was maintained; a unique event in the history of the world was immortalised and systematised and all new religious conceptions were excluded.  Catholicism invariably places all really important events in the past, even in a quite definite period of the past, a period unassailable by historical criticism.  But with the commencement of individual intellectual life the uniform, ecclesiastical image of the Madonna gradually gained life and individuality.  Just as according to Protestant teaching every soul must establish its individual relationship with God (which is subject to change because individuality is not excluded as it is in Catholicism), so the imaginative emotionalist created his own Queen of Heaven.  Frequently he was still under the impression—­this was especially the case with monks—­that he was worshipping the ecclesiastical deity, when he had long been praying to a metaphysical conception of his own.  The great Italian art since the fourteenth century, as well as the Neo-Latin and German cults of the Virgin Mary were, though apparently still orthodox, in their innermost essence the outcome of a personal desire for love, and had therefore abandoned the teaching of the Church and become Protestant.  The fact that the so-called Protestant Church looked askance at Mary, and that the rather coarse-minded Luther said, in his annoyance:  “Popery has made a goddess of Mary, and is therefore guilty of idolatry,” does not contradict my statement.  The true Queen of Heaven was a conception of the artist and lover, incomprehensible to those who were only thinkers and moralists.

Through the legitimation of a divine woman open enmity between the religion of woman and the religion of the Church was avoided.  A woman had stepped between God and humanity as mediator, intercessor and redeemer.  Every metaphysically-loving soul could conceive her as it pleased, could love her and pray to her without being a heretic and worshipper of the devil.  Matfre had complained that men

     Abandoned in her beauty revel
     And unawares adore the devil.—­

but now a means had been found to adore the beloved, and yet remain faithful to God.  Once in a way it was remembered that the adored, strictly speaking, was the Mother of God—­if for no other reason, for fear of the Inquisition which the Dominicans had founded and placed under the special patronage of Mary—­her bodyguard as it were, defending her from the onslaught of minds all too worldly.  Very rarely the adored earthly woman was identified with the official Queen of Heaven—­(this may have been done occasionally by monks); sometimes as in the case of Michelangelo and Guinicelli, the beloved was the sole goddess; other poets, among whom we may include Dante and Goethe, conceived her as enthroned by the side of Mary.

At this point I must interrupt my argument, and briefly sketch the position occupied by Mary in the western world from the dawn of Christianity.