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David has discovered that God demands no sacrifice, much less self-torturing penance. What he demands is the heart. The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit. A broken and a contrite heart he will not despise. It is such utterances as these which have given, for now many hundred years, their priceless value to the little book of Psalms ascribed to the shepherd outlaw of the Judaean hills.
The origin or root of Mariolatry has been accounted for in the following manner: "In all Christian ages the especial glory ascribed to the Virgin Mother is purity of heart and life. Gradually in the history of the Christian church, the recognition of this became idolatry. The works of early Christian art commonly exhibit the progress of this perversion. They show how Mariolatry grew up.
'This easy and universal belief, observes the philosophical historian of the Decline and Fall, 'so expressive of the sense of mankind, may be ascribed to the genuine merit of the fable itself.
He is not ashamed to attempt to justify, what all thinking good men must condemn, the Queen's making twelve peers at once, to serve a particular turn. All these may be ascribed to the strength of his passions, and to the prejudices, early imbibed, in favour of his indulgent royal mistress and her favourites and servants.
If any one, therefore, has considered these foundations, that we are not justified by the Law because human nature cannot observe the Law of God and cannot love God, but that we are justified from the promise, in which, for Christ's sake, reconciliation, righteousness, and eternal life have been promised, he will easily understand that justification must necessarily be ascribed to faith, if he only will reflect upon the fact that it is not in vain that Christ has been promised and set forth, that He has been born and has suffered and been raised again; if he will reflect upon the fact that the promise of grace in Christ is not in vain, that it was made immediately from the beginning of the world apart from and beyond the Law; if he will reflect upon the fact that the promise should be received by faith, as John says, 1 Ep. 5, 10 sq.: He that believeth not God hath made Him a liar, because he believeth not the record that God gave of His Son.
And all this by Eyvind Skaldaspillir, and the heathen Norse in general, was ascribed to anger of the heathen gods. Discontent in Norway, and especially in Eyvind Skaldaspillir, seems to have been very great.
And then there comes the crushing judgment of an over-zealous Christian missionary sinologist: "There is no hierarchy of gods brought in to rule and inhabit the world they made, no conclave on Mount Olympus, nor judgment of the mortal soul by Osiris, no transfer of human love and hate, passions and hopes, to the powers above; all here is ascribed to disembodied agencies or principles, and their works are represented as moving on in quiet order.
Plutarch draws a picture of him so vivid that by common consent it is ascribed to the memoirs of some one who knew him. "In all his dealings with men," says the biographer, "he was always dignified yet always courteous"; that is, while he inspired respect, men felt also that he would do anything in his power for them.
And those burning, passionate reproaches, all that anger of the wounded dove, explained to him the mystery of her return, her unjust suspicions, the cause of her sudden death, which he still ascribed to brain fever, brought on by excitement and fatigue. For Nora did not speak of the child about to be born; she had not remembered it when she wrote, or she would not have written.
Very learned men, Origen and Plotinus among the rest, were let into the secret, and grew so fond of it, that the former, willing to support his opinion by something very solid, catches at the authority of an Apocryphal book, ascribed to the patriarch Joseph, where Jacob is introduced speaking to his twelve sons: "I have read in the register of heaven what shall happen to you and your children."
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