HISTORY OF OUR SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume I, Issue 19, 6 September 1873, Page 13

HISTORY OF OUR SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST.

By the Abbe" J. E. Daubas. (Translated from the French for the New Zealand Tablet.) § 111. — The Immaculate Vib&in. 8. — Universal Traditions regarding the Virgin-Mother. Humanity will repeat, even to the end of ages, the Aye of Gabriel, and proportionally as it shall be meditated upon, will there be found in it a fresh charm. How is it then that Christians accustomed to style the Gospel the infallible word of God, can deny themselves the happiness of repeating, in honour of Mary, the salutation addressed to her eighteen hundred years ago, by the celestial Messenger? Proteslantism treats us, in this matter, as idolaters ; but the Catholic Church does not adore Mary ; it invokes her as the Mother of God $ it honours her, as the creature full of grace, blessed among all women, of whom is born the Son of the Most- High. If that be idolatry, we hold it from the Angel Gabriel himself, and we read it in the first page of the Gospel. There is in the determined silence of Protestantism with regard to the Virgin of Nazareth, ;a narrow and distrustful character, which astonishes faith and disconcerts reason. It cannot be denied, that in the immense social transformation effected directly by the Gospel light, the re-establishment of woman in her rights, is one of the most salient and considerable facts. Nothing short of the suppression of aIL historic evidence could render this truth unrecognizable. Now this great fact becomes unintelligible without the action and influence of devotion to Mary. The chain of events which constitute human history, is united by indissoluble links. The abasement of woman in ancient societies, and among chose nations even now strangers to the revelation of the Incarnate word, is by no means a phenomenon that can be regarded as unmeaning, arbitrary, or inconsiderate. This inferior position of woman in the social scale is an undoubted, uniform fact, positively laid down as the rule and acted on by lawyers, the first cause of which, deeply engraven in the conscieuce of the human race, has its source in a divine condemnation. Apart from the sentence pronounced against guilty woman on the threshold of Eden, there is net possible explanation of this strange fact. The sen»ualism of the Pagan world, far from producing a reaction in favor of woman, served only to aggravate her opprobrium. Find a philosophical reason for this persistent inferiority, during the four thousand years which precede Mary. Explain why Polytheism adored Venus in the temples, and looked upon the wife, the sister, the mother of the family, as a thing viler than the slave. And yet, the world awaited a virgin who should throw open to the earth the closed portals of Heaven. Parallel with this system of inexorable abasement, pursued, without intermission, for forty centuries, by one half of the human race against the other; side by side with the impure sanctuaries, where man, in reality sec up for worship his own depravity, and pretended to confer divine honours on the reproach of woman ; in direct opposition to this current of unbridled brutality and ignominious apotheosis, a tradition was kept alive among all nations, that in course of time salvation -would oouce through the woman. The Roman people awaited the Virgin who was to bring back the keys of the gulden age. The Indian theophanies afford a similar hope. The sacred books of the Brahmins declare that when a god deigns to visit the world, he will take flesh mysteriously in the womb of a virgin. China, likewise, has its flower of virginity : Lien-Oulia, similar to the Egyptian Lotus, which, under the breath of God, renders Isis fruitful.* The Druids expeot the Virgin mother. All these scattered traces of a primitive belief, reaching as far back as Eden, find their centre in the Jewish revelation, around the Lily of Israel, the rod of Jesse, from whose root will spring the celestial flower. A woman "is to crush the serpent's head. A virgin shall conceive and bring forth a son, who shall be our Emmanuel. (God with us.)"