, the Jewish woman was solemnly purified at the temple where she brought her first-born child. In conformity with the law of Moses, she then offered to the Lord a lamb, or two turtle¬ doves ; the two turtle-doves were the sacred offering of the poor: they were that of the spouse of Joachim. But the gratitude of the pious mother went beyond the customary sacrifice: the worthy rival of Anna, the wife of Elcana, she offered to the Lord a victim more pure, a dove more innocent than those which had just fallen gasping and bleeding under the knife of the sacrificing priest: she had no motive crown of most pure gold to hang up on the partition wall of the temple: f she laid at the feet of the Most High the crown of her old age—the infant with which He had * “Nomen Yirginis Mariae, mel in ore, melos in aure, jubilum in corde,” says poetically St. Anthony of Padua. t Macch. lib. iv. MOTHER OF GOD. blessed her life; and she solemnly engaged to bring her daughter again to the temple, and consecrate her there to the service of the holy place, as soon as her young reason should be able to distinguish good and evil. The father of Mary ratified this vow, which then became of obligation.* When the ceremony was finished, the couple returned to their native province,—that province barren of great men, from which Israel was far from expecting a prophet,f—and re-entered their humble dwelling, ever open to the needy and the stranger. There it was that the child of benediction became, from her early years, the delight of her family, and rose up like one of those lilies of which Jesus proclaims the beauty, and which, as St. Bernard poetically says, have the odour of hope— habens odorern spei. According to the custom of the women of her nation, Ann would feed her daughter at her own breast4 Mary’s reason, like the daylight of the favoured regions of the sun, had scarcely any twilight, and shone forth from the most tender age. Her precocious fervour, the wisdom of her discourse, at a period of life when other children enjoy as yet but a mere physical existence, led her parents to * There were two sorts of vows among the Jews: the first, neder, was a simple vow, after which what had been vowed to the Lord might he redeemed (such was that of Ann, the mother of Mary); the second, eheretn, was a vow of indispensable obligation, by which all right t» the thing promised was given up absolutely and irrevocably. Every Israelite might thus vow what belonged to him,—houses, lands, beasts, children, slaves, &c.,—and the things devoted could neither he sold nor redeemed, at any price whatever. t “ Can any good come out of Nazareth ? ” asked Nathanael of those who spoke to him of Christ. “ Because this place was small and contemptible,” says St. John Chrysostom, “and not only this place, but the whole of Galilee.”—(Serm. ix. in St. Matt.) J In Judea, women did not often give up suckling their children; we reckon but three nurses in the whole Scripture—the nurses of Rebecca, Miphiboseth, and Joas; it must be observed, moreover, that Rebecca was a stranger, and that the others were princes. i6 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, judge that the hour of separation was come: and when Joachim had offered to the Lord, for the third time from the birth of his daughter, the first-fruits of the harvest, and pro¬ duce of the small inheritance of his fathers, the pair, grateful and resigned, took the road to Jerusalem, to deposit, in the sacred enclosure of the temple, the treasure which the Hour One of Israel had given them. CHAPTER IY. THE PRESENTATION. The Cison proudly rolled its red waters, swelled by the equinoctial storms,* and the great mountains of Galilee began to be covered with snow, when the parents of Mary began their journey to Jerusalem. We are ignorant of the motive which induced them to leave their native province during the rainy season- Perhaps it was the desire to assist at the great solemnities of the Dedication; perhaps they merely regulated their departure by the epoch of the service of Zachary, whose priestly functions called him to the temple only at regular times.f * The Cison is a small river, which runs between Nazareth and Mount Carmel; insignificant and impoverished during the summer, like all the streams of water of Palestine, it becomes considerable dur¬ ing the rainy season. The troops of Sisara, the general of the army of Jabin, were drowned in this overflowed river in the attempt to force a passage. f According to the order established by David, the priests were divided into twenty-four classes, or turns, each of which served its week. Each class was subdivided into seven parts, which had each their week in turn to officiate; each part of this subdivision had that portion of the service which was assigned to him by lot.—(1 Paralip. c. xxiv.) Zachary was of the turn or service of Abia.—(Prid., Hist of the Jews.) MOTHER OF GOD. s; Obliged to make a journey of several days, during the inclement season, with a child quite young, the prudent and pious travellers did not make their way towards the holy city by the wild and rocky road which winds across the arid flats, the foaming torrents, and the deep ravines of the moun¬ tains of Samaria: there winter ruled with all his frosts. They descended, by the shrubby slopes of Carmel, into the charming and fertile plains which stretch out between the mountains of Palestine and the coasts of Syria, a land happy and forward, the temperature of which is so mild that the orange-trees blossom there in the heart of winter, and the flowers of May expand in the month of December.* After leaving behind them the rich pastures where formerly rose the tents of Issachar, a tribe of shepherd astronomers,! whom the burning breath of the Lord’s anger had dis¬ persed, like a handful of light straw, even to the wild and mountainous regions of Media;—after having admired, as they passed, the hills covered with palm, banana, and pome¬ granate-trees, which once formed the smiling inheritance of * Yolney saw orange-trees bearing fruit and flowers in the open air, in the month of January, on the coasts of Syria. “With us,” he says, “ nature has divided the seasons by months; there, one may say that they are separated only by hours. If we are annoyed at Tripoli by the heats of July, six hours’ march transports us upon the neigh¬ bouring mountains to the temperature of March. On the other hand, are we incommoded with the frost of December, in the midst of the mountains, one day’s mai'ch brings us back to the shore among the flowers of May.” t St. Jerom assures us that the children of Issachar were the learned men who calculated times, and set down the feasts. —(Hieron., Qusest. in 1 Paralip. 112, p. 1390, et in Genes. 49.) This tradition is conformable to that of the rabbins, who affirm that those of the tribe of Issachar applied themselves assiduously to this knowledge of astronomy. — (Maimon., in Kiddosch. hachodesh, et Zachuth, in Juchasin.) In fine, the Scripture authorises this tradition, since it relates that the children of Issachar were expert in the science of the times, so as to order what Israel should do.—^1 Paralip. xii. 32.) 58 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, the sons of Joseph—a fine and warlike race, famous for their skill in shooting with the bow;—the travellers from Galilee went along by the side of the narrow stream of the Gaas, the willows of which love the bank; passed through the groves of Ramatha, a beautiful town, like a cameo fallen into a basket of roses ; and reached at length the borders of the ancient territory of the Jebusites. There the aspect of everything was changed: no more flowers, no more verdure, no more odoriferous breeze wafting afar the sweet scent of the lemon-tree; barren rocks, deep ravines where the wind forced its way with lugubrious moanings ; abrupt and bare mountains, resounding with the hoarse cries of the eagle: in a word, the grandest, most melancholy, most desolate, and most sterile land that could be seen. The little caravan had followed, for some time, a stony path tracked along the flat of an arid mountain, when Joachim, stopping on a sudden at an abrupt turn, stretched out his arms towards the south with a movement of religious enthusiasm mixed with national pride. The object which he thus pointed out to the notice of his companions was worth remarking, for nothing more magnificent or more extraordi¬ nary existed at that time in Asia. It was a city of thirty- three stadia in circumference, enclosed in stone, like a ruby of Beloutchistan; a town of marble, cedar, and gold, its splendour having something in it sad, wild, and suspicious, which denoted an uneasy authority, permanent fears of some foreign power, and a state of things full of contrasts. There were seen in it enormous towers, magnificent as palaces, and palaces fortified like citadels. Its temple, glittering with gold, which shone brilliantly upon the narrow flat surface of the highest