Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/613

 THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION. 597 These irresistible authorities settled the question for a while as one of dogma, but the notion had attractiveness to the people, and in the constant development of Mariolatry anything which tended to strengthen her position as a subordinate deity and interces- sor found favor with the extensive class to whom her cult was a source of revenue. There is something inexpressibly attractive in the mediaeval conception of the Virgin, and the extension of her worship was inevitable. God was a being too infinitely high and awful to be approached ; the Holy Ghost was an abstraction not to be grasped by the vulgar mind ; Christ, in spite of his in- finite love and self-sacrifice, was invoked too often as a judge and persecutor to be regarded as wholly merciful ; but the Virgin was the embodiment of unalloyed maternal tenderness, whose suffer- ings for her divine Son had only rendered her more eagerly benefi- cent in her desire to aid and save the race for which he had died. She was human, yet divine ; in her humanity she shared the feel- ings of her kind, and whatever exalted her divinity rendered her more helpful, without withdrawing her from the sympathy of men. " The Virgin," says Peter of Blois, " is the sole mediator between man and Christ. We were sinners and feared to appeal to the Father, for he is terrible, but we have the Virgin, in whom there is nothing terrible, for in her is the plenitude of grace and the purity of human life ;" and he goes on to virtually prove her divinity by showing that if the Son is con substantial with the Father, the Virgin is consubstantial with the Son. In fact, he exclaims, " if Mary were taken from heaven there would be to mankind nothing" but the blackness of darkness." God, savs St. Bonaventura, could have made a greater earth and a great- er heaven, but he exhausted his power in creating Mary. Yet Bonaventura, as a doctor' of the Church, was careful to limit her sinlessness to sin arising with herself, and not to include the absence of inherited sin. She was sanctified, not immaculately conceived.* — S. Bernardi Epist. 174, ad Canon. Lugdnn. — D'Argentr6 1. 11. 60. — Pet. Lom- bard! Sententt. Lib. m. Dist. iii. Q. 1. — Innoc. PP. III. Sermo xn. in Purif. S. Mariae. ginis c. i., ii., viii., ix.— The mediaeval conception of the Virgin, as the intercessor
 * Pet. Blesens. Sermo xn., xxxni.,xxxviii.— S. Bonavent. Speculi Beatae Vir-