legitimate area-to set sect against sect, and all against the Established Church-street against street, and neighbour against neighbour; nay, to carry discord into every home. There will be, where there is liberty, superstitions many; let every one strive to keep them all within the rules of charity. We talk of superstition-or of the plural, superstitions, as dying out, and of the age of reason as effecting the change: it is said with little thought. Where one dies, another, or rather many more, spring up. Rationalism itself is only an arrogant superstition, false in what it denies and what it believes. The root of reason was corrupted at the Fall, or all men would have a like ratiocination. The mysterious union of the will and the understanding has subjected the latter to an erring agent. If there be no other obliquity to pervert the judgment, pride will be sufficient. They speak very absurdly, who in this country, where civil and religious liberty is an idol of worship, talk of smoothing down the established religion to suit all consciences. The wider you open the doors, the fewer would enter-obstinacy would find a pleasure, and make it a merit to keep out; and thus gratify pride - pride which supplies food for envy, and selects objects for its natural enmity. It is well remarked by Swift, "Are party and faction rooted in men's minds no deeper than phrases borrowed from religion, or founded on no firmer principles? And is our language so poor that we cannot find other terms to express them? Are envy, pride, avarice, and ambition such ill nomenclators that it cannot furnish appellations for their owners?" In a complicated state of society such as ours, with such diverse avocations such ever-shifting engagements, interests, and businesses-there must of necessity be the largest field for the exercise of all the passions: there will consequently be infinite diversities of opinions, and from one social character these will necessarily form sects both in religion and politics; and these will contain, more or less, dangerous superstitions and bigotries. This is the bellua multorum capitum. We contemplate with amusement the whole menagerie properly caged, but it is fearful to think of the letting them loose upon each other. Nevertheless, there are the wildest schemes afloat. There are absurd religiopolitical economists, with rationalism in their heads, and with hearts unoccupied by faith, who would amalgamate incongruities. It is a part of their politics that the one House of Parliament is supreme, and should be the sole maker of the religion of the country, acknowledging for it no other origin; and they would have the thing made a hotch-potch, from which every one should have the liberty of extracting and discarding what his neighbour has thrown in; so that the residue shall be a caput mortuum-neither having nor giving life. We fear many have been drawn into this net, prepared against a church in any shape, under the present temptation of opposing Popery. But is that a safe way to oppose it? Would not such a Parliament as they would assemble, rather mete out its measure of indifference to all forms of religion, and, by non-interference, put Popery in a position to defend its own, and something more? But the real fact is, these experimentalists mean nothing less than that every religious element should have a claim. Their first aim would be exclusion. might deliberate upon the manufacture of the new commodity, excepting those who might be really in earnest with regard to any religion. The remodelling committee would be furnished with lists of proscription; and very much of their time would be taken up with discussing names of persons and principles, known only by conjecture and misrepresentation. We think of what Selden said of the Assembly of Divines. When Parliament were making a question whether they had best admit Bishop Usher to the Assembly, said Selden-" They had as good inquire whether they had best admit Inigo Jones, the king's architect, to the company of mousetrap makers." There is not much to be said for that old Assembly of Divines. Theirs was the superstition of a rancorous bigotry-the superstition of a new one would be an irreligious indifference. Remove national distinctive religion, open our churches alike to all-which would be the end, All if such parliamentary appeals had any success and, very shortly, unrestrained Popery would flourish; for the propensity of a people educated without a religious bias would be sure to fasten upon superstitions, and would find too many of them cunningly devised, courting, tempting their acceptance on every side. think they are crushing Romanism. Having the strongest dislike to Popery-seeing what it does in every country where it is really dominant, and its unlicensed infamy (and we cannot use too strong a word) in Ireland-while we would, as far as we can legitimately act, protect even that country from its aggression and mischievous influence, we are persuaded that it will never resume the position it aims to recover amongst us; but we are persuaded also that we have a more dangerous enemy to deal with, undermining daily the foundations of the people's faith, who would first Germanise our Church, with the ulterior view of annihilating it. We protest against any alliance with thesenon defensoribus istis tempus eget.” แ We said, in the