degraded. All that human genius, inspired by faith, could achieve of
best, all that fanaticism, sensualism, atheism, could perpetrate of
worst, do we find in the cycle of those representations which have
been dedicated to the glory of the Virgin. And indeed the ethics of
the Madonna worship, as evolved in art, might be not unaptly likened
to the ethics of human love: so long as the object of sense remained
in subjection to the moral idea--so long as the appeal was to the
best of our faculties and affections--so long was the image grand or
refined, and the influences to be ranked with those which have helped
to humanize and civilize our race; but so soon as the object became
a mere idol, then worship and worshippers, art and artists, were
together degraded.

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