Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/317

Rh affection, but with unbounded faith as her Lord and Master.

While therefore we disown and reject, as unworthy of those who worship God only, the superstitious homage paid to the mother of Christ, we cannot but feel that the honor which is justly due to holy men and women, belongs in the highest degree to her whom God himself honored so greatly. How can any one speak lightly of her whose name is introduced in the most venerable of ancient creeds in connection with that of our Lord, "who was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary"? "Blessed art thou among women," said the angel, and surely all generations may call her blessed who was chosen from her race to be the mother of Christ, the one to whom His eyes opened first in life, and turned last in death. She who bore that relation to our Saviour cannot be indifferent to us. She who received the Christ-child in her arms, and laid him in a manger; who watched over his infancy; under whose roof he grew in favor with God and man; who shared his bitter sorrows; who "stood by the cross" — "Stabat Mater Dolorosa"; to whom he cast a dying look of ineffable tenderness — to her is due, not worship, but the love and reverence of all the ages.

And that is the truest reverence which regards her, not as a being out of nature — a celestial spirit that came into our sphere to be the "mother of God" — but as in all things human. When we learn to look upon her, not as a divinity, or even as an angel, but simply as a woman and a mother, we shall see how, in the honor put upon her, honor is done to all womanhood and all motherhood. Recognizing her in a relation which they also bear, all mothers, without kneeling to her as an object of worship, may look into her pure and saintly face, and find in her love and tenderness an inspiration and an example.