of its mountains, like the orb of the full moon when it skirts the snowy summits of Libanus,* * The exterior front of the temple was entirely covered with plates of gold, so thick that as soon as daylight appeared, it was as dazzling as the rays of the rising sun. As for the other sides, where there was MOTHER OF GOD. 59 was a fortress almost impregnable, which kept the holy peoplfi of the Lord in awe; while the tower Antonia, from the top of its four elegant turrets of polished marble, kept an over¬ shadowing and continued watch over the court of the temple. A triple enclosure of walls of enormous stones, in which were encrusted ninety forts, bound the sides of this city, which was surrounded by dark valleys of dizzying depths and rocks inaccessible. This proud and warlike city, which seemed to have been transported by magic from the fabulous regions of Ginnistan,f beneath the cloudless sky of Pales¬ tine; this paradise of the Jews ( Ghangh-dix-houcht ), so poetically regretted on the banks of the Euphrates; the city of David and of the Machabees; this Jerusalem, which, in its abject slavery, all the East still salutes with the antique name which the father of Mary then gave it— el Cods! (the Holy.) The parents of the Virgin entered the capital of Judea by the gate of Rama, upon which fell the shadow of a tower,! so high that from its flat top were seen Mount Carmel, the Great Sea, and the Mountains of Arabia. The green standard of Judas Machabeus was still flying there with its no gold, the stones of them were so white, that this superb mass of building looked at a distance like a mountain covered with snow.— (Josephus, de Bello, lib. v. c. 13.) * “Extrema rupis abrupta; et turres, ubi mons juvisset, in sexaginta pedes, inter devexa, in centenos vicenosque attollebantur ; niira specie, ac procul intuentibus pares.”—(Tacit. Hist. lib. v.) t Ginnistan, which the marvellous traditions of the Assyrians and Arabs place at the foot of Mount Caucasus, and on the borders of the Caspian Sea, was the abode of the Peris—a beautiful and fabulous race, which much resembles that of our fairies. These powerful beings, born before the deluge, disposed of the elements, and created everything that could afford them pleasure. Their capital city which they had carefully fortified, to defend it from the attacks of the Dives, who were wicked and formidable genii, was of marble, gold, rubies, and diamonds. J The tower Psephina. bo THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, religious device; but the soldiers who surrounded it no longer understood it; for they were Thracians, Galatians, Germans, and the fair children of Gaul, whom Herod, who feared the Jews and depended upon foreigners, took into his pay, and who were detested at Jerusalem almost as much as himself. The travellers next followed certain winding and gloomy streets, lined with heavy square houses, without windows, with terrace roofs, which stood in melancholy lines, like citadels; and they stopped in the eastern part of the city be¬ fore a house of modest appearance, which tradition points out as the dwelling of St. Ann.* * * § After a purification of seven days, according to the custom of those who came to sacrifice in the temple,f Joachim pro¬ vided himself with the lamb which he was to offer to the Lord, clothed himself in white, J collected together some of the relations and friends whom he had in Jerusalem, and ascended at the head of them to the temple with as much ardour as he would have gone up to the assault of a place in battle .§ * A monastery has been erected over this house of St. Ann; this monastery has been turned into a mosque. Under the Christian kings it was inhabited by religious women.—(See Itin. de Paris & Jerusalem, t. ii. p. 211.) t It was not merely necessary to be presented in the temple with the victim : the law required that the person should remain outside for seven full days, and be solemnly purified on the third and seventh day with ashes and hyssop : that done, they might sacrifice.—(Philo, Tract, de Sacrific., c. 3.) X According to the rabbins, the sacrifice was of no avail when he who offered it was not clothed in white garments.—(Basn., liv. ix. c.4.) § This was of obligation; the Hebrews were to go up to the t»mple with as much ardour as a soldier to an assault; they found this pretext in the 55th Psalm, where David said that ho went to the house of God as to a strong city (Soo Basn., Hist, des Juifs. liv, vii. c. 17.) MOTHER OF GOD. 6l This temple of the God of hosts, where the Virgin then presented herself, like the dove of the ark with the olive branch, had undergone numerous vicissitudes. One of the ancestors of Mary, the wise son of King David, had made it the wonder of the East. He had lavished about it the gold of Ophir, the perfumes of Saba, the cedar of Libanus, the brass which the fleets of Tyre—that queen of the seas, whose merchants were princes—had gone in quest of to barbarous regions, and silver, so common at that time that it had be¬ come of little value; but this splendour had passed away like a vision of the night, thanks to the burning avarice of the people of Egypt and Chaldea. Despoiled twenty times over, but always re-established with magnificence, it had risen again from its ruins under Zorobabel, who had rebuilt it, sword in hand, in spite of the efforts of a multitude of jealous nations. Nevertheless, the second temple, notwith¬ standing its unheard-of richness, w r as every way inferior to the other in grandeur as well as in holiness. It was in vain that the Jews poured out there with a liberal hand the strength of the com and the blood of the vine ; that streams of gold arriving from all points of the horizon came to feed in¬ cessantly its sacred treasury; that pagan kings, confessing the awful sanctity of the God of Israel, sent thither the most magnificent offerings.* Nothing of all this could supply for the absence of the ark, with which had disappeared the tables of the law—that is to say, the will of God, written by himself by the glare of the lightening on Mount Sinai; the * In Josephus may be seen the detailed description of the magniii.. lent table of massive gold incrusted with precious stones, and the no less splendid vessels which Ptolemy Philadelphus gave to the temple ; utmost all the princes of Asia had enriched it with their gifts, and about the time of the Presentation of the Virgin, the Empress Livia sent thither, in her own name and in the name of Augustus, magnifi¬ cent vessels of gold.—(Josephus, de Bello, lib. ii. c. 17; Philo, ad Csyiun.) 62 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, rod of the almond-tree which had miraculously blossomed*, the most ancient title of the sons of Aaron to the office of high priesthood; and the manna of the desert, which, by the miracle of its long preservation, confirmed so many ancient prodigies wrought for the deliverance of Israel. These pre¬ cious things were lost, as well as the sacred fire, which the breezes of the holy mountain alone could enkindle on the brazen grate of the altar of holocausts ; and the oil of unction, \ composed by Moses, whence the priests and kings derived their noble title of the anointed of the Lord. What was still more to be regretted, was that the Schekina, that white cloud'' which attested the divine presence, had never shown itself in - the second temple, and that even the stones of the rational , * that last and brilliant oracle of the God of hosts, had lost their prophetic lustre.* This is what filled the hearts of the sons of Aaron with bitterness, when they compared the house of Zorobabel with the temple of the son of David; this made the doctors of the law say that the fulfilment of the celebrated prophecy of Aggeus was hopeless, unless the Messias himself should appear bodily in the second temple. After passing that magnificent gate of Corinthian brass, which twenty Levites could hardly close at night, and which opened of itself four years before the destruction of Jerusa¬ lem, to the great consternation of the deicidal people whom this gloomy presage filled with terror,! Mary and her pa¬ rents found themselves in a vast enclosure paved with black and white stones, and surrounded by tall porticoes, which in * God employed the precious Btones which the high priest wore upon the rational to foretell victory; for, before the army took the field, there shone forth from them so bright a light, that the people knew thereby that his sovereign Majesty was present, and ready to assist them; but when I began to write this, the rational had ceasea to give this light for two hundred years.—(FI. Joseph., Ant. Jud., lib. iii. c. 8.) t Joseph., de Bello, lib. vi. MOTHER OF GOD 63 time of war served as ramparts.