Delivering a sermon on the “Month of Mary,” we find the Rev. Dr. Preston, of New York City, expressing the Christian idea of the female principle of the trinity better and more clearly than we could, and substantially in the spirit of an ancient “heathen” philosopher. He says that the “plan of the redemption made it necessary that a mother should be found, and Mary stands pre-eminently alone as the only instance when a creature was necessary to the consummation of God’s work.” We will beg the right to contradict the reverend gentleman. As shown above, thousands of years before our era it was found necessary by all the “heathen” theogonies to find a female principle, a “mother” for the triune male principle. Hence, Christianity does not present the “only instance” of such a consummation of God’s work--albeit, as this work shows, there was more philosophy and less materialism, or rather anthropomorphism, in it. But hear the reverend Doctor express “heathen” thought in Christian ideas. “He” (God), he says, “prepared her (Mary’s) virginal and celestial purity, for a mother defiled could not become the mother of the Most High. The holy virgin, even in her childhood, was more pleasing than all the Cherubim and Seraphim, and from infancy to the maturing maidenhood and womanhood she grew more and more pure. By her very sanctity she reigned over the heart of God. _When the hour came, the whole court of heaven was hushed, and the trinity listened for the answer of Mary, for without her consent the world could not have been redeemed._” Does it not seem as if we were reading Irenæus explaining the Gnostic “_Heresy_, which taught that the Father and Son loved the beauty (_formam_) of the celestial Virgin?” or the Egyptian system, of Isis being both wife, sister, and mother of Osiris--Horus? With the Gnostic philosophy there were but _two_, but the Christians have improved and perfected the system by making it completely “heathen,” for it is the Chaldean Anu--Bel--Hoa, merging into Mylitta. “Then while this month (of Mary),” adds Dr. Preston, “begins in the paschal season--the month when nature decks herself with fruits and flowers, the harbingers of a bright harvest--let us, too, begin for a golden harvest. In this month the dead comes up out of the earth, figuring the resurrection; so, when we are kneeling before the altar of the holy and immaculate Mary, let us remember that there should come forth from us the bud of promise, the flower of hope, and the imperishable fruit of sanctity.”