Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XI.djvu/229

MARY 217 shadowing of the Holy Spirit she should con- ceive a son, who should be called the Son of God, and who would be the Messiah expected by the Jews. Almost immediately on receiv- ing this announcement Mary hastened from Nazareth to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who was residing in the hilly district in " a city of Ju- dah." While there, she uttered the Magnifi- cat, a hymn which the Christian church has delighted from the earliest times to use as an expression of thanksgiving. After a sojourn of three months, she returned to Nazareth, when Joseph suspected her of infidelity, and resolved, in order to avoid a public exposure, to dismiss her privately. But an angel (Matt. i. 18-25) informed him in a drearn of the true state of the case, and enjoined him to take Mary as his wife. He complied with this or- der, and was therefore regarded by the Jews as the father of Jesus. Soon after, when Au- gustus ordered a census to be taken throughout the empire, Mary went with Joseph to be en- rolled at Bethlehem, the city of David, and there gave birth to Jesus. According to the law of Moses, she offered him in the temple (Luke ii. 22 et seq.), and returned with Joseph and the child to Nazareth, whence the whole family had to flee to Egypt. After the death of Herod they again took up their residence at Nazareth. When Jesus was 12 years old, Mary visited Jerusalem with him and Joseph at the time of the passover. On their return Jesus was missed from the company, and she dis- covered him sitting in the temple disputing with the doctors of the law. She was pres- ent at the marriage feast in Cana, where she drew her son's attention to the failure of the wine. After this event she appears to have lived alternately with her kinsfolk at Nazareth and Capernaum. She is thought to have come to Jesus to remonstrate with him on his wasting labors (Matt, xii.), while he was surrounded by a great crowd. The Gospel is then silent about her till she appears stand- ing beneath the cross, and is consigned by Je- sus to the care of the beloved disciple John. Thenceforward John's house is her home. The last mention made of her in the New Testament is in Acts i. 14, where it is stated that after the ascension she remained in the upper cham- ber, persevering in prayer with the holy wo- men and the disciples and apostles. Some an- cient writers, like St. Epiphanius, have thought it probable that she passed the rest of her life with John at Jerusalem. Another tradition says that she lived and died in the upper cham- ber, the scene of the last supper, now sup- posed to be the site of the mosque of the tomb of David. According to others, she accom- panied John to Ephesus, and died there in ex- treme old age. In the 5th century opinion in the East was divided respecting her burial place, Ephesus and Gethsemane both claiming to pos- sess her tomb. Some legendary particulars re- lating to her early life, derived from the apoc- ryphal gospels, have come down from century to century. Such is the story of her betrothal to Joseph, with all its miraculous circumstances, as painted by Perugino, and afterward by his pupil Raphael. A tradition relating to the place and manner of her death says that she was buried at the foot of the mount of Olives. Some of the apostles, it is said, having come to Jerusalem the third day after her death, found it empty and exhaling a sweet fragrance. This incident is also the subject of one of Ra- phael's pictures. Mary is the object of a spe- cial veneration in the Roman Catholic church, which honors the saints with the worship known as dulia, a religious service rendered them on account of the supernatural gifts wherewith it holds that God has distinguished them, but decrees to the Virgin the ampler honors of Jiyperdulia, placing her high above all created objects of religious respect on ac- count of her singular prerogative as mother of God, and of the virtues with which she adorned this dignity. The early fathers of the church, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenseus, and others, call her the second Eve. From the office thus assigned to her some Roman Catho- lic theologians deduce the immaculateness of her conception. Pope Pius IX., on Dec. 8, 1854, declared it to be a revealed doctrine that Mary was preserved from the stain of original sin by the merits of her Son. Controversies in reference to the proper position of Mary arose early in the history of the church. Those of the innovators who denied the divinity of Christ, as the Arians, denied her of course the title of mother of God, and so did they who denied the humanity of the Word, as the Euty- chians; while the Nestorians, asserting a double personality, in Christ, allowed her only the maternity of the human hypostasis. Further disputes occurred about the perpetual virginity of Mary. The church insisted upon the belief that Christ was born of a virgin mother, in ac- cordance with the Apostles' Creed, reaffirmed by the Nicene and Athanasian symbols ; and the council of Ephesus decreed expressly that Mary was the mother of God (6eor<kof), and condemned all who denied her that title. The Cerinthians taught first that Christ was born of Joseph and Mary, and their doctrines were repeated by Helvidius in Palestine and Bono- sus in Illyria, their later followers adding that several children were born to Joseph and Mary after the birth of Jesus. Questions existed, until silenced by authority, between Catholic schools of theology, as the Thomists and Sco- tists, and between certain religious orders, as the Franciscans (who followed Duns Scotus) and the Dominicans (who upheld St. Thomas), in reference to Mary's conception, which the former held to have been utterly immaculate of all sin, and the latter maintained not to have been immaculate, or not at least from the earli- est instant of her existence. (See IMMACULATE CONCEPTION.) Many festivals are celebrated in the Roman Catholic church in honor of Mary. Her conception is commemorated by the feast