commencement of these remarks, that a classification of superstitions, according to their moral effects, might be not without use. In some degree it might be a gauge of the truth that is in them. There may be a moral, where there is seemingly the complete absence of a religious truth. We say, with a caution, seem rate moral from religious truth-in some mysterious way or other they are allied, be it by instinct or by fact It is not wise to undervalue an enemy, whose well-organised camp it is not easy to break up, and who is ever ready to make aggressions when he sees yourselves disorganised. Throw as much ridicule as you will and there is cause for a great deal upon their fables, their superstitions innumerable; you may be sure they are not invented to catch you, but others. They have some appropriate to all characters, and will so put them that every inquirer shall appear to be making a discreet choice. If you charge them with virtually setting aside the atonement, they will deny it with a fervour not to be exceeded in any religionists; and they will, and with truth, remind you that the Church of England has not repudiated them-has not unchurched them-ingly, for we would not entirely sepaand that because of the essential doctrines which it is admitted they retain; whereas the allied army in array against them is made up of believers and unbelievers, and have not those essential doctrines in common which should be the strength of religious bodies. We are not without fear of being misunderstood, for we see around us bigotries and superstitions as strong as any to be found in Romanism, and all meeting in one injudicious hostility. All will be ready to cry out, "There is an enemy in the camp!" if a word be said upon the exercise of charity and discretion. Our fears are lest Romanism get strength from our weakness. Papists are astute-know when to lie by, and when to attack. Is not their present caution very observable? They know their strong and their weak defenders, and keep them, each for their use, under orders to move when and where they can best serve their cause. But far different is it with us-there is no restriction; the weak and the unwise rush to the platform and the theatre, and, in their indiscriminate vehemence, injure religion when they for moral good is the will and the commandment of our Creator. Let not the reader, then, be surprised if there is some beauty, some ameliorating virtue to be found in superstitions, which both reason and religious knowledge reject. We are led to these reflections by our purpose, which was to review Mrs Jameson's Legends of the Madonna. We have already, in other numbers of Maga, noticed her Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art, and her Monastic Orders. The "Legends of the Madonna" is a continuation of the series. These subjects have their two phases; they present poetry, sentiment, and true devotion. In another point of view, there is fable meriting all contempt, divine truths deteriorated, corrupted — in fact, there is Popery. We have spoken freely as to both aspects, not forgetting, at the same time, that the real object of the authoress of these treatises was art, not religious discussion. In viewing what these various legends have done for art, it would have been impossible to deny that genius was under the influence of true piety-that Christianity shed a lustre over art, more beautiful than that of boasted antiquity. We favourably contrasted the best works of heathen times with those of the revival of art through Christianity. Ancient art was the idolatry, if it may be so called, of human beauty-the revival took in ideas of the real divine. The one was of a material, a dying beauty -the other, of a spiritualised material, dying indeed, and yet immortal. The one gratified the pride of the eye -the other engaged the affections, and gave aspirations that looked heavenward. As subjects of art, taking art as nothing but as it improves and touches the feelings, what were the muses and the graces of the heathen to the Faith, Hope, and Charity of the Christian world! The divine of Grecian art was but a grand repose majestic man deified. Its loveliness was human. Life it had, and life it was. It feared to approach the confines which separate life and death. Even the sublime of mystery could not tempt it into that night gloom. If it touched suffering, it was to exhibit but one human virtue-courage. It knew not the fortitude, mixed with all tenderness, of faith-the divine patience of suffering-the exaltation, even above the masculine, of feminine virtues. The whole Theogony of Hesiod embodied, could offer nothing in grandeur to compare with angels and archangels in their worship and their ministration; nor, in the loveliness of their best embodied attributes, to the new loveliness and sublime humility. We have, indeed, endeavoured to show that the old art rose from the manifold corruptions of a creed once purer, and we know not how the revelations passed from nation to nation. Its corruption descended, till it reached the deification of the human form. Christianity changed the object of art- human pride it repudiated; and it was long ere humility was raised to the dignity of true sentiment; and even, when intensity of feeling became the artist's sole purpose-partly from neglect of art itself, and loss of its power, and partly