* * * § A crowd of strangers and people of the nation, whose brilliant costumes of opposite colours reminded one of an immense parterre of tulips, were walking and conversing in this forum of Jerusalem, which was not reputed sacred, and which was called the Court of the Gentiles, because idolaters could not advance farther under pain of death, f At some distance from the crowd, under the porch of Solomon, the haughty aristocracy of Israel, clothed in purple and scarlet, or wearing those long Babylonian robes embroi¬ dered with flowers of gold, were waiting for the hour of prayer, keeping aloof from the foreigners with a haughty re¬ serve, considerably mingled with contempt. Joachim, who was equal to the princes of his nation in nobility of race, although he had not their wealth, directed his steps that way, sure of being well received; for those Jews, so disdainful towards the Gentiles, \ loved each other as brethren, especially when they belonged to the same lineage. Scarcely had they perceived them, when a number of illustrous ladies, warriors, and great lords of the family of David advanced to meet them, and after the customary salutations, they joined the family from Galilee, as if to form an honourable train of attendants for Mary.§ The fathers who relate this circum¬ stance, have piously believed that these great personages, the flower of the Jewish nobility, were not found there by mere chance, but that God, who would provide a triumphal * Tacit., Historiarum, lib. v. t Joseph., de Bello, lib. v. et vi. $ Basnage remarks that at the time of Jesus Christ the Jews regarded the Gentiles as dogs, and hated them mortally. “If the idolaters drown themselves, the doctors taught, they must not be pulled out of the water, nor succoured; the only favour that can be done them is not to plunge them deeper into the water, down the precipice, or in the well, if they have fallen in.”—(Basn., liv. v. c. 25.) § “ Primarios quoque Hierosolymitas viros et mulieres interfuisse huic deduction!, succinentibus universis angelis.”—(Isid. de Thess ) f >4 the history of the blessed virgin. entry into his temple for the future Mother of the Messias, had divinely inspired them with the resolution to come thither. From the midst of the Court of the Gentiles arose two other enclosures—both sacred—which composed the temple. Seen from below, this majestic and splendid edifice pre¬ sented a quadrangular mass of building, the walls of which, white as alabaster, were pierced with ten superb gates, covered with thick plates of silver and gold. As the temple, properly so called, crowned the summit of Mount Moria,—a site appropriate for the habitation of the God of the hills , —the ground was a continued ascent, and the walls were completely surrounded by marble steps, which somewhat diminished their height. After ascending the steps of the temple, the group already purified, in the midst of whom was that blessed child who was to be consecrated to God, stopped for a moment on the small platform of Chel.* * * § There the Pharisees displayed their tephilim, + and wound round their foreheads, bowed down, J a lappet of their taled, of white and fine wool,§ orna¬ mented with purple pomegranates, and little cords of the colour * The CM, was a space of ten cubits between the Court of the Gentiles and that of the women. + The tephilim were small pieces of parchment on which were written, with ink made on purpose, four sentences of Scripture ; the Jews wore them at the bend of the left arm, and in the middle of the forehead. These tephilim or phylacteries, were much in use at the time of Jesus Christ, for they made of them marks of distinction, which drew upon them his reproaches.— (Basnage, Hist. Juifs, liv. vii. c. 17.) \ The Pharisees walked always with their heads down, to affect a more humble countenance; and sometimes even with their eyes shut, to avoid seeing what might prove a temptation: thus it very often happened that in passing through the streets they ran their heads against the walls.—(Basn., liv. iii. c. 3.) § Taled, a sort of square cloak which the Jews wore in the temple to make their prayer; some wound it round their necks, others MOTHER OF GOD. 6* of the hyacinth. The brave captains of Herod half concealed their shining cuirasses beneath their long mantles, and the daughters of Sion enveloped themselves more closely in the folds of their veils of purple, sky-blue, or Syrian gauze, with flowers of gold, out of respect for the holy angels who had the charge of guarding the sanctuary.* This done, they entered the temple by the oriental gate, the most beautiful of all,—that one which poured streams of liquid gold when the Romans, unable to force it by the aid of iron, opened it by means of fire.t In our cold northern regions, vast edifices are requisite to protect us from the injuries of the weather; thus we have immense cathedrals, capable of containing whole popula¬ tions ; but in ancient Asia the temples were almost ex¬ clusively for the use of the priests : the people used to pray outside. In Israel the engdah, or sacred assembly, was Usually held in the court of the women: the second division was so called because the Jewish women, whom the severity of the old law made like to slaves, could not advance farther. Separated from their children and their husbands, who re¬ mained in the area of the court, or under the arcades of the peristyle during the ceremonies of religion, they prayed separately in upper galleries, with their heads humbly bent towards the house of Jehovah, of which they could see at some distance the magnificent roof of cedar, bristling all over with pinnacles of gold.! covered their heads with it; this latter custom was the most general —(Basn., t. v. liv. vii. c. 17.) * Ideo debet mulier potestatem habere supra caput propter angelos. —(1 Ep. S. Pauli ad Corinth, ch. xi. v. 10.) t Josephus relates, that when Titus ordered fire to be set to the gates of the second enclosure of the temple, the gold and silver ran down from them like water from a fountain.—(De Bello, c. 23.) + This precaution had been taken in order to prevent the pigeons and doves, which were very numerous at Jerusalem, from resting in iheir flight on the roof of the temple, and defiling it. F THE HISTORY OF lHE BLESSED VIRGIN\ ob The ceremony of the Presentation certainly took place in the court of the women, and not in the actual interior of the sanctuary, where some authors have located it. It began by a sacrifice. The gate of Nicanor, silently rolling on its brazen hinges to let the victim pass in, showed a perspective view of the farthest space, quite like a marvellous vision of that Eden so much regretted, whose golden palaces, over¬ shadowed by lofty cedars, were the habitations of the Just, as the Pharisees taught.* Through the marble columns of a superb portico, from the top of which hung down the gigantic branches and pendant clusters of a golden vine, was discovered an edifice which seemed at first sight to be of massive gold, so strong was the glare which was cast by so many dazzling plates covering its faqade of a hundred cubits beneath the pure and powerful light of the sun of Asia. An incredible number of votive offerings, where ears of wheat, lilies, pomegranates, vine-leaves formed of emeralds, topazes, carbuncles, and rubies, according to their colours, were in¬ termingled, were fastened to the temple by golden cords; and when the rushing wind of the mountains began to blow, they might have been taken for real flowers, such was their exquisite workmanship and perfect imitation. At different distances were seen banners s&ot through with arrows, and stained with idolatrous blood, which the Asmonean princes, heroes of imperishable memory, had won from the Greeks of Syria in the glorious wars of independence, and consecrated with their priestly and warrior hands to the God of hosts. Herod, a cruel prince, but a vsjjfiant captain, had added to * The Jews believed that the souls of the saints go into the garden of Eden, the entrance of which is forbidden to the living by the angel of death. They are magnificent in the description of this locality, where they place palaces built of precious stones, and rivers of perfumed waters. In hell, on the contrary, a river of fire falls upon the damned, who suffer the extremes of heat and cold.