Here, accordingly, the non-Catholic critic condemns us as guilty of unpardonable rashness in addressing a creature in language which may be applied to Almighty God in His incommunicable majesty. And here we join issue with him, by utterly denying that either religion or reason, either piety or common sense, condemn the custom we have adopted. Nay, we allege that religion and reason, piety and common sense, literally require the practice which is so clamorously con

demned.

There is no more pernicious fallacy than that which is involved in the theory, that a system of expression should be invented for religious emotions, totally different from that which is natural towards secular and visible objects. The affections which Christianity inculcates towards Almighty God are so far precisely the same with those which we feel towards one another, that the same language is the natural embodiment of both of them. Love is love, whether towards God or towards man; confidence is confidence; hope is hope; trust is trust; worship is worship; honour is honour. The only difference lies in the difference of kind and degree; in the subordination of the one to the other. And the emotions being the same, the phrases which give them utterance are the same. For our mental structure is such, that in practice we cannot qualify and limit our utterances of these feelings so as to explain to an observer the precise extent of the affection we are expressing. Our complete meaning must be taken for granted. You might as well expect a pedestrian to watch every movement of his limbs in walking, as require a person under the influence of any powerful emotion to frame his every sentence as an elaborate definition of motives and a confession of faith.

Observe what we do in common life, and see how the popular objections to Catholic devotions to the Saints apply equally to every man's words to his fellow-creatures. The salvation of Europe depends on the success of the English and French armies, is the universal cry of the hour. No body objects to the phrase, because every body knows the qualifications understood. Apply it to the intercession of Mary, and all England shouts, "What idolatrous blasphemy !” A child says to its mother, "All I care for is to please you." Who but a shallow prig would accuse it of dishonouring God by such an outbreak of affection? "If we do not infuse into the young the love of God, they will never be good Christians when they grow up." What an impious arrogating of the prerogatives of that Holy Spirit which alone can infuse the love of God into the soul! Yet an "evangelical" peer may

utter such a sentence unrebuked. But when a Catholic tells Mary that all he cares for is to please her, and that without her help he is lost, no pencil can paint the pious horror which whitens the countenances of our sensible fellow-countrymen.

The fact is, that the principles of criticism on which St. Alphonsus and other Catholics are condemned would put an end to all intercourse between man and man. Society is carried on by means of expressions which must be interpreted by the circumstances in which they are used, and by the intentions of the persons who employ them. If we are never to use words towards each other which may be applied to Almighty God also, there is an end of all human relationship. Life must be spent in carping, and quibbling, and guarding, and defining, and explaining, till the heart is drained of its affections, and our whole being paralysed with sheer inaction.

Our demand, therefore, is, that our devotional language shall be measured by the rules of common sense, and not by the straw-splitting perverseness of men whose object is, not to understand what we mean, but to convict us of heinous guilt. We claim the same freedom in invoking Mary, which we exercise in giving a voice to our affection for an earthly mother. Our prayers must be the spontaneous outpourings of a full heart, and not the cut-and-dried formalities of suspicious prudery. If Protestants persist in misunderstanding us, and in fastening upon us meanings which we repudiate, that is their affair, and not ours. We are following the dictates of right reason and the inspirations of a living faith; we are arrogating no license which is not claimed to the fullest extent by our fellow-men in their secular affairs; and by right reason and honourable charity alone will we be judged, and not by the dictates of ignorant presumption, or the martinet regulations of puritanical preciseness. The unbelieving and unloving world, if it pleases, may draw up its formulas of devotion with the minute technicalities of a lawyer's deed; for ourselves, we are content to approach our merciful Father with the eloquent lips of uncalculating love, and to tell the fairest of His creatures that it is our delight to share humbly in that infinite complacency with which her Maker regards her from whom He vouchsafed to assume His own humanity.

Proceeding now to the second class of objections, we shall find that the popular outcry against the frequency of our devotions to Mary equally disappears before the light of reason and philosophy. This accusation, when put into its most reasonable shape (for with those charges which are gross caricatures and palpable slanders we have nothing to do)—this

accusation amounts in substance to the following: that the length of time which we spend in public and private invocations of the Blessed Virgin bears a proportion to the length of time devoted to direct prayer to Almighty God which is wholly inconsistent with the boundless distinction existing between the Creator and even the noblest of His creatures. It appears to Protestants that there is no end to our devotions in honour of Mary; that we exhaust all language in seeking for terms of endearment and veneration; and that the consequence of such practices must be, that we think far too much of the efficacy of her aid, and far too little of the efficacy of direct prayers to God Himself. Whatever may be our theory, they conceive that practically the continued earnestness with which we implore Mary's help must lessen the fervour with which we apply to the one only Source of grace and mercy, As the smallest objects, when placed close to the eye, can hide from our sight those which are immeasurably larger, so, the perfections of Mary are so incessantly dwelt upon by modern Catholics, that our minds have neither leisure nor power to worship as we ought the incommunicable glory of our Maker and only Saviour. Why, it is said, cannot we be content with briefly, though earnestly, invoking the aid of Mary and the Saints, and then spend all our thoughts and energies on God alone? If Mary is, after all, only an intercessor, and apart from her Son is less than nothing, is it not contrary to all true piety to waste upon her the affections and the devotions which, with infinitely more propriety and profit, might be directed to Him whose words and whose blood made Mary all that she is? Such, we think, is a fair statement of the view entertained by the more reasoning and charitable of those who are not actually Catholics themselves. Our reply is as follows:

