Among these reformed Christians of Perth there were some manifestations of opinion characterized by simplicity and decision, which however occasionally took a strange shape. One of the women who frequented the evangelical meetings, Hellen Stirke, was near her confinement, and in her hour of travail, when surrounded by female friends and neighbors, all of them fervent worshippers of the Virgin Mary, she called upon God and upon God alone in the name of Jesus Christ. The women said to her--‘You ought to call upon the Virgin. Is not Mary immaculate as Christ is, and even above him as first source of redemption? Is she not the queen of heaven, the head of the church?’ The Franciscan friars were continually impressing on the minds of these good women the notion that no one could obtain a blessing from God ‘except by the dispensation of his pious mother.’[315] Hellen revered Mary as a holy and blessed woman, but she held her to be of the same nature as other women, and she told her neighbors so. It was of his mercy, as Mary herself said, that God had looked upon the low estate of his servant. That her friends might better understand her meaning, she boldly added, ‘If I had lived in the days of the Virgin, God might have looked likewise to my humility and base estate, as he did to the Virgin’s, and might have made me the mother of Christ.’[316] The women about her could not believe their own ears, and her words, reported in the town by her neighbors, were counted execrable in the judgment of the clergy and of the multitude. If St. Francis was Anderson’s nightmare, the pope was Raveleson’s. But the latter gave expression to his sentiments in a less insulting fashion. When he had built a house of four stories, he placed at the top of his staircase, by way of ornament, over the last baluster and the supporting tablet which masked it, the triple diadem of the pope, carved in wood. This was not a very criminal act: a good papist might have done the like. But Raveleson, doubtless, meant to show thereby that in his house the pope was consigned to the top story. Be that as it may, he paid dear for it.