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tion. This application however, we believe, was never thought of (we write with diffidence on this point) before the full establishment of the worship of the Virgin after the Nestorian controversy in the sixth century. Once suggested, it was too acceptable to the general ear not at once to become the popular belief; and found its expression in the beautiful verses of Petrarch:

Vergine Bella, che di Sol vestita,

Coronata di stelle, al Sommo Sole

Piacesti si, ch' in te suo lume n' ascose.

Poetry and art-and with some poetry and art are the true theology--seized the captivating tradition; it was embodied in the symbolism of mediæval religion, and from such minds can sober reason hope to exorcise such powerful possessing spirits?

Here, however, proceeds Mr. Newman, we are not so much concerned to interpret Scripture as to examine the Fathers. The early anticipations' of the Fathers are certain rhetorical figures of speech in which the obedience of the Virgin is contrasted with the disobedience of Eve. We are compelled to decline the critical examination of these three or four passages, of which those from Justin and Tertullian have no bearing on the worship of the Virgin: the one extraordinary expression of Irenæus, in which the Virgin bears in relation to Eve the title assigned to the Holy Ghost in relation to true Christians, we must persist in describing as a figure of speech, used by a writer of very indifferent style.

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Besides these we have two visions, one of Gregory Thaumaturgus, one which even Mr. Newman will not avouch: and here close the anticipations' of the three first centuriesan image in the Apocalypse, violently wrested from its most obvious signification, three metaphorical passages, and two dreams.

In both these instances (the dreams) the Blessed Virgin appears especially in that character of Patroness or Paraclete which St. Irenæus and other Fathers describe, and which the Medieval Church exhibits -a loving Mother with Christ.

Now, all that the Blessed Virgin does in the first vision is to bid John the Evangelist disclose to the young man a complete formulary of the mystery of godliness.' Upon which the Evangelist, still in the dream, expresses his willingness to accede to the wishes of the Mother of God, and accordingly recites a full and perfect creed. And all this dream at last rests on the authority of a panegyric of the Wonder-worker, written a century after.

But, after all, the unconscious parent of the deification of the Virgin is Arianism! Had the ungodly Arians never afflicted the Church, the Virgin might have remained in modest subordination, and still have dwelt secluded from divine honours: :

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There was one other subject on which the Arian controversy had a more intimate, though not an immediate, influence. Its tendency to give a new interpretation to the texts which speak of our Lord's subordination, has already been noticed; such as admitted of it were henceforth explained more prominently of His manhood than of His Economy or His Sonship. But there were other texts which did not admit of this interpretation, but which, without ceasing to belong to Him, might seem more directly applicable to a creature than to the Creator. He indeed was really the Wisdom in whom the Father eternally delighted,' yet it would be but natural if, under the circumstances of Arian misbelief, theologians looked out for other than the Eternal Son to be the immediate object of such descriptions. And thus the controversy opened a question which it did not settle. It discovered a new sphere, if we may so speak, in the realms of light, to which the Church had not yet assigned its inhabitant. Arianism had admitted that our Lord was, both the God of the Evangelical covenant and the actual Creator of the Universe; but even this was not enough, because it did not confess Him to be the One, Everlasting, Infinite, Supreme Being, but to be made by Him. It was not enough with that heresy to proclain Him to be begotten ineffably before all worlds; not enough to place Him bigh above all creatures as the type of all the works of God's hands; not enough to make Him the Lord of His Saints, the Mediator between God and man, the Object of Worship, the Image of the Father; not enough, because it was not all, and between all, and anything short of all, there was an infinite interval. The highest of creatures is levelled with the lowest in comparison of the One Creator Himself, That is, the Nicene Council recognized the eventful principle, that, while we believe and profess any being to be a creature, such a being

is really no God to us, though honoured by us with whatever high titles and with whatever homage. Arius or Asterius did all but confess that Christ was the Almighty; they said much more than St. Bernard or St. Alphonso have since said of St. Mary; yet they left him a creature and were found wanting. Thus there was a wonder in heaven ;' a throne was seen, far above all created powers, mediatorial, intercessory; a title archetypal; a crown bright as the morning star; a glory issuing from the Eternal Throne; robes pure as the heavens; and a sceptre over all; and who was the predestined heir of that Majesty? Who was that Wisdom, and what was her name, the Mother of fair love, and fear, and holy hope,' 'exalted like a palm-tree in Engaddi, and a rose-plant in Jericho,' 'created from the beginning before the world' in God's counsels, and 'in Jerusalem was her power?' The vision is found in the Apocalypse, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. The votaries of Mary do not exceed the true faith, unless the blasphemers of her Son came up to it. The Church of Rome is not idolatrous, unless Arianism is orthodoxy.-Pp. 404-406.