It has pleased our All-wise Creator to form the human mind with capacities for attaching itself to objects of very different degrees of nobleness and grandeur; we all of us possess naturally the power of loving, not God alone, nor creatures alone, but both God and His creatures. More than this, we have an undeniable capacity for loving creatures, not simply as creatures, but with various kinds of affection proporționate to their individual varieties and excellences; and further still, there exist very considerable differences of intellectual character in different persons of both sexes. Now, a sound philosophy would at once assume that our nature is carried to its highest possible perfection, and the will of God is most completely accomplished in us, when these various capacities for loving are employed upon all those particular objects for which God originally created them. If He has

conferred on us a capacity for loving His creatures in various ways, according to their characters and relationships to ourselves, He Himself is most honoured by our fulfilling those purposes of our creation, and not by our setting up a standard of piety of our own, refusing to love creatures, and confining our affections to the Creator alone. There is no humility, but simply pride and perverseness, in violating those laws which our Creator Himself thought to impress upon our natures; our duty is to ascertain what are the objects on which He designs our regards to be fixed, and to glorify Him by obedience to the laws which He has enacted.

So, again, in regulating the actions of the intellect, God is honoured by our submitting to be what He has made us, and not by every man's straining to be an angel, or to imitate the raptures of those whose gifts are far above those of ordinary mortals. He has thought fit to deny us the power of continuous meditation on Himself in this lower world, except in the case of a chosen few: our brains are incapable of the exertion; an ordinary person might pray and meditate himself into delirium in the course of a few days. Almighty God no more intended us to be always contemplating His own ineffable greatness and glory, and always praying directly to Him for His gifts, than He designed us to pass our lives in ceaselessly walking across the habitable globe: we are to serve Him as men, and the majority of us as very ordinary men.

Further still, in permitting and enjoining intercessory prayer, God has employed these same capacities for loving creatures as a direct instrument for the salvation of souls. Undoubtedly, the efficacy of intercession, whether as offered by a friend on earth or by a saint in heaven, is one of the most mysterious, as it is one of the most consolatory truths of revelation; still, our Blessed Lord has conferred this extraordinary privilege upon Christians, so that in some sort He has actually placed each man's destiny in the hands of his fellows; and the truth once revealed, and the advantages of intercession not merely theoretically admitted, but cordially sought for, it follows that a new class of created objects for our love is called into existence, around whom the affections of the heart spontaneously wind themselves, as naturally as the affections of a child entwine themselves about a mother or an affectionate playmate. Once let a man desire the advantages to be gained by the prayers of living friends or of the Saints, and by the laws of humanity, as a matter of course, he becomes personally attached to those by whose intercessions he believes that he is benefited.

No doubt, all this may seem chimerical and fantastical to

observers who have never practically realised the advantages of the prayers of departed Christians, or to whom those who are dead live only in memory; yet surely it is not difficult to perceive that if a Catholic practically regards Mary and the Saints as living beings, cognisant of the requests made to them from earth, and rejoicing to offer to God the intercessions which their clients entreat of them-surely, in such a case, it is easy to perceive that the affections will spontaneously attach themselves to those from whom these ardently-desired benefits are so abundantly obtained; there is no more danger of dishonour to God from the fervency of our love for Mary, than from our love for our living friends and kindred. Of course Mary may be idolised, as a living mother may be idolised; but the most ardent and affectionate love for Mary no more tends to a neglect of the rights of her God and ours, than the deep love of a son or daughter for an earthly mother tends to the dishonour of Jesus Christ. Our attachments to our natural kindred are not only innocent, but positively right, and in the strictest conformity with the honour due to God; an unnatural child, a false friend, a heartless husband, could not be a good Christian; and the same holds true of the objects of supernatural love. When a Christian, by the help of grace, desires the salvation of his soul, and asks the intercession of Mary, the love which necessarily springs up towards her is in the strictest harmony with his allegiance to the Sovereign Father of all.

Now, in the daily course of this life, as a matter of fact, a very considerable portion of our time is occupied in what are rightly termed the duties of affection and friendship. When we love a person, an irresistible and perfectly praiseworthy instinct impels us frequently to say or do many things by way of expressing or embodying the affection we feel. Is all this, then, so much abstracted from the worship of God? In the endearments between a mother and a child is there any thing hateful in the eyes of Him who made them for His own glory? The very idea almost approaches blasphemy. Is the interchange of sentiments of friendship, the offering of gifts of affection, the amiable intercourse of cordial society, a sin, a derogation from the majesty of the Almighty, a portion of our thoughts and time stolen from devotional exercises, a proof that we idolise the creature and insult the Creator? What monstrous folly to conceive such a thought!

Apply this self-evident truth to the intercourse between Catholics and the Blessed Virgin Mary: she is our friend, our best of friends, our nearest spiritual relation among all creatures, and therefore it is natural to us to betake ourselves to her repeatedly with every possible variety of expression of