entral figure
is, of course, the Blessed Mother--Mary, honored by Christians above all
the daughters of the earth and adored by many millions as the Queen of
Heaven; and yet how inadequate, how meagre is the veritable knowledge we
possess of this immortal woman! Never has human imagination so
magnificently triumphed as in the evolution of the concept of the
Blessed Virgin; never has fond adoration built so marvellous an ideal
upon so scanty a foundation of assured reality. A moderate-sized page
would contain all that is vouchsafed regarding her in the Gospels, yet
who ever disputed the claim for Mary that she is the highest
representative of all that is purest and most beautiful in womanhood.
This much is not a dogma of any church, but a universal feeling. This
prevailing conception of the character of Mary has grown out of the
conviction of what must have been the moral worth of the one fitted to
bear and rear the Son of Man; and it has also resulted to a large degree
from that strong human love for motherhood which seeks a perfect example
on which to expend itself. The Blessed Virgin is womanhood idealized.
She is the personification of all feminine beauty, both of soul and
body; she is the perfect expression of the poet's highest inspiration
and the artist's noblest dream. We cannot help wishing, however, that
more were known of the home life of Mary; the desire to place the
beautiful figure of the Representative Mother in the varied settings of
common feminine life is irresistible, but this can only be done by means
of what little we know of the manners and customs of her people and
time.

As has been said, the sources of information about the Mother of Jesus
are the four Gospels. In addition to these, there are the apocryphal
Christian writings; but these are of too late origin and contain too
many manifestly absurd accounts to warrant credence, except where they
are corroborated by the Evangelists. The latter say nothing whatever of
Mary's direct parentage. She was an offspring of the regal line, that of
David; for though it is most probable that the puzzling genealogies of
Matthew and Luke are those of her husband, Joseph, there are many
reasons for believing that he and Mary were blood relations. Their home
was at Nazareth, a beautiful hill town of Galilee, noted for the
comeliness of its women. At the end of the sixth century, Antoninus
Martyr remarked that the Jewish women of Nazareth were not only fairer
but