sympathize, but strong to save, able to bear the great burden of the world and take it away, and to change the irrevocable wrong from curse into blessing. But the virgins at their vestal vigils knew not of it. Nor of the great multitude clothed in white robes, whom the blood of that heart was to redeem and cleanse, that they also might be altars from which, day and night, the fragrance of incense and the flames of the sacred eternal fire might go up to heaven. THE SILENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT AS TO MARY. OTHING is more natural than to have many questions to ask about her whom the angel hailed as "the highly favoured amongst women, whom all generations shall call blessed." Who has not wished for more such narratives as Luke gives of the angel's visit to Mary, and Mary's visit to her cousin, and those hymns in which they pour forth the gladness of their hearts? If Luke got these narratives from any human source, it must have been from the lips of Mary herself, who could have added many such incidents. Yet we learn very little more of Mary's sayings or doings, of her character and ways before the birth of our Lord, nor any after His birth, when in Egypt, or of the eighteen years. spent in the cottage at Nazareth, excepting the anecdote of her motherly anxiety when she sought Him, sorrowing, and found Him sitting amongst the doctors in the temple, when she "laid up His words in her heart." John tells us of her presence at the marriage, and her suggestion when the wine was short, and the reproof she received. Matthew tells, also, of her unseasonable interruption, as He talked with the people, and the reproof she got; so gentle, yet so like to Him that "must be about His Father's business." After that we see her no more until, standing beside the cross, she is commended to the care of John, who, from that hour, "took her to his own home," where we may believe she passed the remainder of her days in that silence which best became "the blessed amongst women." If any one should have broken this silence, it was John, who could have answered all the questions of the worshippers of Mary as to her person, manners, eyes, complexion, voice, death, and burial. Then, had she no sayings respecting her son which she was fond of repeating? Had John nothing to tell us of her husband Joseph, or of Mary's parents, brothers, sisters, and children, if she had any? There were apocryphal gospels not a few, and there are some in manuscript still unpublished, which, doubtless, give all the information on these matters which men abound in who make answer to themselves. The rise and progress of Mary's worship is the key to this silence. In more than half of Christendom Mary is still spoken of as "the Queen of Heaven." "The Mother of Mercy," honoured on her birth-day, and in that of her husband and parents, and deified in her assumption. The wit of man has been strained to devise titles, and human speech ransacked for epithets to affix to her name. St. Bernard, the last of the fathers, excels them all in the extravagance of his adoration, and all the Latin fathers vie with each other in the frenzy of their devotion. Bonaventura, the model of piety in the middle ages—a cardinal and a canonised saint, entitled "The Seraphic Doctor," who lived in the sixteenth century, was so carried away by his idolatry of Mary, that he turned the one hundred and fifty Psalms into a liturgy of praise to the mother of our Lord, inserting her name wherever that of Jehovah occurs, or the Messiah; a use of the Psalms so satisfactory to his age, that he published an abridgment, under the title of "The Psalter Minor of the Virgin," for popular use. Both may be seen in the Vatican edition of his works by the Jesuit fathers. The bare enumeration of the festivals of the Roman Church in honour of Mary, to which every century down to our own has contributed, gives a terrible meaning to this silence of the apostles and evangelists. The Nativity of the Virgin. Presentation of the Virgin. Purification of the Virgin. The Seven Griefs of the Virgin. Feast in honour of the Name of the Virgin. Feast of the Rosary of the Virgin. Feast of Our Lady of Mercy. Feast of the Prodigies wrought by the Virgin. Feast of Mary of Mount Carmel. Feast of Mary of Nives. Feast of the Expectation of the Virgin. In honour of our Saviour, the Roman Church has seven festivals; in honour of Mary, sixteen. Her portraits and statues are more honoured than those of our Saviour; and some of the least pleasing in form and features are the most honoured, from their reputation as miracle workers, or their supposed antiquity. Sacred art represents Mary's head encircled with a halo or glory, expressing equal dignity with the persons of the Trinity. as While the New Testament writers give us no help towards a portrait of Mary's person, they give us such traits as recall the ideal of her character-enough to show us her humble piety and trust in God, her meekness of spirit, her motherly love, her patience in suffering, her confidence in God. Her person is hid, but not her beautiful spirit. It has been remarked characteristic of the genius of Shakspeare, that his female characters are loved and admired for what they are in themselves, apart from mere physical beauty, for their feminine delicacy and gentleness, their self-sacrifices, their patience in suffering, their unsuspecting