When a wise man speaks one sentence in a thousand is meat for hungry newsgatherers. Last week, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, eminent Baptist divine,* spoke at length in the Town Hall, Manhattan, on "Religion and the Modern Mind," landed in newspaper headlines with two sentences on the Virgin Mary.
As he spoke of the Catholic conception of the Blessed Virgin, his admiration of the special love which millions bear to her, he shocked orthodox Protestants. Said he: "I cannot but believe that my Roman Catholic brethren have the right idea. With my Protestant background I would hesitate to kneel before a statue of the Virgin in public, but worse things than that have been done on this earth."
Even liberal Protestants, to whom veneration of Mary, the mother of Jesus, is nothing short of idolatry, were shocked; Roman Catholics, firm in their faith in Mary, Queen in heaven of the hierarchy of saints, might have answered as before: "Outsiders can never understand our faith, our veneration of the Blessed Virgin."
But Christian faith changes; dogma develops and what was once dogma is now rank heresy. Do Christians know what is known, what believed of Mary, mother of the Christ?
Mary, mother of Jesus: Earnest Christians will find little in the Bible of the birth and early life of Mary. The so-called "Protevangelium Jacobi" written in about the 2nd Century A. D. gives more, says that Joachim (supposedly of the royal house of David) was her father, Anna (supposedly of the priestly house of Aaron) was her mother. Late in life, after angelic visitations, to Anna and Joachim was born a daughter, Mary. Roman Catholic dogma says that she was herself immaculately conceived.† Early theologians, while maintaining the freedom of Mary from earthly sin, held that she was born like all mortals with the taint of the original sin. How else, they argued, could she have been redeemed by Christ? From her third to her twelfth year (according to the same source) Mary dwelt in the temple; when she became of nubile age, Joseph was chosen from the widowers of Israel by divine token, to be her guardian. Later, the annunciation took place; when Mary's pregnancy was discovered, she and Joseph were brought before the High Priest protesting their innocence of earthly wrong. They were tried with "the water of the ordeal of the Lord," were acquitted. In Catholic dogma, Mary remained a virgin before, after and during the conception and birth of Christ.* Again, her perpetual virginity, maintained by the Roman Catholic Church, was not the general belief of early Christian writers, who held that Mary and Joseph were the parents of other children, notably James the Less and John.†
Even the Assumption, the bodily ascent of Mary to heaven immediately after her death, which is based upon Apocryphal writings, is observed as a feast by the faithful of the Roman Church, is generally accepted as "of faith."**