It is not my intention to enter here on that disputed point, the origin of the worship of the Madonna.  Our present theme lies within prescribed limits,—­wide enough, however, to embrace an immense field of thought:  it seeks to trace the progressive influence of that worship on the fine arts for a thousand years or more, and to interpret the forms in which it has been clothed.  That the veneration paid to Mary in the early Church was a very natural feeling in those who advocated the divinity of her Son, would be granted, I suppose, by all but the most bigoted reformers; that it led to unwise and wild extremes, confounding the creature with the Creator, would be admitted, I suppose, by all but the most bigoted Roman Catholics.  How it extended from the East over the nations of the West, how it grew and spread, may be read in ecclesiastical histories.  Everywhere it seems to have found in the human heart some deep sympathy—­deeper far than mere theological doctrine could reach—­ready to accept it; and in every land the ground prepared for it in some already dominant idea of a mother-Goddess, chaste, beautiful, and benign.  As, in the oldest Hebrew rites and Pagan superstitions, men traced the promise of a coming Messiah,—­as the deliverers and kings of the Old Testament, and even the demigods of heathendom, became accepted types of the person of Christ,—­so the Eve of the Mosaic history, the Astarte of the Assyrians—­

  “The mooned Ashtaroth, queen and mother both,”—­

the Isis nursing Horus of the Egyptians, the Demeter and the Aphrodite of the Greeks, the Scythian Freya, have been considered by some writers as types of a divine maternity, foreshadowing the Virgin-mother of Christ.  Others will have it that these scattered, dim, mistaken—­often gross and perverted—­ideas which were afterwards gathered into the pure, dignified, tender image of the Madonna, were but as the voice of a mighty prophecy, sounded through all the generations of men, even from the beginning of time, of the coming moral regeneration, and complete and harmonious development of the whole human race, by the establishment, on a higher basis, of what has been called the “feminine element” in society.  And let me at least speak for myself.  In the perpetual iteration of that beautiful image of THE WOMAN highly blessed—­there, where others saw only pictures or statues, I have seen this great hope standing like a spirit beside the visible form; in the fervent worship once universally given to that gracious presence, I have beheld an acknowledgment of a higher as well as gentler power than that of the strong hand and the might that makes the right,—­and in every earnest votary one who, as he knelt, was in this sense pious beyond the reach of his own thought, and “devout beyond the meaning of his will.”