lopment and the influences that have contributed to shape it, do we
not find that the presence or absence of devotion to our Lady has been a
factor of considerable importance? Devotion to her injected an element
into our religion which is of vast moment, an element of sympathy, of
gentleness, of purity. You can if you like, in condemnatory accents,
call that element sentimentalism, although it is not that but the
exercise of those gentler elements of our nature without whose exercise
our nature functions one-sidedly. You may call it the feminine element,
if you like; you will still be indicating the same order of activity.
Surely, an all around spiritual development will bring out the feminine
as well as the masculine qualities. And it seems to be historically true
that those systems of religion which represent a revolt against the
cultus of our Lady and carefully exclude all traces of it from their
worship, show as a consequence of this exclusion a hardness and a
barrenness which makes their human appeal quite one-sided. And when
those same systems have realised their limitations and their lack of
human appeal, and have tried to supply what is lacking, they have again
failed, because instead of reverting to historical Christianity they
have taken the road of humanitarianism, basing themselves on our Lord's
human life and consequent brotherhood with us, rather than upon His
supernatural Personality as operative through His mystical Body. Stress
is laid upon charitable helpfulness rather than upon the power of grace.
The modern man tries to reform life rather than to regenerate it.

And, I repeat, I cannot help associating with a repudiation of the
cultus of the saints, and especially of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a
consequent failure to understand the Christian life as a supernatural
creation. If one leaves out of account the greater part of the Kingdom
of Heaven, all the multitudes of the redeemed, and their activities, and
fastens one's attention exclusively upon that small part of the Kingdom
which is the Church on earth, one can hardly fail to miss the
significance of the earthly Church itself. Religion understood in this
limited way may well drift more and more toward Deism and
Humanitarianism, and further and further from any supernatural
implications. This is no theory; it is what has happened. It was the
course of Protestantism from the Reformation to the eighteenth century;
and, after a partial revival of supernat