Christianity and Modern ThoughtPeabody, Andrew P. (Andrew Preston)
Religion
Christianity and Modern Thought
Peabody, Andrew P. (Andrew Preston)
Unitarianism
Now I must, before I end, say a few words to you about the late changes.
Do those changes make matters better or worse? Let us pass over ages and
centuries, and come to the present day, because I say we must make some
change in our way of resisting the Church of Rome. I must state, and
very rapidly, what these changes are. There are three of them. The first
is, that a new dogma has been established. The new dogma amounts to
this, without going into details, that Mary, the mother of Christ, was
created, at the moment she began to exist, exempt from original sin. All
human beings are guilty of Adam's sin, with one exception, and that
exception is Mary. That exception dates from the very first instant of
her existence. She never was, even in thought or in feeling, a sinner;
she is consequently out of the pale of humanity; she is not a human
being; she is more than a woman, she is something godlike from before
her birth. That is the dogma. It is not new; it was invented in Spain;
it is a Spanish, an Andalusian dogma. It was invented at a time when the
Catholics in Spain were laboring very hard to expel from their country
the Moors, the African Moslems, who were masters of a great part of
Spain, and who had more science, more art, and more literary culture
than the Christians of Spain, but who had absurd doctrines about the
family and about religion, as well you know. Nothing could displease
them more, could astonish them more, or could confound all their ideas
more, than to tell them that a woman was godlike. They thought, as all
Moslems have thought, that a woman had no soul; and here was a woman who
was a goddess before her birth, who was always a goddess. This was
something absolutely incredible to them, and it showed the great
difference between Christians and Moslems, between Spaniards and Arabs.
This became the general rule among the Spaniards of the southern part of
the country, in Andalusia especially; and when they met one another they
did not salute with words of good greeting, but for centuries it was the
habit in Andalusia, when one Spaniard met another, to say to him, _Ave
Maria purissima_, and the other answered, _Sin pecado concepida_, which
means that that dogma was proclaimed every time two persons met. This
dogma has been taken into special favor by the very powerful order of
Jesuits. They thought it was important to the church; it was putting
Mary in the highest honor, to have that dogma become the law of the
church. But up to the present century, up to last year in the Roman
Catholic Church, people could believe it or not; now the Pope has
declared that henceforth every man who does not believe that dogma is
eternally lost and damned. This he has decreed, after consulting with
some bishops, with whom he conferred about it, but declaring that he did
so of his own accord, because, as pope, he had a right to decide on
that. He said, it is no new doctrine; it has always been in the church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account