—(Maimonides, Menasses, fee.) MOTHER OF GOD. 6? them the standards lately taken in his fortunate expeditions against the Arabs; and the sight of these trophies of arms filled with patriotic pride and warlike ardour those Hebrew hearts who cared so little for death, when they had to fight for what was dearer to them than gold, their families, or their life—the temple ! The priests and Levites assembled in the last compartment received from the hands of Joachim the victim of prosperity * These ministers of the living God had not their foreheads hound with laurel or green smallage, like the priests of the idols; a kind of mitre of a round shape, of very thick linen cloth, a linen tunic, long, white, and without folds, fastened with a broad girdle, embroidered with hyacinth and purple, composed the priestly costume, which was worn only in the temple. One of the priests took the lamb, and after a short invocation of the God of Jacob, slew it, turning its head towards the nrrth; the blood, which flowed into a brazen vessel, was poured out here and there around the altar. When these first rites were terminated, the priest laid out upon a golden plate a portion of the flesh of the victim, still quivering, and part of the entrails, which the Levites had carefully washed in the fountain-court; he wrapped up the oblation in a double covering of fat, covered it with incense, threw upon it the salt of the covenant, then, ascending bare¬ footed the gentle rise which led up to the platform of the brazen altar, he there deposited the offering upon the billets of wood, perfectly sound and stripped of their bark, which fed the sacred fire. The rest of the victim, except the breast and the right shoulder, which belonged to the priests, was returned to the husband of St. Ann, that he might makf a feast with it for bis friends and relatives, according to thd custom.t * Whether a favour was asked of God, or he was thanked for one obtained, it was called “ a sacrifice of prosperity. ” t This feast, reputed sacred, might he kept for two day9 together ; 68 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, The last sounds of the trumpets of the priests were dying away along the porticoes, and the sacrifice was still burning on the brazen altar, when a priest came down into the court of the women to conclude the ceremonial. Ann, followed by Joachim, carrying Mary in her arms, came forward with a veil over her head, towards the minister of the Most High,! and if we may believe an Arab tradition which Mahomet! himself has recorded in the Koran, she presented to him the young handmaid of the Lord, saying, with a voice full of emotion, “I come to offer you the present which God has made me.”* The priest accepted, in the name of God, -who makes the womb of mothers fruitful, the precious deposit which grati¬ tude confided to him, and blessed Joachim, as well as his pious company;+ then stretching out his hands over the assembly, which bowed down over the pontifical benedic¬ tion, \ “ 0 Israel,” said he, “ may the Lord direct his light but the law expressly forbad anything to be reserved from it for the third day, and it must be given even to the last morsel to the poor, for two reasons, says Philo : the first, because, as the victim belonged | to God, who is in his nature liberal, it was his will that the needy should partake of it; the second, to hinder avarice, which is a vice of slaves, from creeping in, and dishonouring a holy practice.—(Philo, Tract, de Sacrif. c. 2.) * According to a Mahometan tradition, when St. Atiu had given birth to the Blessed Virgin, she presented her to the priests, saying these words, which are also found in the Koran : “ Dhouncon hadih alnedhirat,” that is “ Behold the offering which I make you.” Hossein Vaez adds to these words in his Persian paraphrase, “ Kih es an Rhodii,” which means, “ For it is a present which God has made me,” or, still more literally, “ For it is from this present that God is to come.”—(D’Herbelot, Bibl. Orient, t. ii. p. 620.) f Heli blessed Elcana and his wife, and he said to Elcana, “ The Lord give thee seed of this woman, for the loan thou hast lent to the Lord. And they went to their own home.”— (1 Kings i. 20.) See F. Croiset upon this ceremony.—(Exercises de Piete, t. xviii. p. 48.) X While' the pontiff gave the blessing, the people were obliged to place their hands over their eyes and hide *heir faces, because it was MOTHER OR GOD. 69 towards thee—may he make thee to prosper in everything, and grant thee peace!” A canticle of thanksgiving, har¬ moniously accompanied by the harps of the priests, termi¬ nated the Presentation of the Virgin. Such was the ceremony which took place, in the lattei days of November, in the holy temple of Sion. Men, who usually stop at the surface, beheld nothing but a young child, very beautiful and wonderfully fervent, consecrated by her mother to that God who had granted her to her prayers and tears; but the angels of heaven, who hovered over the sanctuary, discovered in that weak and gentle creature the Virgin of Isaias, the spouse of whom Solomon had sung the mystical espousals, the celestial Eve who came to impart t« a fallen race the hope of a glorious immortality. Penetrated with joy to see at length the aurora shine forth of the day of the Messias, “they united,” say certain ancient authors,* “ with this feast of earth, and covering the young descen¬ dant of David with their white wings, they scattered under her feet the odoriferous flowers of Paradise, and celebrated her entry into the temple with melodious concerts.” What passed then in the soul of Mary, in that soul sweetly expanded to the breath of the sanctifying Spirit, where all was peace, pure love, and light ? By what sacred ties did she unite herself to Him, who had preferred her to the virgins and queens of so many nations ? This is a secret between herself and God ; but we may reasonably believe that never was oblation more favourably received; and St. Evodius of Antioch, St. Epiphanius of Salamis, St. Andrew of Crete, and a multitude of Latin fathers, agree in consider¬ ing the consecration of the Virgin as the most pleasing act not lawful to behold the hands of the priest: the Jews imagined that God was behind the pontiff, and looked upon them through his out¬ stretched hands; they did not dare to lift up their eyes to him, “ for no one can see God and live.”—(Basn., liv. vii. c. 15.) • Ht. Andrew of Crete, and St. George of Nice media. 7 o THE HISTORY OR THE BLESSED VIRGltf, of religion in the sight of God which man had hitherto per¬ formed. The name of the priest who received the Blessed Virgin among the number of daughters of the Lord is not known; St. Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople, and George of Nicomedia, incline to the belief that it was the father of St. John the Baptist: the ties of relationship which connected Zachary with the family of Joachim, the high rank which he then occupied in the priesthood,* and the tender affection which Mary cherished for him and for Elizabeth, impart to this supposition a high degree of probability. Be this as it may, the blessed daughter of Joachim was solemnly admitted into the number of the almas, or young virgins, who were brought up under the sacred shadow of the altar. That Mary spent her best years in the temple is proved by apostolic tradition, by the writings of the fathers, and the opinion of the Church, who is not used to sanction doubt¬ ful facts; f nevertheless, certain heretics have allowed them¬ selves to treat this circumstance as fabulous, and some Catholic authors themselves have considered it an obscure * The Jews believed that St. John Baptist was much greater than Jesus Christ, because he was the son of a high priest .— (St. J. Chry- sost., Serm. 12, in Matt.) t In 1373, Philip de Maziere, a French nobleman, chancellor of the King of Cyprus, came to the court of Charles V., and related to him that in the East, where he had lived a long time, the Feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin was annually celebrated, in memory of her having been presented in the temple at the age of three years. Philip added, “ I reflected that this great feast was not known in the Western church, and when I was ambassador from the King of Cyprus to the pope, I spoke to him about this festival, and presented him the office of it; he had it carefully examined by the cardinals, prelates, and doctors of theology, and permitted the feast to be celebrated.” The Greeks kept it early under the title of the “ Ei j -ance of the Blessed Virgin into the Temple: ” mention is made of it in their most ancient martvrologies. MOTHER OE GOD. 71 point, concealed beneath the veil of olden times, which it was very difficult to clear up. The denials of the former surprise us but little, but the circumspection of the others is strange indeed; for if ever a Christian tradition possessed a character of authenticity it is this. St. Evodius, who was the first to relate, in an epistle entitled Lumen , which Nicephorus has preserved for us, this glorious circumstance of the infancy of the Virgin, flourished at the very time of the apostles and of the Mother of God. He was Bishop of Antioch, a town of Syria, to which both Jews and Christians resorted; and the temple where the newly-formed faithful followed, with profound veneration, the traces of the Son oi God and his divine Mother, still subsisted in all its glory. This tradition, which came from the church of Jerusalem,— a church composed of the first disciples of Jesus Christ, among whom were found a number of relatives of the Virgin and of St. Joseph,—was consecrated very early by a religi¬ ous memorial; a demonstrative proof in the eyes of Pro¬ testants themselves.