What is the emotion to which the Madonna appeals? Why do she and her Child thus live in Latin thought? There are historians who tell us that the worship of the Madonna was introduced from Egypt. She is Astarte, Queen of Heaven, the Phoenician goddess of married love or maternity, she is the Egyptian Isis with her son Horus. It is a cult that was introduced through Spain, and took root among the Latin people and grew. There is no question here of Christ, they say; it is the goddess and her son. It has also absorbed the worship of Venus and Aphrodite. Venus was the tutelary goddess of Rome, she was the goddess of maternity, of production. It was not till the Greek idea of beauty in Aphrodite came to Rome and became confounded with the goddess Venus that her status changed. She was the goddess of married love, she became later the emblem of lust. But it was she who purified marriage to the old Roman faith; she was the purifier, the justifier, the goddess of motherhood, which is the sanction of love and marriage. It may be that all this is true. It may be possible to trace the worship back through the various changes to Astarte, Ashtoreth, to Isis, to older gods, maybe, than these. All this may be true, and yet be no explanation. The old gods are dead. Why does she alone survive? What is the instinct that requires her, that pictures her on the street corners, that makes her worship a living worship to-day? And why is it that she appeals not at all to the Teutonic people? Where are her pictures in Protestant Germany, in England, in Scotland, in America? Do you ever hear of her there? Do the preachers tell of her, the picture makers paint her, the people pray to her? Such a worship is impossible. And why? What is the answer that to-day gives to that question? Is the answer difficult? I think not, for it is written in the hearts of the people, it is written in the laws they have made, in the customs they adhere to, in the oaths they take, in their daily lives. Consider the Roman laws of two thousand and more years ago, the French laws of to-day. What is there most striking to us when we study them? It is, I think, the cult of the family. The Roman son was his father's slave. He could not own property apart from the father, he could not marry without leave, his father could execute him without any trial. Family life lay outside the law; not Senate, nor Consul nor Emperor could interfere there. The unit in Rome was not the man, but the family. As it was so it is. The laws are less stringent, but the idea remains. A man belongs not to himself but to his people, to his father and to his mother. In France even now he has to ask their leave to marry. The property is often family property, and his family may restrain a man from wasting it.