the pavement, took up the orthodox ossicles, one and all, and placed them by themselves, in a common shrine, to which the people might thenceforward resort, without peril, or risk of exhaling the breath of prayer to those who had no power to help them! By what means the discrimination was effected, in this charnel-vault, and whether under the direction of a file of demoniacs, or otherwise, our authorities do not inform us. The result however of this needful classification was most happy.

The preacher reminds his hearers that, although neither the souls of the martyrs, nor their relics, could have sustained any injury from the proximity of their remains to those of heretics, while all lay promiscuously beneath the pavement of the church; yet the people were thence exposed to the most serious damage. Not so now, when the sheep are removed from the wolves, and the "Pearls" are set by themselves: now, indeed, we may run to these athletes of piety without fear; now" the LIVING are removed from among the dead,” ἀπέστησαν τῶν νεκρῶν οἱ ζῶντες : he goes on

"To them (the martyrs) it was indeed no damage; but to our people no mean loss accrued ; when any one running to the relics of the martyrs, offered his prayers with incertitude and hesitation, not well knowing which were, in truth, the coffers of the saints, or where precisely the treasures-the true treasures, might lie! It was as if, when the sheep should be led to the pure fountains of water, a pestilential stench, issuing from some source near at hand, should compel them to keep aloof! So it happened in this our fold. The people drawing nigh to those pure wells of the martyrs, when they perceived an heretical stench to be issuing from the same places, were hindered from approaching again. The wise shepherd and teacher of all, perceiving this, who so ordered every thing in the church as to secure the edification of all, did not long overlook the occasion of damage to the flock;zealous lover and emulator of the martyrs, as he was. What does he do? Behold his wisdom! * He stopped up and sealed the muddy and offensive springs, and removed the pure waters of the martyrs to a pure place, by themselves! See then, in this instance,

* Christian Morals.

what an indulgent kindness toward the dead, what a reverence toward the martyrs, what a care for the welfare of the people! Toward the (common) dead, indulgent kindness, in not moving their bones, but in allowing them to lie where they were! Toward the martyrs, reverence, in removing them from juxta-position with the wicked! Toward the people, care, in not suffering them to offer their prayers with ambiguity! Wherefore it is that we have brought you together in this place, that there may be a more splendid assemblage; that the spectacle may be more brilliant; for we have to day a convention, not of men merely, but of martyrs also; nor of martyrs only, but of angels also.-Yes, angels are here present with us :-martyrs and angels are of our company to day! If you would behold, as well martyrs as angels, open the eyes of faith, and gaze upon this spectacle"...Tom. ii. pp. 529, 530.

It would be begging the question now at issue, to affirm that all this is not Christianity. Yet surely we may say it is not Protestantism.-Read the homily "against peril of idolatry!" Those learned persons therefore who, with such, and with volumes of such passages before them-familiarly known to them-the matter of their daily studies, have said-" it is to Chrysostom and his contemporaries we must refer every doubt in point of faith and practice-for they are our masters," such persons are, in no honest sense-protestants. Who has ever stood in a false position, if they do not, as ministers of a reformed church?

The last citation concerning Flavian, and martyr-worship at Antioch, carries back these practices to the early part of the fourth century, when they appear as the then long established usages of the christian world. And such is the aspect under which they present themselves throughout the literature of the Nicene age. Frequently they are spoken of as what the church had received from the earliest ages. Asterius, bishop of Amasea, and a contemporary of Chrysostom, in his Homily against Avarice, (greediness of gain rather) in stating the use to be made of the festivals of the martyrs, wishes his hearers to understand and consider, why it was, and for what purposes, that "our Fathers had instituted the festivals you now witness, and why they firmly enjoined them to their successors." And in the Homily on New

Year's day, as well as in the one just mentioned, inveighs against those abuses, connected with these observances, which, as they imply a slow wearing out of religious sentiments once existing, suppose the lapse of time. Incidental evidence, of the most conclusive kind, points to the same facts.-Poetry takes up and illuminates sentiments, opinions, modes of action, which have already come to constitute the settled elements of the social system. Poetry does not originate; but it adorns. In this view, it is curious and important too, in relation to our argument, to look into the Poems of the amiable Paulinus, bishop of Nola-a contemporary of the great divines now before us. These poems, as well as the same writer's Epistles, exhibit the ripened-unquestioned veneration of relics, and the polytheism therewith connected, in a manner which alone would supply conclusive proof of the antiquity of these pernicious superstitions. I entreat the reader to turn to the pages of this writer, if he have any doubts on the subject. My limits forbid my making quotations. The last enormities of an abject polytheism, graced by elegance of diction, and of sentiment too, we here find recommended by a christian bishop, at a time to which we are to defer in matters of faith and worship!

