best of our faculties and affections--so long was the image grand or
refined, and the influences to be ranked with those which have helped
to humanize and civilize our race; but so soon as the object became
a mere idol, then worship and worshippers, art and artists, were
together degraded.

It is not my intention to enter here on that disputed point, the
origin of the worship of the Madonna. Our present theme lies within
prescribed limits,--wide enough, however, to embrace an immense
field of thought: it seeks to trace the progressive influence of
that worship on the fine arts for a thousand years or more, and to
interpret the forms in which it has been clothed. That the veneration
paid to Mary in the early Church was a very natural feeling in those
who advocated the divinity of her Son, would be granted, I suppose,
by all but the most bigoted reformers; that it led to unwise and
wild extremes, confounding the creature with the Creator, would be
admitted, I suppose, by all but the most bigoted Roman Catholics. How
it extended from the East over the nations of the West, how it grew
and spread, may be read in ecclesiastical histories. Everywhere it
seems to have found in the human heart some deep sympathy--deeper far
than mere theological doctrine could reach--ready to accept it; and in
every land the ground prepared for it in some already dominant idea
of a mother-Goddess, chaste, beautiful, and benign. As, in the oldest
Hebrew rites and Pagan superstitions, men traced the promise of a
coming Messiah,--as the deliverers and kings of the Old Testament, and
even the demigods of heathendom, became accepted types of the person
of Christ,--so the Eve of the Mosaic history, the Astarte of the
Assyrians--

"The mooned Ashtaroth, queen and mother both,"--

the Isis nursing Horus of the Egyptians, the Demeter and the
Aphrodite of the Greeks, the Scythian Freya, have been considered
by some writers as types of a divine maternity, foreshadowing the
Virgin-mother of Christ. Others will have it that these scattered,
dim, mistaken--often gross and perverted--ideas which were afterwards
gathered into the pure, dignified, tender image of the Madonna,
were but as the voice of a mighty prophecy, sounded through all the
generations of men, even from the beginning of time, of the coming
moral regeneration, and complete and harmonious development of the
whole human race, by the establishment, on a higher basis, of what
has been called