Every month they commemorate the assumption of the Virgin Mary, and are of opinion that no Christians beside themselves have a true sense of the greatness of the mother of God, or pay her the honours that are due to her.
They are possessed with a strange notion that they are the only true Christians in the world; as for us, they shunned us as heretics, and were under the greatest surprise at hearing us mention the Virgin Mary with the respect which is due to her, and told us that we could not be entirely barbarians since we were acquainted with the mother of God.
"They wear a shroud under their brown cloaks and a rope round their waists, and they get up on winter nights and go off into cold places to pray to the
Virgin Mary. The
Virgin Mary is a hard mistress!"
"Messieurs the bourgeois," said he, "and mesdemoiselles the bourgeoises , we shall have the honor of declaiming and representing, before his eminence, monsieur the cardinal, a very beautiful morality which has for its title, 'The Good Judgment of Madame the
Virgin Mary.' I am to play Jupiter.
``There she stands,'' pointing to a rude image of the
Virgin Mary, ``see if she can avert the fate that awaits thee.''
"All that is here in Spanish is what the Moorish paper contains, and you must bear in mind that when it says 'Lela Marien' it means 'Our Lady the
Virgin Mary.'"
The old masters did paint some Venetian historical pictures, and these we did not tire of looking at, notwithstanding representations of the formal introduction of defunct doges to the
Virgin Mary in regions beyond the clouds clashed rather harshly with the proprieties, it seemed to us.
As Lydgate rode away, he thought, "This young creature has a heart large enough for the
Virgin Mary. She evidently thinks nothing of her own future, and would pledge away half her income at once, as if she wanted nothing for herself but a chair to sit in from which she can look down with those clear eyes at the poor mortals who pray to her.
To this day they relate the atrocious actions of the bucaniers; and especially of one man, who took away the figure of the
Virgin Mary, and returned the year after for that of St.
Born into an extreme Protestant family, but outraged by the wanton iconoclasm of the triumphant Puritans, and deprived by them of his fellowship, at Cambridge, he became a Catholic and died a canon in the church of the miracle-working Lady (
Virgin Mary) of Loretto in Italy.
We often ate and drank with those men; and though I must confess the conversion, as they call it, of the Chinese to Christianity is so far from the true conversion required to bring heathen people to the faith of Christ, that it seems to amount to little more than letting them know the name of Christ, and say some prayers to the
Virgin Mary and her Son, in a tongue which they understood not, and to cross themselves, and the like; yet it must be confessed that the religionists, whom we call missionaries, have a firm belief that these people will be saved, and that they are the instruments of it; and on this account they undergo not only the fatigue of the voyage, and the hazards of living in such places, but oftentimes death itself, and the most violent tortures, for the sake of this work.
There was a young lady, as beautiful as the
Virgin Mary, in the carriage, and a young man, who looked like the young lady.