[Footnote: Just As This Work Goes To Press, The Dally
Papers Of The World Announce That The Oldest Idol Ever Discovered Has
Just Been Unearthed.
The idol is a goddess, who is holding an infant
in her arms.] Being in possession of the Acts
Of the Apostles, which
plainly declares that Mary herself met with the rest of the disciples
"for prayer and supplication," and, knowing from the four Gospels
that no worship had been at first given to her, the innovation was
slow to find favor; but, in the year 431, the Council of Ephesus
decided that Mary was equal with God.
"After the ruin of paganism they were no longer restrained by the
apprehension of an odious parallel" in the idol worship. Symptoms of
degeneracy may be observed even in the first generations which
adopted and cherished this pernicious innovation. "The worship of
images had stolen into the Church by insensible degrees, and each
petty step was pleasing to the superstitious mind, as productive of
comfort and innocent of sin. But, in the beginning of the eighth
century, in the full magnitude of the abuse, the more timorous Greeks
were awakened by an apprehension that, under the mask of
Christianity, they had restored the religion of their fathers. They
heard with grief and impatience the name of 'idolaters,' the
incessant charge of the Jews and Mahometans, who derived from the Law
and the Koran an immortal hatred to graven images and all the
relative worship." [Footnote: Gibbons' "Rome."]
It should be a most humiliating fact to the Romanists to have it
recorded as authentic history that "the great miracle-working Madonna
of Rome, worshipped in the Church of St. Augustina, is only a pagan
statue of the wicked Agrippina with her infant Nero in her arms.
Covered with jewels and votive offerings, her foot encased in gold,
because the constant kissing has worn away the stone, this haughty
and evil-minded Roman matron bears no possible resemblance to the
pure Virgin Mary; yet crowds are always at her feet, worshipping her.
The celebrated bronze statue of St. Peter, which is adored in the
great Church, and whose feet are entirely kissed away by the lips of
devotees, is but an antique statue of Jupiter, an idol of paganism.
All that was necessary to make the pagan god a Christian saint was to
turn the thunderbolt in his uplifted right hand to two keys, and put
a gilded halo around his head.
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