are the well-known
image in the chapel at Loretto, and images and paintings besides in the
churches at Genoa, Pisa, Padua, Munich and other places. It is difficult
not to regard these as very old Pagan or pre-Christian relics which
lingered on into Christian times and were baptized anew--as indeed
we know many relics and images actually were--into the service of the
Church. "Great is Diana of the Ephesians"; and there is I believe more
than one black figure extant of this Diana, who, though of course a
virgin, is represented with innumerable breasts (1)--not unlike some of
the archaic statues of Artemis and Isis. At Paris, far on into Christian
times there was, it is said, on the site of the present Cathedral of
Notre Dame, a Temple dedicated to 'our Lady' Isis; and images belonging
to the earlier shrine would in all probability be preserved with altered
name in the later.

(1) See illustration, p. 30, in Inman's Pagan and Christian
Symbolism.

All this illustrates not only the wide diffusion of the doctrine of the
Virgin-mother, but its extreme antiquity. The subject is obscure, and
worthy of more consideration than has yet been accorded it; and I do not
feel able to add anything to the tentative explanations given a page or
two back, except perhaps to suppose that the vision of the Perfect Man
hovered dimly over the mind of the human race on its first emergence
from the purely animal stage; and that a quite natural speculation
with regard to such a being was that he would be born from a Perfect
Woman--who according to early ideas would necessarily be the Virgin
Earth itself, mother of all things. Anyhow it was a wonderful Intuition,
slumbering as it would seem in the breast of early man, that the Great
Earth after giving birth to all living creatures would at last bring
forth a Child who should become the Saviour of the human race.

There is of course the further theory, entertained by some, that
virgin-parturition--a kind of Parthenogenesis--has as a matter of fact
occasionally occurred among mortal women, and even still does occur. I
should be the last to deny the POSSIBILITY of this (or of anything else
in Nature), but, seeing the immense difficulties in the way of PROOF
of any such asserted case, and the absence so far of any thoroughly
attested and verified instance, it would, I think, be advisable to leave
this theory out of account at present.

But whether any of the EXPLANATIONS spoken of are right or