although it is not that but the exercise of those gentler elements of our nature without whose exercise our nature functions one-sidedly.  You may call it the feminine element, if you like; you will still be indicating the same order of activity.  Surely, an all around spiritual development will bring out the feminine as well as the masculine qualities.  And it seems to be historically true that those systems of religion which represent a revolt against the cultus of our Lady and carefully exclude all traces of it from their worship, show as a consequence of this exclusion a hardness and a barrenness which makes their human appeal quite one-sided.  And when those same systems have realised their limitations and their lack of human appeal, and have tried to supply what is lacking, they have again failed, because instead of reverting to historical Christianity they have taken the road of humanitarianism, basing themselves on our Lord’s human life and consequent brotherhood with us, rather than upon His supernatural Personality as operative through His mystical Body.  Stress is laid upon charitable helpfulness rather than upon the power of grace.  The modern man tries to reform life rather than to regenerate it.

And, I repeat, I cannot help associating with a repudiation of the cultus of the saints, and especially of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a consequent failure to understand the Christian life as a supernatural creation.  If one leaves out of account the greater part of the Kingdom of Heaven, all the multitudes of the redeemed, and their activities, and fastens one’s attention exclusively upon that small part of the Kingdom which is the Church on earth, one can hardly fail to miss the significance of the earthly Church itself.  Religion understood in this limited way may well drift more and more toward Deism and Humanitarianism, and further and further from any supernatural implications.  This is no theory; it is what has happened.  It was the course of Protestantism from the Reformation to the eighteenth century; and, after a partial revival of supernaturalism, is once more the rapid course of Protestantism to-day.  Protestantism has lost or is fast losing any grip on the Trinity or the Incarnation:  to it God is more and more a barren unity, and Jesus a good man.  And this largely because all interest in the world of the Redeemed has been abandoned and all intercourse with the inhabitants of that world denied.

It is therefore of the last importance that we, infected as we are with Protestantism, should stress the revival of the cultus of the saints, and should insist upon our right and privilege to pay due honour to the Mother of God and ask our share in her prayers.  We must do all we can to make her known to our brethren.  We need her sympathy, her aid, her example.