Not the least curious part of this extraordinary passage is its coincidence with one in a work which Mr. Newman appears to have read, but whose principles of development arrive at very different conclusions from those of Mr. Newman :

It is possible that the controversies about the Trinity and the divine nature of Christ tended indirectly to the promotion of this worship of the Virgin, of angels, of saints, and martyrs. The great object of the victorious, to a certain extent, of both parties was the closest approximation, in one sense the identification, of the Saviour with the unseen and incomprehensible Deity. Though the human nature of Christ was as strenuously asserted in theory, it was not dwelt upon with the same earnestness and constancy as his divine. To magnify-to purify this from all earthly leaven-was the object of all eloquence. Theologic disputes on this point withdrew or diverted the attention from the life of Christ, as simply related in the Gospels. Christ became the object of a remoter, a more awful adoration. The mind began, therefore, to seek out, or eagerly to seize, some other more material beings, in closer alliance with human sympathies. The constant propensity of man to humanize his Deity, checked, as it were, by the receding majesty of the Saviour, readily clung with its devotion to humbler objects. The weak wing of the common and unenlightened mind could not soar to the unapproachable light in which Christ dwelt with the Father; it dropped to the earth, and bowed itself down before some less mysterious and infinite object of veneration. In theory it was always a dis.

tinct and inferior kind of worship; but the feelings, especially impassioned devotion, know no logic: they pause not; it would chill them to death if they were to pause for these fine and subtle distinctions. The gentle ascent by which admiration, reverence, gratitude and love swelled up to awe, to veneration, to worship-both as regards the feelings of the individual and the general sentiment-was imperceptible. Men passed from rational respect for the remains of the dead — the communion of holy thought and emotion which might connect the departed saint with his brethren in the flesh-to the superstitious veneration of relics, and the deification of mortal men, by so easy a transition that they never discovered the precise point at which they transgressed the unmarked and unwatched boundary.-Milman's Hist. of Christianity, vol. iii. p. 339.

It was to fill up this chasm, then, caused by this honourable relegation of the Saviour to a height inaccessible to human devotion, that a new and more humanitarian worship became necessary. But even suppose such a necessity, grant that this condescension of the Church to her weak and perplexed disciples was a wise indulgence; is this, if you will, admirable expedient to be a perpetual law of Christianity? Is this creatureworship (take it in its loftiest sense) to be for ever interposed— and by all Christians in every state of intelligence-between the soul of man and his one Redeemer? Is Christ never to descend again, and to resume his direct communion with his own? Is all mankind to be kept without in the vestibule, and never be allowed to approach, even in thought, to the Holy of Holies?

We deny not, we dissemble not the justice of Mr. Newman's animadversions on what we with him should call vulgar Protestantism, (he would once have called it 'popular' Protestantism,) but which he now charges on the most spiritual and enlightened, as well as on the lowest and most fanatic Protestantism:

It must be asked, whether the character of Protestant devotion towards our Lord has been that of worship at all; and not rather such as we pay to an excellent human being, that is, no higher devotion than that which Catholics pay to St. Mary, differing from it, however, in being familiar, rude, and earthly. Carnal minds will ever create a

carnal worship for themselves; and to forbid them the service of the Saints will have no tendency to teach them the worship of God.P. 438.

In the fear, then, lest coarse minds should worship coarsely, must the attempt never be made to spiritualize and purify their worship? Are we for ever to give them that to worship which God has not commanded, or rather which, by the whole jealous Triunism of the New Testament, he seems solemnly, earnestly, awfully to interdict? We know who has said 'God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.' Must those who aspire to fulfil-some of whom nobly, we believe, succeed in fulfilling, the Lord's high commandsmust they be forced and bound down by the canons and the creed of an inflexible and unrelenting Church to the common level?

But is the worship of the Saints, or even the worship of the Virgin Mary, always so unfamiliar, so refined, so heavenly? It is easy for a mind of Mr. Newman's religious delicacy, or poetic apprehensiveness-it is easy for men of fine taste, the born mental aristocracy of Romanism (like the author, for instance, of the Mores Catholici'), to cull out all that is pure, touching, gentle, and venerable from antiquity in Mediæval Christianity, and repudiate, or studiously, skilfully, or at least really conceal all which is gross, material, and grovelling. Nor shall anything tempt us to wound the feelings of any high-minded Roman Catholic by an ungenerous disclosure of the coarseness or the wild Antinomianism, to say nothing of the debasing superstitions of their popular religion. But the very purest feeling to which the worship of the Virgin appealed, was it not, exquisite though it be, earthly? What was it in Jure matris impera filio—or where less peremptory language implies the more modest maternal influence? But dare we therefore take up into heaven these feelings, though perhaps the most heavenly upon the earth; and intrude them, in their plain and positive significance, unveiled by figurative language, into the region of pure spirit? Is the metaphoric phrase, condescend

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