* In fine, the greater number of the fathers,f and especially St. Jerom, who lived in the midst of the sites of our redemption, and where the traditions were yet recent, have recorded it, and held it to be true. This traditionary belief may therefore be ranked in the number of the best established facts of history. * Gibbon himself could not help acknowledging the authenticity of the religious traditions in Palestine. “ They (the Christians) fixed, 6y unquestionable tradition, the scene of each memorable event” (c. xxiii.) : an avowal of considerable weight in the mouth of a writer so well informed as the English historian, and a man at the same time so little disposed in favour of religion. According to M. de Chateaubriand, if there is anything well proved upon earth, it is the authenticity of the Christian traditions at Jerusalem. t St. Epiphanius, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Gregory of Nazianzum, St. Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople, George of Nicomedia, St John Eamascen, &c. 7* THE HISTor t OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN,\ CHAPTER V. MARY IN THE TEMPLE. In the fortified enclosure of the temple, on that site where the Christians erected an oratory, of which the companions in arms of Godfrey made a church with a gilded cupola, under the invocation of the Blessed Mary,* which the brave Knights Templars often took delight in ornamenting with spoils of the Saracens, arose that part of the religious edifice which had been consecrated to the virgins who were dedi¬ cated to the Lord : it was thither that Zachary led his young relative, t * The mosque of Omar (el Aksa) represents to the Christians ths ancient temple of Solomon; el Sakhra (the rock) is built on the place where Mary lived from the age of three years till her espousal with Joseph. This place was at that time an appendage to the temple of Solomon, as el Sakhra is now to the mosque of Omar. Before the crusades, el Sakhra was only a chapel ; the Franks added to it a church, which they surmounted with a gilt cupola. When the conquerors threw down the great cross which glittered on the cupola of the Sakhra, the cries of joy of the Mussulmans, and the cries of grief of the Christians, were so great, says an Arab author, that it seemed as if the world was going to he destroyed.—(Correspondance d’Orient, t. v.) According to Schonah, there arose a great tumult in the city, which Saladin was obliged to suppress in person. t St. Germanus affirms that it was Zachary who undertook to place the Virgin in the temple. The Arab traditions relate, in like manner, that God gave the Virgin in charge to Zachary, ouacafalha Zacharia. The Koran, in the Surate which treats of the family of Amram, adds to this fact a marvellous legend picked up among the Christian tribes in the desert. It says that Zachary, who went from time to time to visit his young relative, never did so without finding near her a quantity of the finest fruits of the Holy Land, and always out of season, which obliged him at length to inquire of Mary whence all these fine fruits came. Mary answered, “ Hou men and Allah iarzoe mother of god. n Although virginity in Israel was only a temporary virtue, and had soon to give place to conjugal virtues, it was not without privileges and without honour. Jehovah loved the prayers of chaste children, of pure virgins; and it was a virgin, and not a queen, whom he had chosen to bring about the redemption of the human race. Thus, when the seers of Juda unfolded to the elect, but oft chastised people, the prophetic picture of their miseries, or their victories, they always introduced in it a virgin, either smiling or in tears, to personify provinces and cities. In the wars of extermina¬ tion, in which the broadsword of the Hebrews cut down the women, children, and old men of Moab, the virgins were spared; and the high priest, who was forbidden by a severe law to pay funeral honours to the friend whom he loved as his own soul, and even to the prince of his people, might assist without being defiled at the funeral of his sister if she had died a virgin.* The virgins, or almas, took part in the ceremonies of the Hebrew worship before that worship had a temple. We see them, under the guidance of Mary, the sister of Moses, celebrate with dances and canticles the passage bf the Red Sea.f These dancing choirs of young women, transplanted from Egypt into the desert, continued a long time among the Hebrews. The virgins of Silo, who seem to have been, in the time of the Judges, more especially consecrated to the service of Adonai than the other daughters of Israel, were dancing to the song of canticles and the sound of harps, at a short distance from the holy place, during a feast of the man 'iascha begdir hissa,” (All that you see comes from God, who provides what he pleases, without count or number.)—(D’Herbelot, Bibliotheque Orientale, t. ii. art. Miriam.) * Levit. xxi. 3. t Mary and her young companions (les almas) sung canticles at the passage of the Red Sea, accompanying themselves with timbrels.— (R. sal Yarhhi. Exod. xv.) 74 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN , Lord, when the Benjaminites carried them off. This serious event did not put an end to this custom, which ceased only at the disastrous epoch when the ark was lost and the first temple destroyed.* All the almas were probably admissible to these sacred choirs, when their reputation was not tarnished with any stain; but among them a chosen portion are distinguished, who are grouped about the altar, with greater fervour and perseverance. While the ark of God was still encamped in tents, the women who watched and prayed at the door of the tabernacle offered to God the brazen mirrors which they had brought from Egypt. They were doubtless pious widows, who had refused to form new engagements in order to attend more uninterruptedly to heavenly things, and almas devoted by their parents to the service of the sanctuary, who had been placed under the protection of these virtuous women. St. Jerom thus understands this passage of Exodus. As the vow of parents could generally be redeemed, and as the redemption, fixed at a moderate sum,t was always ef¬ fected at the end of a few years, | these temporary vows * These sacred dances, which brought to mind the passage of the Bed Sea, and which were accompanied with hymns of praise, were considered among the Jews as a practice of so great piety, that we find them even among the severe therapeuts. “ The sacred dance of the devout therapeuts,” says Philo, “was composed of two choirs, one of men, the other of women,—the union of both was very harmonious and real music, because nothing was heard but very fine words, and the grave and decorous dancers had no other object than the honour and service of the God of Israel.”—(Philo, de Vita cont.) f Moses had fixed the ransom of this vow, by an express law, at a sum of fifty sides at most. The side of silver weighed four Attic drachms, and was worth about fifteen pence of English money. I The children, in this sort of bondage, retained their rights to the paternal inheritance, and could ransom themselves, if their parents did not redeem them.—(L’Abbe Guen6e.) Josephus (Ant. lib. iv.) •emarks that men and women who, after consecrating themselves voluntarily to the ministers', wished to break their vows, paid to the MOTHER^ OF GOD. ^5 were called a loan made to the Lord.* “ I have lent him to the Lord,” said Anna, when she took her little Samuel to Silo, j- After the return from the captivity, the influence of the Persians, who banished women from their religious solemni¬ ties, X told upon the institution of the almas; they ceased to form, in some degree, a body in the state, and to take an ostensible part in the ceremonies of worship. Under the pontiff kings, they lived in seclusion, and their days passed in so profound a retreat, that when they ran in dismay to the high priest Onias, at the time when the sacrilegious attempt of Heliodorus threw all Jerusalem into commotion, the Jewish historians considered the fact so unusual and wonder¬ ful that they recorded it in their annals.§ There were then, whatever some may have said, certain virgins attached to the service of the second temple at the time of the presentation of Mary; the institutions of the primitive Christians attest it,|| and St. Ambrose, St. Jerom, and before them the proto-gospel of St. James, have affirmed priests a certain sum, and that those who were unable to pay placed themselves at the discretion of the priest. * F. Croiset, Exerc. de Piete. t Id circo et ego commodavi eum Domino. J At Bombay, the descendants of the Persians have a temple consecrated to fire. They come in crowds upon the platform, with their brilliant white costumes and coloured turbans, to salute the rising of the sun, or to offer their homage to his last rays, by humbly prostrating before him. Their wives do not appear at that time ; it is the hour when they go to fetch water from the wells.