"
"You must have dogma," said Gherardi complacently, "You must
formulate something out of a chaos of opinion. As for superstition,
you will never get rid of that weakness out of the human
composition. If the Church gives nothing for this particular mood of
man to feed on, man will invent something else OUTSIDE the Church.
My dear sir, we have thought of all these difficulties for ages! In
religion one cannot appeal solely to the intellect. One must touch
the heart--the emotions. Music, painting, colour, spectacle, all
these are permitted us to use for the good purpose of lifting the
soul of a sinner to contemplate something better than himself. Women
and little children enter the Church as well as men,--would you have
THEM find no comfort? Must a woman with a broken heart take her
sorrows to the vast Silence of an unreasonable God among universes
of star systems? Or shall she find hope, and a gleam of comfort in a
prayer to a woman of the same clay as herself in the person of the
Virgin Mary? And remember, there is something very beautiful in the
symbol of the Virgin as applied to womanhood! The Mother of God!
Does it not suggest to your poetical mind that woman is destined
always to be the Mother of the God?--that is, mother of the perfect
man when that desirable consummation shall be accomplished?"
"I have never doubted it.
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