from an overstrained contempt of beauty merely human-there was too much to offend, and not unfrequently to disgust, in early representations of Christian subjects. The legends, too, of the age, however wild and fabulous, took their colour from the gloom of persecuting troublous times. Wrong and injury, sorrow and persecution, were a real history; and, from these, superstitions took their cast, and were repulsive. When anchorites sought refuge in wildernesses, they did but change the fears of the world for the fears of demon persecutors. They were visited by distempered visions. Their asceticism awed all but themselves. The ignorant believed them to be holy men, and gifted with miraculous power. Their most fervid dreams were deemed realities;-nor is this surprising, for the contact with fellow-beings, and daily intercourse, can alone satisfactorily separate the real and the visionary. Legends were multiplied, and, in their multiplication, changed their character with the changes of times; and so were the superstitions which they multiplied also. When the institution of religion became more firmly established, the gloom of former times gave way. Asceticism, though still lingering, was the exception, not the rule. The monastic orders arose, whose piety and earnestness included a sense of the duties of benevolence. They revived learning; they cultivated art; invented or recovered what was most needful for man. As work was with them a religious duty, they taught by practice, improved agriculture, and made wastes a smiling and productive land. The love of the beautiful-a part of the love of the good—was recovered also, and became a part of Christianity. It was first visible in architecture; and how great, how sublime it was, we still have proofs before us; though, as the authors worked for neither fame nor profit, but the glory of God, they have not left us records of their names. Learning was advanced by them, and preserved as it is to this day. They ameliorated the severities of the times by their charity and piety; and, in the midst of a world of turbulence, begat, by the sanctity of their lives, a reverence to themselves, and a salutary awe for the religion which they taught. The age of monachism was an important era in human culture. They did everything-worked everything. The monks of the Benedictine orders were the earliest artists of the middle ages. The very colours came from their laboratories. As it has been well observed by Mrs Jameson, "As architects, as glass-painters, as mosaic-workers, as carvers in wood and metal, they were the precursors of all that has since been achieved in Christian art." There was no Popery in all this, nor was it in the hearts of these great yet unpresuming workers. Let us not, in a misdirected Protestant zeal, be guilty of a blind and unjust fanaticism; but, looking back upon the page of history, and keeping in mind the visible culture of our own day, let us not be unthankful for benefits largely received, and show ourselves steeped in the superstition of self-pride. We know to some it will be unpalatable to speak a just word of these orders; they would have us uncharitably deny the real truth, and, viewing only the crimes and corruptions of other times, include all in one unforgiving censure. Whatever was the amount of their delinquencies, an unjust fanaticism may awaken in us as evil passions as any we condemn in them. We have no faith in what may be called the liberal abandonment of priestcraft, taken in its worst sense. Priestcraft is but a means of superstition, which would be enlarged rather than eradicated by the forbidding tyranny of modern rationalism. Were that dominant, and under as congenial circumstances, it would be as exacting as was in other times our own violent and destructive Puritanism. The Legends of the Madonna now entice us to the consideration of Mrs Jameson's recent volume. Lovers of art, for the most part ignorant of the real intention in the pictures of sacred subjects, which they admire on account of the artistic excellence, will do well to refer to Mrs Jameson's Madonna, when particular subjects in which the Virgin is principally represented come before them. They will often be surprised to find themselves pictorially instructed in a theological dogma. Such pictures are in fact painted creeds, and as they were first read, so they continued to be received. It is true, as the religious fervour deteriorated, if the symbolic character was retained, it was only slightly significant, and degenerated at length into the mere representation of beauty, and the subject was chiefly taken as a means of showing artistic skill. We learn from Epiphanius, who died in 403, that among the heresies which he enumerates was one set up by women who offered cakes and honey and meal to the Virgin Mary, as to a divinity-being, in fact, a continuation of the heathen worship of Ceres. The most ancient representations of the Virgin in art are of the fourth century. The Virgin with the Child did not appear till after the condemnation of Nestorius by the Council of Ephesus. Nestorius maintained the two separate natures of our Saviour, and that Mary was mother only of the man. "Every one who wished to prove his hatred of the arch-heretic, exhibited the image of the maternal Virgin holding in her arms the infant Godhead, either in his house as a