xviii

CARDINAL BUONAVENTURA.

him gladly;" but Cardinal Buonaventura, "the seraphic Doctor," now worshipped as a saint, altered our Lord's command "Come unto me," and made it "Come unto Mary." When a father calls his child to himself, does he then mean that it shall go to another! No! the whole plan of mercy for man rests on his looking, not at the Church, nor to the Priests, nor to the Saints, nor to his own merits, nor to his own penitence, nor to a purchased indulgence, but with grateful, obedient confidence immediately to a willing and always gracious Mediator. Let every Christian feel, towards his Divine Redeemer, as Diogenes did when Alexander intercepted the light of the sun, only impatient for the obstacle to be removed.

A Protestant Christian finds, even in the greatest miracles recorded by the Bible, nothing contrary to the evidence of his senses, but all harmonious and distinct. When Christ at the marriage in Cana turned the water into wine, that miracle was visible to every spectator's eye and taste. As Dryden so beautifully expresses it, "The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed." In a Popish Church, on the contrary, when the Priest is supposed to turn bread into flesh, he must work a double miracle; first, that it shall be really transformed; and secondly, that the transformation shall not be visible. Our Lord, in adopting figurative Eastern phraseology, said

"This is my body," though he was then present in his own entire unbroken body. He likewise says elsewhere, "I am the door," and also "The seven candlesticks are seven churches;" but who takes these expressions literally! Duns Scotus, the professor of Divinity at Oxford in 1301, says as clearly as the Professor of Divinity at Oxford could do now, that "previous to the Council of Lateran, transubstantiation was not an article of faith."

The doctrine of Infallibility, like an iron hoop, rivets all the eccentricities of Romish doctrine together; and can anything be conceived more calculated to crush the intellectual vigour of all, than this assumption by one only? Dr. Wylie says in his work on the Papacy, "As an infallible Church, Rome presents her votaries with a system of dogmas, not a few of which are opposed to reason, and some of them even to the senses. Those dogmas are not to be investigated; the person must not attempt to reconcile them to reason, or to the evidence of his senses; he must not even attempt to understand them, but they are simply to be believed. If he demand grounds for this belief, he is told that he is committing mortal sin and perilling his salvation. Here is all action of the mind interdicted under the highest sanctions. The person is taught that he cannot commit a greater crime than to think; that he cannot more

grievously offend against his Creator than by using the powers his Creator has endowed him with. Thus, while the first effect of Christianity is to quicken the intellect, the first effect of Romanism is to strike it with torpor. She inexorably demands of all her votaries that they denude themselves of their understandings and their senses, and prostrate them beneath the wheels of this Juggernaut of hers. While the Protestant is employed in investigating the grounds of his creed, in tracing the relations of its various truths, and in following out their consequences, the mind of the Romanist is all the while lying dormant. As the bandaged limb loses in time the power of motion, so faculties not used become at length incapable of use. A timid disposition, an inert habit, is produced, which is not confined to religion, but extends to every subject with which the person has to do. His reason is shut up in a cave, and Infallibility rolls a great stone to the cave's mouth."

In 1829 the Pope, for the first time, reversed the Papal denunciations against those who believe that the world moves round the sun and its own axis, according to the discovery of Galileo some centuries before, whose name and whose assertions had been till then branded by infallible authority as heretical. There are pictures exhibited by the Papists as having been painted by St. Luke,

which the Pope by a stretch of infallibility warrants perfectly genuine, but nevertheless they are in a style of art so palpably more modern than the period alleged, that Lanzi protests their origin "can only be credited among the vulgar." Either the Pope's infallibility or the connoisseur's is strangely at fault. A favourite subject for the pencil of Murillo and other Popish painters, is "the marriage of St. Catherine," of whom there is no proof that she ever existed; but the Pope, who forbids the clergy to marry, nevertheless promulgates, on the credit of his infallibility, that legend in respect to her, which the pen of a Protestant cannot write.

The Romish Church calls herself the mother of all Churches; but she proves herself a very arbitrary step-mother while claiming a position of priority which equally belongs to the Church at Jerusalem, the Greek Church, or any of the seven Churches of Asia. The religion taught now by Romanists cannot be called Christianity, but is Mariolatry, a perfectly different faith, and those who have been accustomed all their lives to worship a Holy Trinity in Unity, cannot receive the unaccountable assertion that there is a Queen of Heaven. In Archbishop Reilly's catechism, Mary is called "Holy Mother of God,-Refuge of sinners,-Comfortress of the afflicted,-Queen of Angels, and Mother of our Creator!" Alphonso

Liguori, the saint canonized in 1839 by Cardinal Wiseman, addresses his readers as "Children of Mary," and begins his introduction thus: "My dear reader and brother in Mary." St. Bernardine likewise says, "As many as obey God, so many obey the glorious Virgin; everything in heaven and on earth which is subject to God is also under the empire of His most Holy Mother." If that be not idolatry, there never was idolatry on the earth; and who can wonder that the Papists, seeing how powerfully the Bible would testify against such offenders, exclude that infallible witness from appearing in court! The Sultan in 1824 promulgated a firman, forbidding on pain of death any one reading the Bible; and not long since the newspapers recorded that a student had been expelled from Maynooth College for the same crime. This is a curious coincidence of conduct.

Worshipping the Virgin was never heard of till five hundred years after her death, when it was first mentioned by P. Tullio; and subsequently the name of Mary became a favourite war-cry among the gallant and chivalrous crusaders. Mary's own words are, "My spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." According to St. Hilary, one of the earliest Popish writers, the Virgin was, like the saints, martyrs, and prophets of the Church, to pass through purgatory; and the sacred writers after our Lord's crucifixion preserve a total and perfectly in