And thus too Jerome's angry defence of the homage paid to relics, in his letter to Vigilantius, and his animated appeal to the practice of the church universal, as authorising it, leaves no room to doubt (other evidence not adduced) that the entire system, as represented in the citations above given from Chrysostom, was then neither recent, nor of partial extent. Its universality indeed is in no way to be accounted for, apart from the supposition of its having originated at a remote period. That it did so, in fact, is capable of an easy proof. The very ancient belief concerning the state of souls, and the observances that were thereupon founded --the rich and vivid conceptions entertained of invisible orders, and of their intimate relations with the human family-the very ancient superstition connected with the veneration of the Crossthe boundless exaggerations indulged in when the merit of eminent persons was spoken of-the inveterate tendency of the human mind toward polytheism, and the sumptuous worship, and the veneration of sensible objects, and (as to the chiefs of the church)

S. Asterii Hem. Antwerp. pp. 31, 51.

the traitorous wish to grasp converts from paganism, by bringing Christianity to as near a visible resemblance as possible to the ancient rites-all these various and yet homogeneous influences, meeting upon the church at a time when the genuine energy of evangelic doctrine had long ceased to be felt, produced their natural consequences; and, in a blended form, showed themselves at the very first moment when it was possible for them so to appear in all the meretricious magnificence, and in all the impieties and frauds the illusions and the tricks, of a renovated polytheism. As rich and as sensible as the fading heathenism, and far more potent, as to the imagination, and animated by a vivid belief which heathenism had long failed to inspire, and giving scope to that new and general tendency toward religious feeling that reaction from atheism, which marked the times, such was the christianized demonolatry of the fourth century.

In following, as I have done, the guidance of bishop Newton, I have confined myself, as well to the particular branch of the general subject to which he refers, as to the particular authorities to which he appeals; and have even restricted myself (or very nearly so) to the very orations or treatises which he specifies. But it will not be imagined that the evidence has been exhausted. No one who reads merely the citations from Chrysostom, and duly considers what is implied in them, as to the notions and usages of the times, can suppose that other contemporary writers are silent on the same themes. It is far otherwise. Not a fiftieth part of what might deserve to be called THE EVIDENCE, bearing upon our subject, has been produced. Scarcely a writer-if there be one of the Nicene church-eastern or western, would withhold his contributions to the mass: and, alas! what a volume would Augustine alone furnish!

To have adopted a more comprehensive method in adducing this evidence, would have rendered it necessary to carry the subject forward, through several of these numbers; nor would it, perhaps, have availed our immediate purpose to do so. The few passages that have been cited will, I think, be enough to satisfy every honest and intelligent reader, as to the broad fact assumednamely That the direct invocation of saints and martyrs, and an idolatrous veneration of their symbols and relics, were carried to

as culpable an extreme in the Nicene church, as they have at any time since been carried in the Romish church; and that, in whatever terms we may choose to express our disapprobation of these superstitions as patronized by the latter, they cannot, with any colour of reason, be retracted when we have to speak of the same, as attaching to the former.

I am not, just now, undertaking to prove that the church of Rome is idolatrous in its principles and rites. All I say is this, that--If the church of Rome be liable to this heavy imputation, the Nicene church is liable to it also, and in the same measure and that, in comparing the two, on any admitted principles of historical justice, a less heavy blame must be made to attach to the church which only followed a bad example, than to the church which set it;-and a less heavy blame to modern Romanism, which has laboured to save christian theology by insisting upon distinctions, than to Nicene Christianity, which rushed forward on the path of superstition, heedless almost of any.

The lapse of ages did however bring about some changes in the modes and forms of this christianized polytheism; and these demand to be briefly noticed, and the more so, because, if not adverted to here, a ground of exception would probably be taken against my ultimate inference.

POLYTHEISM-involving, of course, a belief in the existence of SUBORDINATE INVISIBLE POWERS, may be defined as a reverential regard toward, and a habit of applying to, such beings, for help, succour, and favour. IDOLATRY is Polytheism, definitively associated, in its expressions and rites, with certain visible and tangible symbols, or representations of those invisible guardians.

Polytheism may exist, and has, in some few instances, existed, apart from Idolatry, which is its form or accident; nevertheless, the constitution of the human mind tends so directly to bring about a connexion between the objects of a fond imaginative belief, and some visible types of those objects, that a purely intellectual polytheism has ever been rare; and never, when it appears, can it be regarded as any thing else than a transition from the abstract to the sensible. It need hardly be said that, even in its utmost intellectual or abstract stage, polytheism excludes the genuine and spiritual communion of the soul with the One and True God.