n influence incalculable, not only at the time,
but ever since that time; of which the manifold results, traced
from century to century down to the present hour, would remain quite
unintelligible, unless we clearly understood the origin and the issue
of the controversy.

Cyril, who was as enthusiastic and indomitable as Nestorius, and had
the advantage of taking the positive against the negative side of the
question, anathematized the doctrines of his opponent, in a synod held
at Alexandria in 430, to which Pope Celestine II gave the sanction of
his authority. The emperor Theodosius II then called a general council
at Ephesus in 431, before which Nestorius refused to appear, and was
deposed from his dignity of patriarch by the suffrages of 200 bishops.
But this did not put an end to the controversy; the streets of Ephesus
were disturbed by the brawls and the pavement of the cathedral was
literally stained with the blood of the contending parties Theodosius
arrested both the patriarchs; but after the lapse of only a few days,
Cyril triumphed over his adversary: with him triumphed the cause of
the Virgin. Nestorius was deposed and exiled; his writings condemned
to the flames; but still the opinions he had advocated were adopted by
numbers, who were regarded as heretics by those who called themselves
"the Catholic Church."

The long continuance of this controversy, the obstinacy of the
Nestorians, the passionate zeal of those who held the opposite
doctrines, and their ultimate triumph when the Western Churches of
Rome and Carthage declared in their favour, all tended to multiply and
disseminate far and wide throughout Christendom those images of the
Virgin which exhibited her as Mother of the Godhead. At length the
ecclesiastical authorities, headed by Pope Gregory the Great, stamped
them as orthodox: and as the cross had been the primeval symbol which
distinguished the Christian from the Pagan, so the image of the Virgin
Mother with her Child now became the symbol which distinguished the
Catholic Christian from the Nestorian Dissenter.

Thus it appears that if the first religious representations of the
Virgin and Child were not a consequence of the Nestorian schism, yet
the consecration of such effigies as the visible form of a theological
dogma to the purposes of worship and ecclesiastical decoration
must date from the Council of Ephesus in 431; and their popularity
and general diffusion throughout the western Churche