Mary's True Place in Christian Esteem
E. T. Marshall, M. A. Luke 1:26-30 And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,… It is impossible to worship the Virgin, because the very exquisiteness of her character stands in her being a perfect type of human nature, pure and simple; her native womanly grace and innocence are her chief charm. Deify her, and, besides other things, you wrong the whole human race; you depose her from her rightful place at the head of Christian women; you cheat Christ's sisters of their sweet queen, and say, in effect, that you can do nothing with a pure life and a humble spirit but make an idol of it. Give us back the mother of our Lord; we want her here with us on earth, that our maidens and our matrons, feeling her to be one of themselves, may learn from her, in each event of life, how to receive God's will about themselves. It is a presumptuous interference with God's own ordering of the Incarnation, to take the mother of Jesus out of the category of earthly women, and to set her already on a throne in heaven. Was Christ born of a woman or was He not? If He was, let us accept the mystery with all its consequences, reverently limiting our thoughts and fancies by the extent to which God has thrown back the veil... It should be equally impossible to tolerate unscriptural legends about Mary. Men do not gild gold, or paint white frames for snow-wreaths; and do they not see what violence they do to the most retiring character in the world by dragging it to the front, and setting it on a throne, and making it an arbiter of the destinies of men? It is because we feel so strongly that Mary is just as God would have her in herself that we resent all apocryphal accounts of her doings, and deplore all unauthorized additions to her life; these fancied embellishments of the loveliest of womankind, only serve to hide from us what she really and genuinely was from God. We can forgive the false taste of a worship which professes to be sensuous; but we feel bound to protest against the tampering, in faith and doctrine, with the character and very being of her who is the cherished heritage of every Christian soul. (E. T. Marshall, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, WEB: Now in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,