innocence, their purity and simplicity, their perfect naturalness. Their physical beauty, if they have any, is but the setting of the jewel, or as that which belongs by natural allotment to the sex at large. Is not this the way of the writers both of the Old and New Testaments? The Old Testament, describing the virtuous woman, "the one among a thousand," says nothing of her bodily presence, but much of her love to her husband, of her wisdom in building up her house, of the honours she receives from her children, the industry of her household, her good management and diligence early and late, the law of kindness on her lips, and the fear of God in her heart. In the New Testament, the Marys, Elizabeths, and Marthas, are characters, not images or portraits. Not a word is said of their comeliness. We know them only as they speak and act. What meaneth this? All the self-developments of our race have been either physical or intellectual. Physical power was man's first ambition; and with physical power the ancient heathen endowed in fullest measure their gods. To physical strength and powers they gave their homage, as seen in the gigantic remains of the sculptures of Egypt, Nineveh, and Babylon. Nineveh, and Babylon. Intellect, in union with physical beauty, and strength, subordinated to intellect, was the highest development man ever sought and attained, as expressed in the architecture, sculpture, poetry, and philosophy of Greece. Under the gospel is set before us moral beauty and moral strength, exemplified in Him who triumphed "because of meekness, truth, and righteousness." In Christ, and all who bear His image, we see the development of moral principles and feelings-man subject to an unseen God and Saviour, in whom is the pattern of all excellence. The hope of a great future raises him above the slavery of the senses, and turns this life into a probation for a higher. The distinctions of this life lose much of their value. In poverty and in riches, amidst physical deformity and weakness, as well as in union with physical beauty and strength, this new development may go forward, and the one is to be sought at a great distance after the other. It has been said of the Hindus that, to their misfortune, they have no historical examples of ancestral worth. The Eastern imagination on death converted all their great ones into gods, and so magnified their most frivolous acts, as mediæval times did those of their European saints, that they took them out of the region of human imitation. Against this danger both the Old and New Testaments guard us, by recording the human-like faults, as well as the virtues of the best men, keeping them ever sufficiently human for imitation; so that we may, in reading our Bibles, thank God, with Luther, for recording the faults as well as the virtues of the best men. Apart from the teaching of the Scriptures, men did but feel after the moral and spiritual in character. No Christian can walk Christians, to their right minds. It may serve to readjust the balance between reverence and worship in times to come. How many at the opening and during the progress of the Reformation struggle must have felt this silence, and been. drawn anew to the worship of one God through one Mediator! Are no Romanists, at this moment, as they read in their mother-tongue some of those fifty millions of Bibles which the British and Foreign Bible Society have circulated this century over the continent of Europe, saying to themselves amongst the remains of the artistic productions | turn of the Church, as well as of individual of the Old World without feeling that the highest style of man was still unknown, even in ideal, to the Greeks and Romans. The Son of God must become the Son of man to show us the Highest, and to turn men into something of the likeness of that heavenly original. Lest that Divine ideal should be overlaid, or overlooked by the merely physical, we are told little more of Christ's bodily presence than that He was one of us," and that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us." Even His intellectual superiority to other men is seen chiefly through His moral and spiritual superiority. Whatever of His humanity only addresses the senses or imagination is passed over as not to the purpose of His mission. All His surroundings, also, are of the humblest and homeliest kind. His lot in social life is that of the million-of honest industry; His dwelling, a cottage; His trade, a carpenter. As the Master, so are the disciples; and as the Son, so is the mother. Everything is excluded from the gospel narratives that would turn aside the thoughts from those loftier elements of character which He came to exemplify, and which may adorn the cottage equally with the palace. If this was the end of the silence and reserve of the Gospels as to Mary, how little has the Church in times past understood its meaning, and avoided the danger which it forewarned! But the dangers of the Church from this quarter are not yet over and gone. The seeds of Scripture sowing, like those of Nature, have different times of upspringing. As well ask why religious intolerance and persecution were not long since arrested by the rebuke which our Lord gave to the fiery zeal of the two apostles—" Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of." If even the positive teaching of our Lord to Peter-" Put up thy sword," has not stayed