And Him Whom thou
delightest in thy silence, thou wilt delight even more by thy speech,
for He called to thee from Heaven: 'Oh! fairest among women! Let me hear
thy voice!'" etc. Here we have St. Bernard, the rock of orthodoxy,
representing God as Mary's languishing admirer! Suso is irreproachable
in this respect, but Conrad says that the colour of Mary's face was so
bright and made it so lovely,
That even the Eternal Sire
Was filled with sacred fire,
And all the heavenly princes....
Thus, at the turn of the fourteenth century the great celestial change
was complete: By the side of God, nay, even in the place of God, a woman
was enthroned. "The Virgin became the God of the Universe," says
Michelet, a thorough, though rather imaginative expert on the Middle
Ages. The people primitively worshipped idols. The clergy, headed by the
Dominican and Franciscan monks, introduced Lady Days into the calendar
and invented the rosary to facilitate the recital of the _Aves_; secular
orders of knighthood placed themselves under the Virgin's protection (La
Chevalerie de Sainte Marie), but the rarest minds, sublimating the
beloved, raised her into Heaven and worshipped her as divine.
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