No woman that ever lived on the face of the earth has been an object of such wonder, admiration, and worship as Mary the mother of Jesus. Around her poetry, painting, and music have raised clouds of ever-shifting colors, splendid as those around the setting sun. Exalted above earth, she has been shown to us as a goddess, yet a goddess of a type wholly new. She is not Venus, not Minerva, not Ceres, nor Vesta. No goddess of classic antiquity or of any other mythology at all resembles that ideal being whom Christian art and poetry present to us in Mary. Neither is she like all of them united. She differs from them as Christian art differs from classical, wholly and entirely. Other goddesses have been worshiped for beauty, for grace, for power. Mary has been the Goddess of Poverty and Sorrow, of Pity and Mercy; and as suffering is about the only certain thing in human destiny, she has numbered her adorers in every land and climate and nation. In Mary, womanhood, in its highest and tenderest development of the MOTHER, has been the object of worship. Motherhood with large capacities of sorrow, with the memory of bitter sufferings, with sympathies large enough to embrace every anguish of humanity!--such an object of veneration has inconceivable power. The art history that has gradually grown up around the personality of the Madonna is entirely mythical. It is a long poem, recorded in many a legend or tradition, and one which one may see represented, scene after scene, in many a shrine and church and monastery devoted to her honor. According to these apocryphal accounts, the marvels begin before her birth. Her parents, Joachim and Anna, of the royal race of David, are childless, and bitterly grieved on this account. On a great festival-day, when Joachim brings a double offering to the Lord, he is rejected by the priest, saying, "It is not lawful for thee to bring thine offering, since thou hast not begotten issue in Israel." And Joachim was exceedingly sorrowful, and went away into the wilderness, and fasted forty days and forty nights, and said, "Until the Lord my God look upon mine affliction, my only meat shall be prayer." Then follows a long account of the affliction of Anna, and how she sat down under a laurel-tree in the garden, and bemoaned herself and prayed. "And behold, the angel of the Lord stood by her, and said, Anna, thy prayer is heard; thou shalt bring forth, and thy child shall be blessed through the whole world. See, also, thy husband Joachim is coming with his shepherds, for an angel hath comforted him also. And Anna went forth to meet her husband, and Joachim came from the pasture, and they met at the golden gate, and Anna ran and embraced her husband, and said, Now know I that the Lord hath blessed me."