men from shedding each other's blood in the name of Christ, is it to be wondered that the silence and reserve of Scripture respecting Mary and her surroundings have not yet wrought their appointed work and borne their proper fruit? It has not prevented the rise and progress of Mariolatry; yet it does not follow that, even in the past, it has been wholly unfelt. It may have often checked and retarded its growth, rendered more easy the re "How little is said of Mary, whom we worship more than Christ!" Are no Protestants at this hour held back from returning to the superstitions of Mary-worship by this silence? THE USE OF SACRED ART. Out of this silence arises the question-What use is it lawful to make of what is termed “sacred art?" This is a question of growing interest in a time so marked by the revival of British art. That the revival of the fine arts is without danger to the simple and spiritual religion and worship of the New Testament, no man that knows himself, the history of the past, or the revival of mediæval tastes, will affirm. The extremes of society meet in their love of a symbolic and imaginative worship that strives through the senses, in one form or another, to excite the feelings of reverence and the emotions of love and tenderness, filling the eye and imagination rather than the understanding and heart. These times of increasing wealth, with its luxuries and refinements, are leaving an ever-growing number of our wealthy and well-to-do indisposed to receive any other religious culture than that which they almost passively take in from the productions of "sacred art." Beauty is worshipped instead of truth, and the judgment, instead of controlling, is controlled by the senses and imagination. The primitive Christians were jealous of art, and feared communion with it, as if contamination. This jealousy the Old Testament taught them; and as pagan art ministered to the grossest superstitions and the foulest idolatries, its disuse became a high and holy duty. Julian the Apostate accused Christians of insensibility to the beautiful, whereas it was only their sensibility to a beauty that pagan art had never reached, and that fear of moral corruptions which pagan art had hitherto adorned. In spite of this jealousy, such is the tendency of every part of human nature to seek its develop ment and assert its legitimate rights, that when paganism was overthrown and the immediate danger past, art revived under the wing of the Church, expressing Christian ideas and characteristics, and after serving the cause of truth was anew perverted by the Church to the cause of idolatry; and when the Reformation arose, the lovers of the gospel felt the same jealousy of medieval art as the primitive Christians did of pagan. The Reformers appeared the enemies of art, whereas they only loved truth more, and had more urgent and higher duties and wants to attend to. The fine arts have again revived—a part of our modern civilization no longer under the patronage of the Church of Rome only, but of all Churches and all classes of men. The lovers of gospel truth and purity naturally inquire how the claims of art are to be adjusted with the spiritual worship of the New Testament? The adjustment may be difficult, but is not the less a duty. Both are the gift of God, and both have their uses; and rightly used, they must be helps and not hindrances to each other. We may surely hope that New Testament Christians may find a way of using the fine arts in their highest development without anew corrupting Christianity. The Son of God became the Son of man that we might think of Ilim and feel towards Him as our elder Brother. If as a man we are to think of Him, and as a man to speak and write of Him, why not also to paint Ilim in colours or represent Him in sculpture? The same reasons that would forbid the painter or sculptor to do their part, would forbid the poet, the preacher, or the writer, except in the use of the very words of Scripture. If it is lawful in one man, by the exercise of his poetical or oratorical gift, to give us his ideal of Christ, why should not another in the exercise of the gift of the painter or sculptor? The one talent is not more the gift of God than the other. If the genius of the poet or the eloquence of the preacher has often raised our ideal of the Saviour and made our hearts burn within us, may not the genius of the Christian painter lend his aid in ex | alting our ideal of the Christ, of the Evangelists? It is not the occasional or the private use of the works of the painter that the silence of Scripture forbids. It is the fixing and consecrating the work of human art to the continuous worship of God. When set up in the house or church as aids to worship, by an inevitable law of our nature they pass by insensible degrees from helps to hindrances, to snares, to idols, and at length become substitutes for the Saviour. It is true that we may and do idolize the work of the poet and preacher, but experience warns us of a far greater danger from the continued use of the same paintings and sculptures in our devotions. The eloquent ideal of one preacher is succeeded by the ideal of another, but the work of the painter remains one and the same; no longer our ideal of the Christ is free to grow with our knowledge or with the growth of our own Christian character. We limit the illimitable-limit Him to some one or two