these it is said to be a sin to ask.  At one stroke the responsibility is transferred, and the anxious mind finds what it terms “rest in the Church.”  Hence men often begin with anxious interest, advance as a second step to perplexity, and then, at length, abandon inquiry in a blind reliance on what they are told is the teaching of the Church.  One of the late perverts to Rome said, when a gentleman quoted to her the Word of God, “I thank God I am not called to perplex myself any more with the perplexities of Scripture.  I have placed the interests of my soul in safe keeping, and shall not suffer myself again to be disturbed.”  She had plainly felt perplexity, and she had found a false peace in throwing off her personal responsibility.  So there is mention made in “Milner’s End of Controversy,” of one Anthony Ulric, Duke of Brunswick, who, having commenced a search for true religion, ended in writing a book entitled his “Fifty Reasons for preferring the Roman Catholic Religion,” in which he says, “The Catholics to whom I spoke concerning my conversion, assured me, that if I were to be damned for embracing the Catholic faith, they were ready to answer for me at the day of judgment, and to take my damnation upon themselves.”  As he could find no Protestants who were willing to undertake a similar responsibility, he decided on joining the Church of Rome:—showing again how a state of perplexity leads on to a blind transfer of personal responsibility to others.

It is not our business to-night to shew the utter fallacy of all such blind reliance, or to point out how widely it differs from the faith with which it is confounded; how infinitely more difficult it is to discover what the Church teaches than what the Bible does; or how such persons receive without investigation a monstrous dogma opposed to every evidence, viz., the pretended infallibility of the Church on which they lean.  My one desire has been to show that such a system is a natural accommodation of the doctrine of revelation to the wants and waverings of the natural man.

II.  Worship.

It is plain to any man that without worship there can be no true religion, and the Gospel is a grand scheme whereby God enables men to pray.  Christ came that we might have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him.  His blood removes every barrier, and his Spirit gives the needful power.  But unless that Gospel be embraced with an appropriating faith, true prayer remains an impossibility; men may repeat their prayers, but, like St. Paul, they will never really pray.  Hence, if a man remain in an unconverted state, he must do one of two things; he must either give up prayer altogether, which cannot satisfy an anxious mind; or he must have some modification of true worship.  If he cannot rise in heart to heaven, he must have a shadow of the throne provided for him on earth.  Now mark the effect of this necessity.

The first great difficulty in the way of earnest prayer is realization.  The natural man cannot realize unseen spirits.  There is a height and glory in them beyond his reach.  But yet there is no peace unless he does realize.  So what must he do?  Me must invent some representation, whereby to lead on his mind; some image, figure, or effigy, which may stand before him, in order to bring the object of his worship to his view, and which may stand as a hallowed emblem, through which he pays God his honour; he invents for himself just such a system as is described in the decree of the Council of Trent, when it says, Sess. xxv., “The honour which is given to the images is given to the prototypes which they represent, so that through the images which we kiss, and before which we uncover the head and make prostration, we adore Christ, and venerate those saints of whom they are the likeness.”  Through the image they adore the Saviour, and the image is employed as an accommodated help to assist the process of realization in the worship of an unseen God.

If there were any doubt that this is the true history of image-worship, it would be removed by the fact that the sin has appeared under the same form, under all circumstances, and in all ages.  Aaron made the calf as a representation of God, and said, “These be thy Gods, O Israel, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt;” and the Hindoo of the present day regards his idol as a representative of his deity.  A Jesuit priest was in conversation the other day with a learned Hindoo in the neighbourhood of Madras, and urged him to embrace what he termed the Catholic faith.  “What is the good,” said the heathen, “of my exchanging one system of idolatry for another?”  “Idolatry!” said the priest, “you do not mean to say that ours is idolatry.  We do not worship our images; we merely set them before us, and adore our Saviour and the saints in them.”  “And do you suppose,” replied the heathen, “that we actually worship the images?  No; we merely set them before us as a representation of our gods.  No, Sir; a Christian I may become, but I shall never be a Roman Catholic.”  There was not a shade of difference between the two systems, both having sprung from the natural tendencies of the human heart.

This identity was on one occasion curiously illustrated by the Church of Rome itself, for when they obtained possession of a magnificent statue of Jupiter Tonans, they removed the thunderbolt out of his hand, and gave him two large keys in its place.  By this slight alteration, they changed Jupiter into Peter, and transferred him from a Pagan temple to a Christian Church.  Could anything shew more clearly that Paganism and Romanism were nothing more than different accommodations to the idolatrous tendencies of the human heart?  There was no opposition in principle, and the only difference was between the thunderbolt and the keys.

What a refreshing contrast do we find in the records of the Tinnevelly Mission, where the heathen idols have been used for pavement at the Church doors, so that none can enter God’s house for worship without first trampling the former idol under foot!

From the same nature has sprung the system of saint worship.  There is always a tendency to deify the great, and just in proportion as time advances does this tendency increase.  The man’s human frailty is daily witnessed by his own contemporaries, and the humanity of his nature kept in view by visible facts; but when the corrective evidence of real life loses its power through the lapse of time, the human failures are forgotten, while the great acts are exaggerated, till something supernatural is attached to the memory, and the earthly benefactor is adored as a god.  This is the history of all the tutelary deities of Pagan lands.  Romulus, e.g., was no sooner dead than deified; the most popular deity of China, Laoutze, was one of the early emperors, and there is scarcely a nation in the world that has not elevated its benefactors into gods.

Here, then, is the natural tendency of the natural heart—a tendency in direct opposition to Christianity.  But, though thus opposed to the Gospel, it is not necessarily eradicated from the heart of every professing Christian; and, hence, it has produced within the Church a new mode of Christianized hero-worship, in which the martyrs have taken the hero’s honours, and the Virgin is crowned with the crown of Cybele.  There was nothing wonderful in this.  They witnessed the martyrs’ faith, and met for sacramental communion around the martyrs’ tombs; they knew their souls yet lived, and they knew not but what they might be even present.  What, then, could be more natural than that the waiting heart should begin to adore them?  It was not addressing a Pagan god, but a Christian saint, and the very prayer was an acknowledgment of all the great principles of Christianity.