k they accordingly are on most of
the wayside chapels for many a mile around Oropa. Yet in the chapels we
have been hitherto considering--works in which, as we know, the most
punctilious regard has been shown to accuracy--both the Virgin and Christ
are uncompromisingly white. As in the shops under the Colonnade where
devotional knick-knacks are sold, you can buy a black china image or a
white one, whichever you like; so with the pictures--the black and white
are placed side by side--_pagando il danaro si puo scegliere_. It rests
not with history or with the Church to say whether the Madonna and Child
were black or white, but you may settle it for yourself, whichever way
you please, or rather you are required, with the acquiescence of the
Church, to hold that they were both black and white at one and the same
time.

It cannot be maintained that the Church leaves the matter undecided, and
by tolerating both types proclaims the question an open one, for she
acquiesces in the portrait by St. Luke as genuine. How, then, justify
the whiteness of the Holy Family in the chapels? If the portrait is not
known as genuine, why set such a stumbling-block in our paths as to show
us a black Madonna and a white one, both as historically accurate, within
a few yards of one another?

I ask this not in mockery, but as knowing that the Church must have an
explanation to give, if she would only give it, and as myself unable to
find any, even the most farfetched, that can bring what we see at Oropa,
Loreto and elsewhere into harmony with modern conscience, either
intellectual or ethical.

I see, indeed, from an interesting article in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for
September 1889, entitled "The Black Madonna of Loreto," that black
Madonnas were so frequent in ancient Christian art that "some of the
early writers of the Church felt obliged to account for it by explaining
that the Virgin was of a very dark complexion, as might be proved by the
verse of Canticles which says, 'I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of
Jerusalem.' Others maintained that she became black during her sojourn
in Egypt. . . . Priests, of to-day, say that extreme age and exposure to
the smoke of countless altar-candles have caused that change in
complexion which the more naive fathers of the Church attributed to the
power of an Egyptian sun"; but the writer ruthlessly disposes of this
supposition by pointing out that in nearly all the instances of black
Madonnas i