unchanging works of human art. We run counter to the purpose of this Scripture silence and reserve. We forget that He Himself said, "It is expedient that I go away," and that He will not be worshipped "after the flesh." The occasional sight or study of the purest productions of human art may not only correct but enlarge and exalt our own low or one-sided idealism, and that just as the artist was more imbued than ourselves with the spirit of the New Testament, or had a finer sensibility to its moral beauties. The greater difficulty in the right use of the painter's art should forewarn but should not deter us from the use of any of God's beautiful gifts. In our age art is popularising itself, like our literature, to the instruction and delight of the many as well as of the few, illustrating alike sacred and secular subjects. We must accept the new gift with all its hazards, turning it to the best uses, and out of the thorn of danger pluck the rose of beauty, profit, and delight. The most rigid of the Puritans of England and Presbyterians of Scotland, those who looked askance on the arts of the painter and sculptor, exercised their imaginations on the types of the Old Testament even to the spiritualising of the bell and pomegranate on the skirts of the highpriest's robe. That which Paul called "the beggarly elements" became food for their piety and a feast for their imaginations. They loved to | Bible. The eagerness with which all avail themtrace in them the roots of the gospel embedded selves of pictorial Bibles, illustrated commentaries in the past. A modern Ritualist cannot regale and dictionaries, prove how natural such helps his imagination more with the symbols of the are. Every one feels how much nearer they bring mediæval Church than the Scotch Covenanter in us to the scenes of Bible narrative and the cirthe symbolic worship and imagery of the Jewish cumstances of those who first heard the great tabernacle. This field of imagery he justly re- Preacher, and what living force they impart to garded as holy yet not forbidden ground; and the parables, sayings, and acts of our Lord and from his visits returned, like David, "wiser than His apostles. The full pictorial illustrations we his teachers, wiser than the ancients." This is are daily receiving of Bible lands are going near the imagery which makes the Psalms so rich in to realize, in a natural way, the Roman Catholic suggestive meanings, without familiarity with legend of the transportation of Mary's house at which we sing we know not what, but intelligent Nazareth to the shores of the Adriatic, where the in which we celebrate, in the language of Jewish Lady of Loretto's Chapel is still the most freritualism, the glorious things of the gospel, past, quented of Roman shrines. Pope Sextus V. is present, and to come. said to have purposed the transference of all the holy places of Palestine bodily to Italy, if not to Rome. But such miracles are no longer needed. All our wants are being anticipated by modern art and explorations. The marvels of photography are enough. The danger now threatening us is, of having our scripture readings and studies overlaid with too much pictorial and imaginative illus Compared to them, the medieval symbols are barren and unfruitful. In the dearth of Scripture knowledge, the medieval Church doubtless found in them some spiritual food; but it was of the barest, as one who should forsake a garden to batten on a moor-destitute of those manifold meanings by which Old Testament types reward equally the Bible-loving peasant and the Bible-tration, as before with too much of commentary. loving scholar, which show us the gospel in the bosom of the Old Testament Church, join the past to the present and future, and make one glorious whole of Christ and His Church from the first of time. This love of the types of Scripture in the Scottish Churches is only one of many proofs that the senses and imagination are to be used to stir and exercise our devotion, and are so used by the most intellectual and spiritual of Christians. Are we limited to these Scripture helps? No modern Church is now content with repeating the Church architecture of last century. No Church, however poor, is satisfied with the musical attainments of the past, and refuses to improve either its vocal or instrumental music. The use of sacred art in illustration of Scripture has been welcomed by all. The pencil of late has marvellously aided both the pen, the preacher, and the reader of the The lands of the Bible are now everywhere; yea, more present to those that tarry at home than to the most favoured of Eastern travellers, who can see and record only what is to be seen on his own line of travel. This is all for good. It imparts freshness to Bible sayings, vividness and reality to Bible incidents; and though it gives us no new truths, it lends to old and familiar truths and incidents new points of interest and attraction. Whilst enjoying all the advantages which modern art has brought to every door, let the solemn silence of the New Testament as to the personal presence both of our Lord and of Mary be a voice behind us of warning, saying, “Thus far!" The love of the beautiful in art is not the same as the love of truth; nor is the admiration of the works of human genius the same as the adoration and imitation of the Holy One of God. ST. HELIERS, JERSEY, January 1, 1870. G. L. |