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Elucidations.
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I.
(We here behold only shadows, etc., p. 335.)
Schleiermacher,2821
2821
Introduction to the Dialogues, etc., Dobson’s translation,
Cambridge, 1836. | in commenting
on Plato’s Symposium, remarks: “Even natural
birth (i.e., in Plato’s system) was nothing but a reproduction of
the same eternal form and idea.…The whole discussion
displays the gradation, not only from that pleasure which arises from
the contemplation of personal beauty through that which every larger
object, whether single or manifold, may occasion, to that immediate
pleasure of which the source is in the Eternal Beauty,”
etc. Our author ennobles such theorizing by mounting up to the
great I Am.
II.
(Christ Himself is the one who is born, p. 337.)
Wordsworth, and many others of the learned,
sustain our author’s comment on this passage.2822 So Aquinas, ad loc.,
Bede, and many others. Methodius is incorrectly represented as
rejecting2823
2823
Speaker’s Com., ad loc. | the idea
that “the woman” is the Blessed Virgin Mary, for no such
idea existed for him to reject. He rejects the idea that the
man-child is Christ; but that idea was connected with the supposition
that the woman was the Church of the Hebrews bringing forth the
Messiah. Gregory the Great regards the woman as the Christian
Church. So Hippolytus:2824
2824
Vol. v. p. 217, this series. | “By the woman…is
meant most manifestly the Church, endued with the Father’s Word,
whose brightness is above the sun,” etc. Bossuet says
candidly,2825
2825
Works, vol. i. p. 447, ed. Paris, 1845. |
“C’est l’Église, tout
éclatante de la lumière de J. C.,” etc.
Now, note the progress of corruption, one fable
engendering another. The text of Gen. iii. 15, contrary to the Hebrew, the
Seventy, the Syriac, and the Vulgate itself, in the best mss., is made to read, “She shall bruise thy
head,” etc. The “woman,” therefore, becomes the
Mother of our Lord, and the “great red dragon” (of
verse 3), from which the woman “fled
into the wilderness,” is next represented as under her
feet (where the moon appears in the sacred narrative); and then the
Immaculate Conception of her Holy Seed is transferred back to the
mother of Mary, who is indecently discussed, and affirmed to have been
blest with an “Immaculate Conception” when, in the ordinary
process of nature, she was made the mother of the Virgin. So,
then, the bull Ineffabilis—comes forth, eighteen hundred
years after the event,2826 with the announcement that what
thousands of saints and many bishops of Rome have denounced as a fable
must be received by all Christians on peril of eternal
damnation.2827
2827
See The Eirenicon of Dr. Pusey, ed. New York, 1866. | The
worst of it all is the fact, that, as the mystery of the Incarnation of
the Son of God has heretofore been the only “Immaculate
Conception” known to the faith of Christendom, thousands now
imagine that this is what was only so lately set forth, and what
we must therefore renounce as false.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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