tions and penal laws against them, as she has done to a very unwise and unjustifiable extent.* I am yours, &c. J. M., D.D. LETTER XIX. RELIGIOUS MEMORIALS. DEAR SIR:-The Vicar finds fault with the title of the present letter: I adopt it because it applies to all the subjects I have here to treat of, pious pictures, statues, crucifixes, emblems and relicks; and because it expresses the object and nature of the respect that we Catholics pay It is presumed that few persons will acquit of a very large share in this charge, “the learned, venerated, and authorized organ of the English Church," as the Bishop of St. David's, in his Grand Schism, p. 10, calls B. Jewel. This Prelate, in a sermon before Q. Elizabeth, thus addressed her: "It may please your Grace to understand that witches and sorcerers have wonderfully encreased. These eyes have seen most evidently marks of their wickedness. Your Grace's subjects pine away even unto death; their colour fadeth; their flesh rotteth ; their speech be removed, and their senses bereft. Wherefore your poor subjects petition that the laws touching such malefactors, may be put in due execution, for their horrible doings." In the ensuing Parliament an Act passed making witchcraft felony, and great numbers suffered death upon it in this and the following reign. In the year 1612 as many as nineteen persons were arraigned upon it, in the single county of Lancaster, of whom ten were condemned to death. to them. We venerate them, in as much as they represent or bring to our remembrance the holy persons or things they relate to, not for any excellence they have of themselves. In short, we do not make and retain these objects, according to the calumny of our opponents, for the purpose of venerating them, as the heathens did their idols, but we venerate them because they are memorials of the persons and things they relate to. This you will bear in mind, as likewise the necessity to which the Vicar and his fellow polemics are reduced of finding pretences for their unhappy departure, and continued separation from the True Church; none of which is so plausible and popular as that of Pagan idolatry, with which they charge her. Hence the vociferous declamation of preachers against wooden gods, and the inexhaustible sophistry of controversialists about the worship of images. In refutation of the above-mentioned calumnious and impious charge, I produced, as I likewise did in my last letter, the high and definitive authority of our general Council of Trent, which declares that, 66 though the images of Christ, the Virgin Mother of God, and the other Saints are to be kept and retained, particularly in Churches, and due honour and veneration paid to them, yet that we are not to believe there is any divinity or power in them, for which we respect them, or that any thing is to be asked of them, or that trust is to be placed in them, as the heathens of old trusted in their idols."* To the same intent I produced our first or elementary catechism, which treats this subject as follows: Question. Does this commandment forbid the making of images? Answer. It forbids the making them, so as to adore or serve them that is, it forbids making them our Gods. Question. May we pray to relicts or images? Answer. No by no means; for they have no life nor sense to hear or help us." Lastly, I quoted the emphatical anathemas of our above-mentioned celebrated work, The Papist Misrepresented, &c., in pronouncing which, I pledged myself that every Catholic will join: "cursed is he that commits idolatry, that prays to images or relicks, or worships them for God." And, whereas B. Porteus had denied that the Scriptures allow any exterior respect whatever to be paid to such memorials, I referred to the veneration paid by God's faithful servants, and under his sanction to the Ark of the Covenant, namely, a chest of settim wood, containing two pots of Manna and the tables of the law, and being surmounted with the carved figures of two Cherubims. Before this memorial the faithful Joshua and the Elders of Israel prostrated themselves in prayer to God on their defeat at * Sess. 25. Ai:* for looking profanely into this, the Bethamites were severely chastised by God,† and for his fidelity in guarding this Obededom was richly rewarded by him. Surely these instances which I referred to, are sufficient, without mentioning others, to shew that the Scriptures do allow and sanction an exterior respect to Religious Memorials. With respect to Relicks in particular, I mentioned the revival of the dead body, related in the fourth Book of Kings, by its touching the remains of the prophet Elisha, and the miracles wrought by means of handkerchiefs and aprons which St. Paul had sanctified. || All these Scriptural proofs I fortified abundantly from the writings and the practice of the Holy Fathers and primitive Christians. It might be expected from my Rev. Opponent, that, having undertaken to give A REPLY to The End of Controversy, he would have questioned the fidelity of that exculpatory evidence, which I drew from the Decree of our General Council and the other documents, and from the testimony of the Fathers, but especially from the Holy Scriptures; or, at least, that he would have attempted to explain it away: but no, he takes no notice whatever of all this, just as if it were nothing at all to the purpose; but whereas I * Jos. vii. 6. ‡ 2 Kings, vi. 12. +1 Kings, alias Sam. vi. 19. incidentally mentioned in a note that Queen Elizabeth persisted, during many years, in retaining "a Crucifix on the Altar of her Chapel, till some of her Puritan Courtiers engaged Patch, the fool, to break it; no wiser man, says Dr. Heylin, daring to undertake such a service ;"* the Vicar flies off from his proper task to take up this matter, where he reproaches the Queen for not having carried on the business of the Reformation as far as he wished it to have been carried. In fact he bewails "The influence of Popish prejudices on her mind, and tha he had not proceeded on those pure principles of Christianity, by which the conduct of the pious and enlightened Edward had been regulated;"† namely, the boy Edward, whose scholastic ex * Letter xxxiv. p. 25. + Reply, p. 308. Having mentioned, in my Inquiry into Vulgar Opinions concerning Ireland, that I had seen fragments of the true Cross of Christ, the Vicar impiously calls it "the accursed Instrument of our Saviour's sufferings," and in opposition to the express testimony of S. Cyril, S. Paulinus, S. Ambrose, S. Chrysostom, and several other Fathers, on the bare credit of his, the Vicar's word, denies that the Cross was discovered by the Empress Helen. On this occasion he compliments his countrymen and the present writer with the following flowers of speech: "The poor credulous Irish, who have ever been the dupes of juggling impostors, will swallow all his lying wonders as undoubted facts; reported as they are by the accredited agent of their Hierarchy, a Vicar Apostolic, a Bishop of Castabala Ipse !" Answer to Ward's Errata by the Rev. Richard Grier, A.M. Master of Middleton School, p. 64, |