—(Buckingham. Picture of India.) § Macch. i. 2. || It is known that the primitive Christians, particularly those of Jerusalem, who were of Hebrew origin, preserved some institutions of the old law; of this number was that of virgins and widows, who are found attached to the primitive churches to exercise various good works in use by the sex.—(See Fleury, Moeurs des Israelites ot des Chretiens, p. 115.) ;6 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, it. But what passed during the abode of the Virgin in the temple ? What were, at this interesting time of her life, her tastes, her habits, her practices of devotion ? On this sub* ject, there remain but few authentic documents. A tra¬ ditionary life of the Mother of God, which St. Epiphanius, who lived in 390, considered then as very ancient, no doubt entered into those details, but it is lost. The gospel of the infancy of the Virgin, and of St. Jerom, though both inform us of the admission of Mary among the daughters of the Lord, confine their indications almost entirely to this fact.. To fill up this vacant space of a history which God seems to have been pleased to envelop in clouds, we have nothing more than a few uncertain lines, some mutilated pages of the fathers, of which it is difficult, even by putting them carefully together in order, to make a satisfactory outline. No matter; like the Indian artisan, who joins together a broken piece of cloth, thread by thread, and who patiently en¬ deavours to join the ends again by unravelling, tying to¬ gether, and letting his shuttle glide with infinite precautions along this woof, worn out and easily broken, we shall apply laboriously to the work, and collect together the scattered shreds of the precious web of the life of the Virgin, to reunite the tissue, if it be practicable. With the persevering patience of Banian, we shall endeavour, not to make up a conjectural affair, which our profound respect for our subject would forbid, but to give, by the help of the best authorities and a long study of the manners of the Hebrews, the most precise idea, and that approaching as near as possi¬ ble to the truth, of the almost cloistered life of Mary in the temple. Some old legendary writers have delighted in surrounding the early childhood of the Virgin with a number of pro¬ digies : we pass over in silence these marvellous events, which aie not sufficiently proved; but what we ought to call attention to, is an inaccurate assertion, or rather an in- MOTHER OF GOD. T, admissible one, which has been adopted confidently and without examination by some holy personages and religious writers.* From the Virgin’s having always been sanctity itself, which no one disputes, it has been inferred that she must have been placed in the most sanctified part of the temple, that is, in the Holy of Holies, which is materially untrue. The Holy of Holies, that impenetrable sanctuary of the God of hosts, was closed against the whole of the Hebrew priesthood, except the high priest, who went into it only once a year, after a number of fasts, vigils, and purifi¬ cations. He did not present himself there without being enveloped in a thick cloud of perfumes, which interposed between him and the Divinity, “ whom no mortal could see without dying,” says the Scripture; in fine, he remained there only a few minutes, during which the people, prostrate with their faces to the ground, uttered loud sighs, for fear that he should there die. He himself afterwards gave a great feast to his friends, to rejoice with them for having escaped a danger so pressing and formidable.! After this, let any one judge if it be possible that Mary was brought up in the Holy of Holies ! The local traditions of Jerusalem protest no less loudly than common sense against this opinion, thrown out at hazard: the Sakhra, which was originally a Christian church, built on the site of the apartments of the Virgin, is a dis¬ tinct appendage of the mosque of Omar, and is not enclosed within that edifice; yet the mosque of Omar is built on the very place where the temple stood. F. Croiset, in his Exercises de Piete, has not adopted this opinion; but, unwilling to reject it altogether, he has attempted a sort of compromise. According to him, the Mother of God was not brought up in the Holy of Holies, but the priests, struck with her admirable virtues, permitted * St. Andrew of Crete, George of Nicomedia, &c. f Prideaux. Basnage. Higtoire des Juifs. liv. y. c. 16. 78 THE HISTORY OR THE BLESSED VIRGIN, her to go and pray there from time to time. The Jesuit father has forgotten several things in adopting this mezzo- termine: first, that woman, among the Hebrews, was a being reputed unclean, likened to a slave, and hardly bound to pray at all; * one who was banished to an enclosure which she could not pass beyond, and that the interior of the temple was a forbidden place to her, even if she were a prophetess or the daughter of a king. Secondly, that the priests could not grant to Mary a privilege which they did not enjoy themselves, and that, moreover, it would have been exposing her to certain death.f Lastly, even suppos¬ ing none of these prejudices and fears to have existed among the priests of Jehovah, they would not have suffered any one, on any account, to go into the Holy of Holies, considering that it was important to withhold from the people the know¬ ledge of the disappearance of the ark, which had been lost in * The impurity of the woman, according to the Rabbins, dates from the seduction of Eve by the serpent, and cannot be expiated but at the coming of their Messias. Prayer is not so obligatory upon her as upon man; she is not even bound to the greater part of the positive commandments ; in fine, the Jews still say, in their morning prayer, “ Blessed he thou, O Lord, King of the universe, for not having made me be born a woman.” The woman in her humiliation says, on her part, with sorrowful resignation, “ Blessed be thou, O Lord, who hast made me what thou hast pleased.”—(Basnage, Hist, des Juifs, liv. vii. c. 10, p. 169.) f “ The sanctuary is a place so holy,” says Philo, “ that there is no one among us but the high priest alone who is allowed to enter it, and that only once in the year, after a solemn fast, to bum perfumes there in honour of God, and humbly to beg of him that this year may be happy to all mankind. If any one, not only of the common people of our nation, but even one of the chief priests, dared to go in thither, or if the high priest himself went in twice a year, or more than once on the day when he is allowed to do so, it would cost him his life, without any possibility of saving him, so strictly has Moses, our legis¬ lator, commanded us to reverence this place and render it inacces¬ sible.”—(Philo, ad Cadjum. c. 16.) MOTHER OF GOD. 79 some obscure cavern of the mountains of Judea ever since the days of Jeremias.* This second version, therefore, is no more admissible than the first. The education which Mary received in the temple was as carefully provided as was compatible with the knowledge of the time and the manners of the Hebrews ; it turned princi¬ pally on domestic work, from which the wife and daughter of Augustus Caesar did not think themselves exempt in their imperial palace, and in the midst of the luxuries of Rome, f Brought up in the strict observance of the laws of Moses, ind conforming to the customs of her nation, Mary rose at the song of the bird, at the hour “ when the bad angels are silent, and when prayers are heard most favourably.” J She dressed herself with extreme decency, out of respect for the glory of God, who penetrates everywhere, and beholds the actions of man, even in the darkest night; then she thanked the Lord for having added another day to her days, and having preserved her during her sleep from the snares of the evil spirit. § Her toilet was not long, and there was no re¬ finement about it; she wore neither pearl bracelets nor gold chains “inlaid with silver,” nor purple tunics, like the daughters of the princes of her race. A robe of hyacinth blue, of soft and velvet-like appearance, like that flower of * The Jews are not agreed as to the fate of the ark after the ruin of their first people: some will have it that Jeremias hid it in a cavern in the mountains, the entrance to which it had never been possible to find again; others say that the holy King Josias, admonished by Holda, the prophetess, that the temple would be destroyed soon after his death, had this precious deposit placed in a subterranean vault which Solomon had had constructed. t Augustus never wore any other garments but those woven by his wife or his daughter; and Alexandei the Great, by his mother and his sisters. % Basnage, liv. vii. c. xvii. p. 309. ? Basnage, loco citato So THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, the field—a white tunic confined by a plain girdle, with the ends hanging free—a long veil with its folds inartificially but gracefully arranged, and so formed as quickly and com¬ pletely to cover the face—and, lastly, shoes to match the robe, composed the oriental costume of Mary.