SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM 



of the old-fashioned system until hardly anything was left of it. 

 Moreover, there were discoveries in the spiritual world, too; there 

 was the important protestant discovery that material riches, far from 

 being a presumptive sign of ill dealings, were an outward and visible 

 sign of the inward approval and blessing of God. And most interesting 

 of all, there was the rise of the concept of scientific law, often con- 

 ceived of in a crude mechanical way, as was only natural at its first 

 beginnings. Who would connect with this the decline in the cult of 

 the Blessed Virgin? Yet there was a certain connection. "The Virgin," 

 wrote Henry Adams,^ "embarrassed the Trinity. Perhaps this was 

 the reason why men loved and adored her with a passion such as 

 no other deity has ever inspired. Mary concentrated in herself the 

 whole rebellion of man against fate; the whole protest against divine 

 law; the whole contempt of man for human law as its outcome; the 

 whole unutterable fury of human nature beating itself against the 

 walls of its prison-house, and suddenly seized by a hope that in the 

 Virgin there was a door of escape. She was above law; she took a 

 feminine pleasure in turning hell into an ornament, as witness the 

 west window at Chartres; she delighted in trampling on every social 

 distinction in this world and in the next. She knew that the universe 

 was as unintelligible to her, on any theory of morals, as it was to her 

 worshippers, and she felt, like them, no sure conviction that it was 

 any more intelligible to the creator of it. To her, every suppliant was 

 a universe in himself, to be judged apart, on his own merits, by his 

 love for her — by no means on his orthodoxy or his conventional 

 standing in the Church, or his correctness in defining the nature of 

 the Trinity." What a collapse it w^as when men came to feel that this 

 way of escape was no longer open to them. As canon law decayed, as 

 confidence in the absoluteness and divine authority of civil law dis- 

 appeared, so scientific law arose like the growing light of day. The 

 mediaeval worship of Mary, so charming, so naive, was a phenomenon 

 of childhood. She could perhaps save a suppliant from a ruling, a 

 decretal, or a codex, but not from the laws of gravitation or thermo- 

 dynamics. Mankind was now to take up again the guidance of old 

 Epicurus — 



"Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest 

 non radii solis, neque lucida tela diei 

 discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque."^ 



1 Henry Adams, Mont St. Michel and Chartres, Massachusetts Historical Society, 

 p. 276. ^ De Rer. Nat. VI, 39 



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