The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-02-24

ages it reacts its distinsuished drama. brilliant with star and angel, pure as the lily, fragrant as the violet, until the feast of the nativity -ohecured though it has becoms by worldliness chimes out as the annual raIlying point of faithN Coward God and goodwill toward men. ys .3
 Through the age of chivalrys was there ever white clad knight, keep ing vigil before the altar who did not get courage from Mary, EalIantly named Our Lady" whom all genera tions have called both blessed" and avirgin." to pledge his life on the morrow to courtesy, valor and loyalty! It could not but be that so royal fig ure as she is portrayed to be, should increase in power and honor-t0o much says half of Christendom of the other hAlf too little responds this lat ter of the former. But this difference of opinion is not for me to settle. am speaking of what actually occurred in history and gave us such, a wealth of immortal architecture and art as has never been equalsd. Christian life dur ing the period beginning with the sec ond thousands years of the Christian era was not . calculation but . pas sion flinging itself against the sky. The inspiring center was the gospel of the nativity, now one part, now another, radmtins its rich and tangled influence far and wide.
 Turn first to architecture. The great cathedrals and churches built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries according to Henry Adams were the direct product of belief in the Blessed VirEin Mary. According to statistics, in the single century between 1170 and 1270, the French built eighty cathedrals and nearly five hundred churches of the cathedral class, which would have cost, according to an estimate made in 1S40, more that five thousand millions to re- place. Five thousand million francs is thousand million dollars, and this covered only the churches of single century. The same scale of expendi- ture has been going on since the year 1000 :. The share of this capital which was--if one may use cominer- ciaT figure-invested in the Virgin can not be fixed, any more than the total sum given to religious objects between 1000 and 1900; but in a spiritual and artistic sense, 1t was almost the whole and expressed an intensity of eonvic- tiop never again reached by any pas sion, whether of religion, of loyalty, of patriotism, or of wealth; perhaps never even paralleled by any single economic effort, except in war. Nearly every great church of the twelfth and thir- teenth centuries belonged to Mary, un- til in France one asks for the church of Notre Dame as though it meant cathedral" (Mont-Saint Michel and Chartres, Pp. 94. 9). "The architects of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries took the church and the universe for truths, and tried to express them in a structure which should be final" (ibid, p. 3S2).
 Religion in those days was much more than theology it was at any rate first of all an instinct, a feeling, dynamic faith. There was not then "only thus far and no further.n Men made great ventures in every direc- tion. The saints of yesterday jostled the the sinners of today. The Blessed Virgin Mary was the ideal of human perfection, living force, the friend of the simple folk. We of today with our worldwide relations think we have a great family--if indeed we can call the organized human confusion of man kind by so sacred a name. Even the peasant of the times we are consider ing had a still greater family in his friends of every century. Statues and figures stood for the real presence of the noble and good of yesterday retain ing interest in and keeping tab on to- day. Christ was among men, always available, always the Saviour of prince and pauper alike. Those ages may have lacked in some things, but they were days of dynamic faith that pro- duced immortal fruit.
 In art we find the same inspiring center. Whatever other New Testa- ment occurrences found expression on canvass or in stone, the Gospel of the nativity held a place of prominence second to none. Four names will sur flee to witness to the fact-Michael Angelo. Raphael, Boutwell, and Titan. Michael Angelo, sculptor, painter, poet, was among the flew men, notably few artists" who "have preserved that con tinuity of moral, intellectual and physi- cal development in one unbroken course" (Symonds' Life of Michael An gelo p. 85.) He was a gruff old bache- Tor, who, like many of his class, claim ed for virginity superiority to the married state, as the passage I !am about to quote probably indicates, In his Pieta he made the Blessed Virgin appear relatively younger than her son. In answer to critics he said: ssDo you know that chaste women maintain their freshness far longer than the uncha ate How much more would this be the case with virgin. into whose breast there never crept the least lasciyious desire which could affect the body? Nay, l will go further, and hazard the belief that this unsullied Bloom of youth, be- side being maintained in her by nat ural causes, may have been miraculous ly wrought to convince the world of the virginity and perpetual purity of the Mother. This was not necessary for the Son. On the contrary, in order to prove that the Son of God took upon Himself, as in every truth He did take human body, and became subject to all that an ordinary man is subject to; with the exception of sin; the human nature of Christ. instead of being super seded by the divine, was left to; the op- cation of natural laws, so that His per son revealed the exact age to which He had attained. You need not, therefore, marvel if, having regard to these con alterations, l made the most Holy Vir- gin, Mother of God, much younger rela- lively to her Son than women of her years usually appear, and left the Son such as His time of life demanded" "
 (Condivi, p. 20, quoted by SymOnds.)