things were transacting. Heroic efforts had not been wanting, and many sacrifices had been made to overcome the tendency which was dissipating the humanity of Christ into an illusory dream, and these efforts may not have been wholly in vain, for future ages, even though at the time they were futile. Nothing could stem the tide which was sweeping over the imagination of the people and carrying the Church to the enthusiastic worship of the Mother of God. The strength of a people lies in its consciousness of God; and just in proportion as it knows God and worships Him is a people strong. But God was disappearing from the thought and life. And Christ also, the strong Christ of the Gospels, the leader of humanity, who had come to reveal God, He had been reduced to an infant in His mother's arms, and it was the Christchild who could appeal to His mother's love and sympathy, which also appealed to the deteriorating religious instincts of the age. When the Providence of God was fully revealed, it broke upon the world in the invasion of the Saracens, who easily took possession of the territory of the Eastern Church. Asia Minor, nursing mother of so many religions, where the cult of the Virgin Mary had also found most fertile soil, succumbed to the invasion of the followers

of the prophet, whose war-cry and religion were the same, "There is one God." That had been also the original war-cry of the Christian Church as it entered the Roman Empire to begin its unparalleled career of conquest. Turn to the Christian apologists of the age before Constantine for the impressive contrast. Very little had they to say about the Virgin-birth and nothing about the Mother of God. They were preoccupied with God the Father, the Being spiritual and invisible, whose providence over all the world was most real and powerful, and extended to each individual man, who ruled the world in righteousness and was calling it to judgment. This conviction of God had been raised to the highest degree of motive power by the coming of Christ, His only Son our Lord, and it was not the glories of Mary, nor the winning arts of the Christ-child that broke the power of the Roman Empire, but the strong Lord Christ, whom the apologists drew as a real man, in the historic reality of his earthly life. God was then in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself and fulfilling the promise and potency of the Incarnation. But when the Eastern Church entered on the way of decline and degeneracy it was about the middle of the fifth century that the decline began to be apparent,

which is also the date of the great Council of Chalcedon - then it is not God they are talking and thinking about, but the relation of Christ to Mary, and how the Virgin-birth is related to Christ's divinity and to the salvation of mankind. In the earlier age when the Church was winning its stupendous victory over the Roman Empire, the divinity of Christ and his Godhood had been set forth as most manifest in His life and character, His deeds, His words. In the age that followed, of decline and weakness, His divinity had come to be dependent on the exact nature of the incident of His birth. In the earlier period they were fighting to the death the corrupt mythology of the old world, which concealed God or denied Him. In the later age the mythological tendency revived, with the Virgin-mother for its centre, and God was smothered in the mazy labyrinth where the consciousness of the Church was wandering.

How was it in Western or Latin Christendom? We cannot tell what Augustine might have done, had he lived to confront the Council of Ephesus or the Council of Chalcedon, as they gave their sanction to the expression "Mother of God," wherein was wrapped up, as in a germ, that theory of the Incarnation which he rejected. He was taken away from the evil to come. The

West was fast sinking into barbarism, in the year 430 when he died, and in that very year the Vandals were knocking for entrance at the gates of Hippo. It was no longer a time for theologizing. Dialectic gave way to organization and to action. No one arose after him who was his equal in the West. He was read and studied, and his name carried great influence both in the earlier and later Middle Ages. But so far as the doctrine of the Incarnation and the Eucharist were concerned, Western theologians followed other lights. They finally yielded to the prestige of the East on these issues, and not Augustine, but John of Damascus became their teacher. They were aware as they made their departure in this direction that Augustine no longer served them. When his name and authority were appealed to in behalf of doctrines the Church was rejecting, the answer was made that "the holy doctor of Hippo, fatigued by the labors of composition, had not always made his thought sufficiently clear; and thus was explained how, for the ignorant, he was a source of error; but if, what was impossible should be the case, he had erred upon so great a mystery, it would be, indeed, an occasion for repeating the words of St. Paul, 'If an angel from heaven preach any other Gospel unto you than that

which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.'" 1 So John of Damascus superseded Augustine on the Incarnation, as Dionysius the Areopagite on the doctrine of the Eucharist. The Eastern, or Oriental, interpretation of the Christian mysteries dominated the West. From the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the worship of the Virgin-mother made rapid strides. Already indeed the Latin Church was adding another element to the Marian mythology, the immaculate conception of Mary, which the Eastern Church had not known. But this was thought necessary in order to make more secure the sinlessness of Christ and the purity of His life-giving flesh. It did not become a formal dogma till a later age (1854), but it was a belief widely prevalent from the twelfth century and earlier.2

And the outcome of it all in Western Chris

1 "Durandus Troarnen," cited by Batiffol, in "L'Eucharistie," P. 379.

2 Roman Catholic theologians defend the recent Latin dogma (1854) that Mary herself was immaculately conceived, on the ground that it is contained implicitly in the action of the Third General Council which canonized Mary as the Mother of God. The Roman Church, says Duchesne, received the cult of the Virgin Mary from the Greek Church (d'importation byzantine), and Latin theologians are surprised when Episcopal voices in the Greek Church now protest against the new honors which the Roman Church has decreed to the Mother of God. ("Églises Séparées," p. 110.)