A PROTESTANT EULOGY ON THE BLESSED VIRGIN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 175, 4 August 1876, Page 13

A PROTESTANT EULOGY ON THE BLESSED VIRGIN.

Rev. Me. Steobkl, a Lutheran missionary of Holy Trinity Church (German), Baltimore, who has once before defended the immortality of the soul in an erudite lecture against some of his infidel countrymen, preached on the 9th March a splendid sermon of which the following is the substance. The preacher premises by calling Mary " the Mother of the Lord," and praises her as an humble handmaid of God, blessed daughter of David, faithful friend, and the severely tried Mother of Sorrows, worthy to be a shining model to her sex. The Protestant preacher who thinks he should revile our Blessed Mother he calls a pseudo-Protestant, with regard to him he exclaims : ' Poor Mary ! couldst thou have forseen this, thou wouldst have chanted a w y ail of lamentation instead of a hymn of glory. He further says of the Blessed Virgin : " She is the true ideal of noble womanhood, of which Goethe at the conclusion of his ' Faust ' remarks: "Woman's eternal grac<» will elevate us." The Minnesingers of mediaeval times called the Blesed Mother by no other name than Our Lady — ' Unsere Liebe Frau,' — and Schiller in his " Bride of Messina," one of the ablest of his tragedies, in speaking of Mary, pays her a beautiful tribute, saying that " even the Church, always divine, presented nothing more beautiful for the heavenly Throne ; no art could soar higher, though divinely born, than to the Mother and her Son,"

" History glorifies Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, on account of her noble sons ; the history of the Church justly praises St. Monica, the holy mother of the great St. Augustine ; but what is the honor of a Cornelia, of a Monica, to the honor of Mary, who bore the only One, to loose whose shoe-latches neither the greatest wesman, nor the most celebrated churchman could ever be found worthy. And yet Mary is called the Mother of Sorrows — Mater dolorosa. And she is justly called so, because since upon earth there is no dignity without weight, and no joy without sorrow, the highest dignity of a woman, and the greatest joy of a mother, united in Mary's person, have been united with great woe and grief. Already in the days of Christmas, the venerable Simeon, when blessing her, told her that •' a sword should transpierce her soul She must have certainly suffered much at the thought that from her Child's Blood should come forth salvation to the -world. But to her resignation of faith were added the pangs of a mother's heart when seeing her Divine Son in agony, bleeding and suffering, on the martyr's pole at Golgotha. David exclaimed once, with tears : ' O Absalom, my son ! would to God that I could die for thee.' David's daughter Mary, said nothing when her Son, Jesus, was dying, since there is a wo i too great for words and toars, and such was Mary's woe at Golgotha : ' At the Cross hsr station keeping, Stood the mournful Moth«r weepiug, Closd to Jesus to the last, Through her heart, His sorrow sharing, All His bitter auguish Waring, Now at length the sw onl liatl parsed '

At the conclusion, Mr. Strobel exhorted his hearers to place images of Mary in their houses, since the Lord's own Mother is a true type of noble womanhood. — ' Aye Maria.'