INTRODUCTION.

On page 140 the idea of guilty souls contemplating the sufferings of others who are enduring precisely what their own punishment will be in the day of judgment, is more than Dantesque in its awfulness.

It is hardly necessary to say that I endorse the opinion of Dr Ewald (as quoted by Dr Wright), in the Gött. gel. Anzeigen for 1865¹.

“We can certainly affirm that this book has become from the first the firm foundation for all the unhappy adoration of Mary, and for a hundred superstitious things, which have intruded with less and less resistance into the Churches, since the 5th century, and have contributed so much to the degeneration and to the crippling of all better Christianity. The little book is therefore of the greatest importance for the history of every century in the Middle Ages, and yet to-day we ought to notice far more seriously than we usually do the great amount of what we have to learn from it. The whole cultus of Mary in the Papal Church rests upon this book; we might search in vain for any other foundation to it: notwithstanding the fact that it was excluded once again in early times from the list of canonical books by the Decretum Gelasii². The three yearly feasts in honour of Mary which the Greek Church maintains to this day, and whose number has been exceeded only by the Papal Church in the long course of centuries are ordained for the first time in this book, and are even defined by the day of the year (on which they are to be held). The delusion about the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which has in our day been elevated into a dogma, finds its foundation and its certain consequences only in this book. The similarly quite unhistorical delusion about an original adoration and consecration of the Sepulchre of Christ in Jerusalem is spoken of for the first time in the beginning of the second of the six little books of this text, that is, in the beginning of the narrative about the last days of Mary, and in such a way that we can easily understand what a deep impression such a narrative was bound to make on the world of that period; even if the well-known example of Constantine’s mother had not preceded it.”

The unhistorical nature of this narrative is only too apparent. It is difficult to believe that any Roman Governor who was a convert to Christianity held sway in Jerusalem at any time during the thirty-seven years which elapsed between the Crucifixion and the destruction of the city; still less during the life-time of Tiberius Cæsar, who died in A.D. 37. A.D. 44 has been fixed by competent critics³ as the date of the execution of James, son of Zebedee, and of the imprisonment of Peter by Herod Agrippa, as recorded in Acts xii. 1—3. It is therefore passing strange that

¹ Stück 26, p. 1018 foll.
² Supposed to be a forgery. See Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. x. p. 130.
³ See Prof. J. B. Mayor in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. II. p. 541.