* After the customary ablutions, the Virgin, her companions, and the pious women who were responsible to the priests and to God for this sacred deposit, proceeded to the tribune surrounded with balconies,f where the almas seated them¬ selves in the place of honour.! The sun was beginning to gild with his early rays the distant mountains of Arabia, the eagle was soaring in the cloud, the sacrifice burned upon the brazen altar to the sound of the morning trumpets, and Mary, with her head bowed down under her veil, after re¬ peating the eighteen prayers of Esdras, besought of God, with all Israel, the Christ so long promised to the earth, and * The Annunciades of Genoa wore in the sixteenth century the costume of the Blessed Virgin, that is to say, white lelow, and. sky blue above, that such a habit might cause a continual remembrance of her. The slippers of the choir nuns in like manner are covered with leather of sky-blue colour .—(Rule of the Annunciades of Genoa, c. 2.) M. de Lamartine found in those Eastern regions, where everything seems unchangeable, the costume of Mary in that of the women of Naza¬ reth. “They wear,” says the traveller poet, “a long tunic of sky- blue, fastened by a white girdle, the ends of which hang down to the ground; the full folds of a white tunic gracefully fall over the blue.” M. D. Lamartine traces back this costume to the times of Abraham and Isaac, and there is nothing improbable in this sup¬ position, We see but a very slight difference between the costumes adopted in the sixteenth century from the traditions of Italy, and that which the French traveller found in the very places them¬ selves. f In the feast of tne drawing of the waters, the men were placed above the galleries, which went all round the peristyle of the women. + Ongen, St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Cyril have preserved to us the tradition which assigns to the virgins of the temple an honourable and separate place in the peristyle of tb* women MOTHER CP GOD. Si so slow to come. “ 0 God ! may thy name be glorified and sanctified in this world, which thou hast created according to thy good pleasure ; let thy kingdom come: may redemption flourish, and may the Messias come speedily.” * * * § And the people answered in chorus, “ Amen! amen! ” Then they sung the concluding verses of that beautiful psalm attributed to the prophets Aggeus and Zacharias:— “ The Lord looseth them that are fettered: the Lord enlighteneth the blind. “ The Lord lifteth up them that are cast down; the Lord loveth the just. “The Lord keepeth the strangers: he will support the fatherless and the widow; and the ways of sinners he will destroy. “ The Lord shall reign for ever: thy God, 0 Sion, unto generation and generation.” t The reading of the schema J and the blessing of the priest concluded this public prayer, which was made at night and morning. § * This prayer, which is called Kaddisch, is the most ancient of all those which the Jews have preserved, and as it is read in the Chal- daic tongue, it is believed to be one of the prayers which had been made after the return from Babylon.—(Basn., liv. vii. c. 17, p. 314.) Prideaux affirms that it was used long before our Lord’s time, and that the apostles often offered it with the people in the synagogues. It was recited often in the service, and the assembly were obliged to answer Amen several times. t Leo of Modena. Maimonides. + Leo of Modena, c. 11, p. 29. By the schema is understood three different sections of Deuteronomy and Numbers. It is a kind of profession of faith which is recited night and morning, by which they confess that there is but one God, who delivered his people out of Egypt. § It is certain that the Blessed Virgin must have assisted very often at the public prayers of morning and evening: these prayers were considered more efficacious than others, and there are even Hebrew doctors who maintain that God hears none but these. *2 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, After fulfilling this first religious duty with indescribable fervour, Mary and her young companions resumed their ac¬ customed occupations. Some turned swiftly with their active fingers spindles of cedar or ithel,* * * § others worked in purple, hyacinth, and gold upon the veil of the temple, or the rich girdles of the priests; while groups, bending forward over a Sidonian loom, were employed in executing the varied designs of that magnificent tapestry for which the valiant women deserved the praises of all Israel, and which Homer himself has extolled.f The Virgin surpassed all the daughters of her people in these beautiful works, so highly appreciated by the ancients. St. Epiphanius informs us that she excelled in embroidery and in the art of working in wool, fine linen, and gold ; % the Proto-Gospel of St. James exhibits her to us seated before a spindle of wool dyed purple, which turned round under her light hands like the quivering leaf of the aspen-tree ; § and the Christians of the East have per¬ petuated the traditionary opinion of her unrivalled skill in spinning the flax of Pelusium,|| by giving the name of the Virgin's thread to those webs of dazzling whiteness, and * The ithel is a species of acacia, which grows in Arabia ; it is of a fine black, and resembles ebony: it is thought to be the setim wood of Moses. t See the Iliad, lib. vi. X In the middle ages, in memory of the Virgin working in linen, the weavers had placed themselves under the banner of the Annuncia¬ tion. The manufacturers of gold brocade and silk stuffs had for their patroness Our Lady the Rich, and bore her image on their banner, heavy with magnificent embroidery.—(Alex. Monteil, Hist, des FranQais des divers etats. § The church of Jerusalem had early consecrated this memorial by numbering among its treasures the spindles of Mary. These spindles were sent afterwards to the Empress Pulcheria, who placed them in the church of Hodegos, at Constantinople. || The vestments which the high priests wore in the morning were, says the Misnah, of fine linen of Pelusium, a town of Egypt, where the flax was exquisite. MOTHER OF GOD. 83 texture almost vaporous, which hover over the deep valleys in the damp mornings of autumn. The serious and pure wives of the first faithful, in remembrance of these domestic occupations, which the Queen of angels did not disdain, never failed to consecrate to her a distaff surrounded with little bands of purple, and supplied with spotless wool.* But the talents and knowledge of the Virgin were not con¬ fined to this. St. Ambrose attributes to her a perfect under¬ standing of the sacred books, and St. Anselm maintains that she knew perfectly that ancient Hehrew, the language of the terrestrial Paradise,! in which God traced with his potent finger, on very thick precious stones, \ the ten precepts of the Decalogue. Whether Mary, by studying the idiom of Anna and Debora, had been initiated, during her solitary vigils, in the sublime conceptions of the seers of Israel, or whether she received from that sanctifying spirit, who had so richly en¬ dowed her, a breath of poetical inspiration similar to those harmonious breezes which lightly touched the Eolian harp of King David,§ still we cannot deny that the young prophetess, who gave to the new law its most beautiful canticle, must have known the sweetest and most sublime inspirations of * This custom still exists in some villages of the north and west of France. f According to the rabbins and commentators on the Bible, the language of the terrestrial Paradise was the ancient Hebrew. X Hebrew tradition.—(Basn., liv. vi. c. 16.) According to some oriental authors, the tables of the law were of red rubies or car¬ buncles ; but the most common opinion among the Arabs and Mussulmans is that they were emeralds, in the inside of which the characters were so cut a3 to be legible on every side.