picture, or embroidered on his garments, or on his furniture, or his personal ornaments-in short, wherever it could be introduced. It is worth remarking that Cyril, who was so influential in fixing the orthodox group, had passed the greater part of his life in Egypt, and must have been familiar with the Egyptian type of Isis nursing Horus. Nor, as I conceive, is there any irreverence in supposing that a time-honoured intelligible symbol should be chosen to embody and formalise a creed; for it must be remembered that the group of the mother and child was not at first a representation, but merely a theological symbol set up in the orthodox churches, and adopted by orthodox Christians." After the Council of Ephesus, history mentions a "supposed authentic portrait" of the Virgin. Such a picture was said to be in the possession of the Empress Endocia, who obtained it in the Holy Land: "It is certain that a picture, traditionarily said to be the same which Eudocia had sent to Pulcheria (ber sister-in-law), did exist at Constantinople, and was so much venerated by the people as to be regarded as a sort of palladium, and borne in a superb litter or car in the midst of the imperial host when the emperor led the army in person. The fate of this relic is not certainly known." The history of the next three hundred years testifies to the triumph of orthodoxy, the extension and popularity of the worship of the Virgin, and the consequent multiplication of her image in every form and material through the whole of Christendom. The schism, however, of the Iconoclasts, under Leo III. and his immediate successors, if for more than a hundred years it destroyed innumerable specimens of antique art, yet, so far from suppressing, greatly increased the veneration for these representations. So great, indeed, was the effect of the reaction, that the first notice of a miraculous picture is of this date. As we hear still of miraculous pictures and very much is made of them in the preaching of modern Romanists, amongst whom are conspicuous some recent converts-it may be as well to offer the original legend. "Among those who most strongly defended the use of sacred images in the churches was St John Damascene, one of the great lights of the Oriental church. According to the Greek legend, he was condemned to lose his right hand, which was accordingly cut off. But he, full of faith, prostrating himself before a picture of the Virgin, stretched out the bleeding stump, and with it touched her lips, and immediately a new hand sprung forth like a branch from a tree.' Hence, among the Greek effigies of the Virgin, there is one peculiarly commemorative of this miracle, styled the Virgin with three bands.' In the west of Europe, where the abuses of image-worship had never yet reached the wild superstition of the Oriental Christians, the fury of the Iconoclasts excited horror and consternation. The temperate and eloquent apology for sacred pictures addressed by Gregory II. to the Emperor Leo, had the effect of mitigating the persecution in Italy, where the work of destruction could not be carried out to the same extent as in the Byzantine provinces. Hence it is in Italy only that any important remains of sacred art, anterior to the Iconoclast dynasty, have been preserved." The Iconoclasts were condemned by the Second Council of Nice, yet the controversy did not cease till 842. The widow of the persecutor Theophilus succeeded in giving the triumph to the orthodox party, yet only for the reinstating pictures. Sculptures were prohibited, and have not since been allowed in the Greek church. We know not if modern Romanists have considered the controversies carried on against their doctrines and their aggressions for the last few years in the nature of an iconoclastic persecution, and have thought it a fit time to reassert by instances the miraculous power of pictures of the Virgin; but certain it is that they have at no period more advanced and insisted upon the divine power of the Virgin Mary than at this particular time. It is common most strenuously to defend the weakest point. They may think, the greater difficulty, the less it will bear argument; the boldness of insisting may take people by surprise and prevent discussion; and this great difficulty got over, certainly others will appear of minor consequence. We hear now not only of miraculously bleeding pictures, but Pio Nono has chosen this time to promulgate his ordinance (dated from Gaeta, 1849) respecting the "Immaculate Conception of the Virgin." We find the most extravagant notions are always advanced in times of controversy. It is ever the season for progression of superstition. The wily enemy knows that the first step for defence is to advance. The fevered mind is naturally the recipient of delusion; the longer this fevered condition can be kept up, the firmer becomes the establishment of error. It was in such times the superstitions of Rome took root, and advantage was taken of the unreasoning period to advance the supremacy and feed the avarice and ambition of Rome. But we must not forget we are reviewing Mrs Jameson's Legends of the Madonna, a work which, professing to treat the subject relatively to art, repudiates controversy. The Angelic Annunciation (the "Ave Maria"), as an addition to the Lord's Prayer, was introduced at the end of the tenth century. The cru |