THE ROOT AND THE CURE OF MARIOIATRY.
THE Times, in a review of Dr. Pusey's last pamphlet, marked by more thought than its reviews usually are, affirms that the final obstacles to any re-union or definite treaty of peace between. the English Church and the Church of Rome are the belief in, Infallibility and the worship of the Virgin, and as regards the Anglican party it is probably in the right. With average English- men the dogma of transubstantiation, and the system of sacer- dotalism of which that is the foundation, are probably still more effective barriers. No race is likely to accept the dogma of transub- stantiation as a belief, after once rejecting it, until it sees what the dogma means, and we very much doubt whether average Englishmen, whatever their future training, ever will see precisely what it means, whether they will ever recognize fully that besides flour, water, yeast, and salt, there is a metaphysical substance called bread, which may be miraculously changed, evidence being adduced to that effect, without any inevitable change in the. elements which produce it. They will go on asserting to the end. of time that flour can't be flesh, just as if anybody had ever said it could, with a simple directness which, like the protest of the boor that he sees the sun go round, almost baffles argument. Nor will they ever hold, for in the depth of the Catholic period they never did hold, that the right of teaching and the power of working a daily miracle can by possibility descend, like gout, hereditarily, or like an official warrant by transmission at human discretion from one human authority to another. To the mass of Englishmen talk of the Apostolic succes- sion is, and we believe will remain, simply silliness. If the clergy have got it, whatever it is, very good; if they have not got it, very good too ; in neither case is it of any more importance than any other inherited or official advantage which helps a mania the race, but does not make him winner. Cieteris paribus, the orthodox Briton rather prefers a " regular " clergyman, as he rather prefers an aristocratic candidate for Parliament, but cause being shown he turns from the slim curate to listen to Spurgeon, and is not impressed by Ken when Bunyan is talking English. But to the Anglican who has convinced himself of the real presence, the worship of Mary is probably the real stumbling-block and rock of offence. He could get over infallibility much as the Hohenstauffen used to do, when they first pitted the State against the Church, by affirming that although it must exist nobody knows where it exists, and the only certain guide to its habitat, the consensus of the entire Christian world, can never be obtained. Purgatory to people who believe in a Dantesque hell is a mental relief, "the worship of saints" may be refined into a commemoration, and the distinction between mortal and venial sin is accepted in everything but theory by every Protestant who ever lived. But Mariolatry —we do not mean to use the term offensively, but as we use Bibliolatry—they cannot get over, and Mariolatry has become of the very essence of the Roman cult. That it should be so is perhaps the most striking psychological fact within the whole domain of theology. We do not mean only in the extreme form given to it by the doctors who declare, though without the consent of the body of their followers, that Mary was conceived without sin, and therefore deity, or who exult in the wire-drawn deduction that as the substance of Christ is present in the Eucharist the substance of his mother must be present too, but in its older and more popular form, the worship of the Virgin, the importation of a goddess into a monotheism, is a spiritual marvel well worth an effort to explain. Had there been the faintest ground for it in Scripture, or in that bodyof uncritical deduction from Scripture called patristic tradition, it would have been explicable, but there is none. Christ himself expressly repudiated His mother's authority, the notion of its existence never seems to have occurred to St. Paul or St. Peter, who never so much as name her, and for the first two centuries after Christ the idea of any special sanctity, or still more any spiritual power, attaching to the mother of Jesus and His brothels never seems to have entered a Christian head. The tenet being arbitrary must have had its root in some deep want of human nature, some irresistible crave which induced or, as it were, compelled mankind to look out into theologic space for a supplement to their ordinary faith. We believe that it had
such a root, and among Southern Catholics has one now, and that the attempt of Anglicans, and indeed of Teutonic Catholics generally, to subordinate the Virgin's place in the ecclesiastical system while holding the ideas which made her necessarf, will until the new thoughts now seething in all Churches rise to the top be-entirely abortive.