—(D’Herbelot, Bibliotheque Orientale, t. ii.) 4 According to an ancient Jewish tradition, David had a harp which played at night when a particular breeze blew. Basnaga ridiculed these strings which sound of themselves at the night breeze, and openly treats this assertion as an absurdity. The invention, or rather the re-discovery of the Eolian harps, the magic sounds of which enchant the parks of the English, has justified the rabbins. $4 the history of the blessed virgin. genius. Certainly, the woman who composed the Magnificat was no young girl of the ignorant common people, as some Protestant authors have not been afraid to say, and she com¬ bined with unequalled sanctity talents of the highest order. Nevertheless, this brilliant side of her intelligence was hardly perceived, so adroit was she in concealing it beneath her evangelical modesty. Knowing the delicate duties and true interests of her sex, she avoided display with extreme care, and passed along without noise, like a silent star, that pursues its course through the clouds. The rich treasures of her mind and heart have been but rarely and imperfectly revealed to the earth; they were the roses of Yemen, which the young Arab girl conceals beneath her veil, and the softened perfume of which is hardly perceived. An ancient poet said with servility of Augustus that he was himself the work of several ages, and that, since the days of the creation, all the industry of nature had been put in re¬ quest to produce him. What was an hyperbole carried to an absurd length in speaking of the sanguinary nephew of Caesar, becomes a truth demonstrated when applied to the Virgin. Mary is the masterpiece of nature, the flower of the old generations, and the wonder of ages. Never had the earth seen, never will the earth see, so many perfections combined in a simple daughter of men. All was grace, holi¬ ness, grandeur in this blessed creature: conceived in the friendship of God, sanctified before her birth, she knew not those passions which disorder the soul, and sin which corrupts the heart. Attracted towards good by a sweet and natural inclination, by favour of her immaculate conception, her pure and innocent actions were like those coats of snow which are silently heaped upon the lofty summits of the mountains, adding purity to purity, and whiteness to white¬ ness, till a dazzling cone is raised, on which the light darts playfully, and which forces man to turn away his eyes, like the sun. It has not been given to any second creature MOTHER OF GOD. 85 to present such a lii’e to the sovereign Judge of men ; Jesus Christ alone surpassed her,—but Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Mary entered the temple of God, like one of those spotless victims which the Spirit of the Lord had shown to Malachy. Beautiful, young, nobly born, and qualified to aspire to every position among a people who often placed beauty upon the throne,* she attached herself to the corners of the altar by a vow of virginity. By this vow, unheard of before, Mary broke down the fence which separated the old law from the new, and plunged so deeply into the sea of the evangelical virtues, that it might be said that she had already sounded almost all its depths when her divine Son came to reveal it to the children of men. God does not change his ways abruptly; he announces, he prepares long before, the great events which are to change the face of the earth: a precursor was needed for the Mes- sias, and he found him in the person of St. John the Baptist; a preliminary was requisite to the new law, and the virtues of Mary were to the gospel what a cool and cheerful dawn is to a fine day. St. Epiphanius, quoted by Nicephorus, has left us a charming portrait of the Virgin; this portrait, sketched in the fourth century, from traditions now effaced, and manu¬ scripts which we no longer possess, is the only one which has come down to us. The Virgin, according to this bishop, was not tall of stature, though her height was a little above the middle size; her colour, slightly darkened, like that of the Sula- mite, by the sun of her country, had the rich tint of ripe ears * “ It is neither climate, nor diet, nor bodily exercise which forms the beauty of the human form ; it is the moral sentiment of virtue, which cannot subsist without religion. Beauty of countenance is the true physiognomy of the soul.”—(Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Etudes de la Nature, 6tude 10.1 86 THE HISTORY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN, of corn; her hair was light, her eyes lively, the pupil being rather of an olive colour, her eyebrows perfectly arched, and of the finest black; her nose, remarkably perfect, was aquiline; her lips rosy; the shape of her face a fine oval; her hands and fingers long. All the fathers eagerly attest, with one accord, the admira* ble beauty of the Virgin; St. Denis the Areopagite, who had seen the divine Mary, assures us that she was a dazzling beauty, and that he should have adored her as a goddess, if ht had not known that there is but one God. But it was not to this assemblage of natural perfections that Mary owed the power of her beauty; it emanated from a higher source. St. Ambrose understood it well, when he said that this attractive covering was but a transparent veil which let all the virtues be seen through it, and that her soul, the most noble and purest that ever was, next to the soul of Jesus Christ, was entirely revealed in her look. The natural beauty of Mary was but the remote reflexion of her intellectual and imperishable beauties: she was the most beautiful of women, because she was the most chaste and most holy of the daughters of Eve.* God has made a palace of pearl-coloured shell for the pearl of the Green Sea;f but it is the pearl, and not its brilliant shell, which is set in gold, and with which the diadems of kings are incrusted. The fathers were not here mistaken; and accordingly, in what they have left us about the person of Mary, they have devoted a considerable part to moral * We know that David, Solomon, and the other kings of Juda, often placed upon their royal couch women of obscure condition; the celebrated Sulamite of Solomon was, it is said, a young country girl of the little village of Sulam, situated at a short distance from Jerusalem. In the time of Mary, Herod the Great had espoused Marianne, the daughter of a plain sacrificing priest, on account of hoi beauty. f Bahr-al -Akhdhar, a name of the Persian Gulf. MOTHER OF GOD. beauties,—the only ones which are not the food of worms. We are about to collect the little precious stones which they have scattered over their writings, to compose with them a mosaic which may exhibit a second portrait of her who was, says St. Sophronius, “ the garden of pleasure of the Lord.”* The greatest propriety reigned in all the actions cf the Virgin; she was good, affable, compassionate, and never tired of hearing the long complaints of the afflicted. She spoke little, always to the purpose, and never did an untruth defile her lips. Her voice was sweet, penetrating, and her words had something unctuous and consoling, which shed calm over the soul. She was the first in watchings, the most exact in fulfilling the divine law, the most profound in humility, the most perfect in every virtue. She was never seen in anger; she never offended, afflicted, or railed at any one. She was an enemy to pomp, simple in her attire, simple in her manners, and never had a thought of display¬ ing her beauty, her ancient nobility, or the rich treasures of her mind and heart. Her presence seemed to sanctify all around it, and the sight of her banished the thought of the things of earth. Her politeness was no vain formality, made up of words of falsehood: it was an expansion of universal benevolence which came from the soul. In fine, her look already discovered the Mother of mercy—the Virgin of whom it has since been said : “ She would ask of God forgiveness even for Lucifer, if Lucifer himself asked for forgiveness.” Though very scantily provided with riches, Mary was liberal to the poor, and her young maiden alms often dropped unperceived into that chest which was fixed to one of the columns of the peristyle, into which Jesus at a later period saw the widow’s mite fall. St. Ambrose makes known to us the pure and sacred source from which Mary derived her alms; she deprived herself of everything, granting only to * “ Vere Virgo erat hortus deliciarum. in quo consita sunt universa fiorum genera et odoramenta virtutuin.”—(Sophron., Serin, de Ass.) 88 THE HTSTOR Y OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN ,, nature what she could not withhold from it without dying, and seemed to live, like the grasshoppers, upon air and dew. 1 * Her fasts, which were frequent and rigorous, were in likei manner beneficial to the poor. But the fasts of the Blessed Virgin were not like our fasts in the north, which last only for a morning, and are confined to the privation of certain kinds of food; they were an abstinence from everything! which began in the evening at sunset, and ended the next day at the rising of the stars.t All this time Mary denied herself all that could gratify her taste and her heart; she | imposed upon herself the hardest work, the most disagree¬ able works of mercy, put on her poorest garments, slept on the ground, and did not allow herself, during these days of mortification and tears, which were often prolonged for weeks together, anything but a slender repast, composed of bread baked in the embers, bitter herbs, and a cup of water from the fountain of Siloe. J Her meditations were frequent, and her prayer so recollected, so attentive, so profound, that her soul seemed to dissolve in adoration before the Eternal. * The ancients believed that grasshoppers lived on air and dew.— 'Philo, de Vita cont., p. 831.) Homer, in the third book of the Iliad:— . . . . Ttrriytfffft ioiKong oire tcafl’ vXriv Atvdpiu i