"The whole of the Christian religion depends upon the doctrine of the Incarnation. "No other foundation can any man lay but that which is laid, Jesus Christ our Lord." He is the cornerstone of the whole religious edifice. The union in Jesus Christ of the two natures, the Divine and the human, is (one may say) the whole of Christianity; everything depends upon it. His words and His works all have their value from the fact that they were done and spoken by One who was at the same time perfect God and perfect man, yet but one and the same Person. What would be His moral teaching or His example to us, except He were man even as we are men, with a body and a soul like ours; a will, an understanding, a heart and affections like ours? Or, on the other hand, how should we have profited by His death except He had been God, and so His sufferings had been of infinite value?
[...] When, therefore, a man professes himself to be indifferent, insensible about anything that can be said of Mary, it is not upon Mary, but really upon Jesus--upon God--his Savior, that his insensibility falls; he is wanting in faith, or in love, with reference to the Incarnation. He has never tried to realize to himself what is meant by the Son of God becoming man; or, having thought of it, his affections have not been warmed towards it, and he treats it as a common ordinary thing. If, indeed, the Word being made flesh be an ordinary thing, then Mary, in whom that mystery was accomplished, may have been altogether an ordinary being, endowed with no special privileges, and deserving no special honor. But if, on the contrary, that mystery be the crowning work of God's creation, the end for which all things were and are, then surely it is only reasonable to expect that she, on whose will it once depended, at whose word it began to be, in whose womb it was brought to maturity, should be a being of high and singular gifts, endowed with many and great prerogatives, and to be reverenced with no common honor. No honor, no privilege (provided only that it be possible and lawful in a creature) can be thought extravagant and out of place in one who alone of the whole human race was deemed worthy to have a Son common to herself and the Eternal Father, the Creator and Lord of all things. Once believe that He whom Mary bore in her womb and brought forth was God of God, very God of very God, and all honor that man can pay her seems comparatively small. Though a man should have the wisdom of angels and of men, the eloquence of the prophets and doctors of the Church, and as many tongues as there are stars in the firmament or grains of sand on the seashore, he could never exhaust--he could never even adequately express--all that is contained in that one fact--Mary was the Mother of Jesus, who was the Almighty God."
-Fr. James Spencer Northcote
Source: The Dogma of the Incarnation Rests on the Dogma of the Divine Maternity of Mary
James Spencer Northcote was a convert to Catholicism, having been a married Anglican minister. At the death of his wife, also a convert, he entered the Catholic priesthood and eventually became president of St. Mary’s College at Oscott. Between the years 1856 and 1860 he gave a series of lectures to refute the Protestant claim that, according to the Bible, the Blessed Virgin Mary is nothing but an ordinary woman. They were later published, and furnish some of the best rebuttals in print against those who attack Catholic devotion to our Beloved Mother Mary. (x)