We believe the worship of Mary,—originally an accident, the priesthood in its grand fight with Paganism feeling the need of a perfect feminine ideal, and in its recoil from the sexual laxity of Paganism exalting virginity into an active merit,— to have attained its marvellous popularity from this cause. She was the one being for ages whom spiritual teachers declared to be spiritually powerful, and did not invest with unendurable terrors. In the awful fight with Paganism which lasted thirteen centuries the Catholic theologians grew fearfully hard, just as in the shorter and sharper fight with them the Calvinists were welded into steel. God became in their hands what Dante believed Him to be, the all-holy executor of righteous but most unendurable vengeance, a fearful Being, ever sending forth on nations judgments, on individuals tortures elaborated beyond imagination, and in- tended to endure to all eternity. The terror of physical tor- ments to be suffered by the body for ever grew insuffer- able, and there was no visible path of safety or conceivable escape. To live justly was useless, for a just life included in the ideas of priests obedience to them and. attention to a regime of observances as oppressive as the old ceremonial law. To turn to Christ seemed hopeless, for Christ had been slowly degraded from His transcendent position as Redeemer of mankind into one of two attitudes—the patient sacrifice offered by an angry Deity to His own wrath, or the embodied Church who interceded for man when the requirements of the Church had been fulfilled, and at no other time. Even in the former aspect, now comforting to millions who do not see that, God being just as well as merciful, Redemption cannot mean the punishment of the innocent, there was no hope for the earlier Christian. The creed had become a cult, faith an act daily repeated, and that act was declared impossible except through the intervention of the Church and under mental conditions which she summed up in the single law of obedience to herself. Salvation, essential to avoid elaborated physical torture, only through the Eucharist ; the Eucharist only to the worthy ; the worthy those only whom the Church thinks worthy ;—this was for ten centuries the sum of the Christian plan, a plan, be it remembered, set before men with as high an ideal of goodness as we have, but a much lower moral fibre. Decent Atheists nowadays could not, for example, do the cruelties Christians then performed without a shudder. The belief in purgatory spread, but brought little relief, for man scarcely conceives eternity, and thinks torture for millions of years as terrible as torture for ever. The world grew full of the horror and depression which, visible for centuries, culminated in the tenth century, till men refused to beget children and property lost its value, and bad and good believed strenuously that the hour was approaching when the judgment should commence and the final and unen- durable misery should begin. The utter decay of the true ideal of Christ, of any knowledge of His character even, which marks this long stage in Christianity, would be inexplicable, did we not remember that for popular use the Gospels were non-existent, that Christ was ever becoming in popular imagination sterner against sin, "Rex tremendx majestatis, qui salvandos salvat gratis," that the single idea of redemption ever presented to the masses was that of a sacrifice useless unless the Levites consented that it should be useful. Amidst the gloom, however, shone one refulgent figure. The people had no means of knowing that Mary had not been revealed as Christ had been revealed—remember how swiftly her worship died after printing brought home the facts—the priests said she was all-powerful, and she was surrounded with no magic terrors. No one painted her wielding the thunderbolts, or organizing eternal terror, or demanding the sacrifice of the innocent. She was always the same, the Imre- ing mother, weeping for man, who could save, yet demanded nothing save prayer, and Worship, and purity of life, and man, hungering for the benignity which he felt must exist somewhere in Heaven, for the merciful comprehension of his frailty which must be in some Being's heart, independent of all formula, or ceremonial, or act like eating, turned in a rapture of relief to her. The more her efficacious power was exalted the greater became his sense of security, till priests and people, emotion and logic, the sense of sin and the thirst for mercy all conspiring, the pure and serene Jewish matron, whom the sternest of Protestants still recognize as the ideal type of holy but human womanhood, was exalted from her place in the workman's shop to be the Queen of Heaven. The quality of mercy, denied in the Almighty, forgotten in Christ, was -deified once more, and once more there was an object of worship approachable by the heart alone. We could fill number after number of this journal with stories of the Middle Ages, many ludicrous, many- trivial, one or two sublime, but all penetrated with this single thought, that from Mary, and Mary alone, could heart worship, and re- pentance, and prayer, in the very second of death, in the very act of sin, without the Eucharist, without the priest, at sea, in the desert, in the very home of vice, obtain instant and full remission. Men felt there was truth there, and had no means of knowing that the instrument of that truth was a pure invention, non-existent in fact, non-existent in revelation.
And the belief in Mary will die out among the Southern races of Europe, among women who still believe in dogmatic Catholicism, among those few men of the North who still hold the formula" Chris- tianity is true, and Christianity is Catholicism," only when they have perceived, as man will perceive at last, or all our faith is vain, that in the real Christ, the Christ of St. John, all that priests have ascribed to Mary is contained, the infinite mercy, and love, and, above all, the comprehension of humanity ; that the feminine element of which sceptics have complained in His character is there, and is its perfecting strain ; that in Him both the ideals which the Catholic has divided are completely united. There is no road to reunion through Anglicanism, through the doctrines of men who like Dr. Pusey declare the wretched idea of a materialistic hell,—which when men heartily believed, as in Dante's time, made them insuf- ferably bad,—to be the guardian belief of morals, who think the road to heaven lies through a suit, who ascribe to acts done by priests healing powers to the soul whose shell has endured them, who see in the eternal Son not the Redeemer of mankind, but the substance of an innocent sacrifice to be perpetually repeated to avert the wrath of an angry God, jealous for His own glory. The prospect of overt reunion, if it exists at all,—and we see not why a banyan is preferable to a forest clump, why all the diamonds of earth are more diamond when joined in one sparkling chain,—lies not there, but in the faith which believes that Christ descended for humanity, that in Him Godhead, manhood, and womanhood were absolutely united, and that the work He came to do was done.
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