Church Catholic till the end of time. Greater still will that influence become, if, as with sad foreboding we apprehend, her service and invocation should be put foremost in the revival of religion now commencing in the Roman communion. This will be a miserable disappointment to all of us. It will blight some promise which now delights and, perchance, deludes the eye. It will put things back again, perhaps for centuries, which have, with so much difficulty, made their present slight advance. For we live in an age when tendencies ripen rapidly, and the effects of a quickened belief in, and service of, the Virgin of the Assumption, and all that is therewith connected, would speedily display themselves in a corruption of Catholic doctrine, perhaps worse than what has been hitherto. What those effects would be are thus set forth by the theologian recently quoted. "It is, of course, believed in the abstract, (i. e. by Romanists) that our Lord is the One Mediator with the Father, and the blessed Virgin a mediatrix only with our Lord; Rome is not charged with denying, but with overlaying the faith by her additions; but, practically, at the best, where is the inducement held out to a sinner to go further than the blessed Virgin, when it is taught that she has all power given her, that she obtains what she wills, that persons need only pray to her? Nor can this be paralleled with the Catholic doctrine of prayer to the Father through the Son; undoubtedly there may be a form of unconscious Unitarianism lurking under exclusive prayer to our Lord (as it would also be un-scriptural and un-catholic); but at least in such prayers, prayer is offered to Him Who, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, is one God; in these prayers to the Virgin, the creature is substituted for the Creator as the object of prayer. Such, it is much to be feared, must be the effect of this teaching on common minds; but, at the very best, her office, as thus set forth, practically takes the place of that which our Blessed Lord deigns to bear. The feelings of devout affection, trust, and hope, amid our sins, boldness in approaching to the throne of grace,' consciousness that we have One Who can have a feeling for our infirmities, which, in the Catholic system, are directed towards our Lord, as being Man although God, in the Romanist are turned aside to his Mother. Our Lord is contemplated as God, and our judge; the blessed Virgin has that office which, in the Catholic system, is occupied by the glorified Humanity of our Lord; justice and mercy are no longer met together, but justice is apportioned to our Lord. His other attribute of mercy is divided from Him and given to His Mother. The soul is invited, not to lift itself up to Him, but to rest in His Mother, as finding in her the very attributes, which Holy Scripture and the Catholic Church set forth to us in our Lord." We saw nothing in Genoa of the irreverent demeanor, both of the clergy and people, which we had been told would meet our eyes on landing in Italy. On the contrary there was much apparent devotion. The services were very magnificent and affecting, and had the appearance of being felt by the people as real. I was struck, as often before, with the stress, in the offices of the Virgin, laid upon "plena gratiæ," the Latin translation of KexaρITwμévn, κεχαριτωμένη, the " highly favored," "graciously accepted," or "much graced," of our translation. Neither has any of the priests yet explained satisfactorily to me, why Mary and her choosing the "better part" should constantly appear in Roman devotion books in honor of the blessed Virgin. Of course they cannot have confused the two Maries, and the Church might make any ecclesiastical application of Scripture in a mystical way, specially when the Roman Breviary is so rich in them; but how is such an application made in this instance to the case of the blessed Virgin? Fuller gives this advice to travellers, in his buffooning style :-"Be well settled in thine own religion, lest, travelling out of England into Spain, thou goest out of God's blessing into the warm sun. They that go over maids for their religion will be ravished at the sight of the first popish church they enter into. But if first thou be well grounded, their fooleries shall rivet thy faith the faster, and travel shall give thee confirmation in that Baptism thou didst receive at home." I would say the reverse of much of this. So far is one from being "ravished at the sight of the first popish church" we enter, that the service is, so far as I know, distasteful, and almost offensive. Nearly the whole of my second journey on the Continent, and that too amid the ecclesiastical magnificence of Belgium, had elapsed before I became at all reconciled to it. The danger, if danger there can really be to an intelligent or well-disciplined Anglican, is on further acquaintance and familiarity. The attraction increases in proportion to our study of the Roman service books. Much, well nigh all, in them is so beautiful, so solemn, so reverently bold, so full of Catholic teaching, so fitted to the deepest devotional cravings of which we are capable, and has, historically, been the road and training of such eminent Saints, that we return almost with a feeling of disappointment and sense of lowering to our own formularies, forgetting that we have deserved lowering much further, and that the Catholic richness of the Common Prayer is far above our actual condition and practice. The hold which the Breviary takes upon us is strengthened, while we allow its austere hymns to raise our affections higher than their wonted pitch, while we learn many things we knew not of, from the selection of the readings, and pause over the antiphons, where a word from one part of Scripture seems to meet another and make a key, and open up whole mines of mystical exposition, much of it, probably, belonging to very ancient traditional treasures in the Church. When this is done, and there is no feeling in the mind of the real, however obscured, catholicity of our Church, and no sense that so much of the Breviary belongs to us, no less than to Rome, then it is that the Roman services are most likely to "ravish " those who join, and peril their allegiance to their own Church; if such a thing were possible to instructed or modest minds. He, who first taught us that the best part of the Breviary was our own, and separated it from later additions, and bid us boldly use it, and put words into our mouth to those who would make its beauty their claim to our submission, earned a truer gratitude from the English Church, and kept her sons better to her side than many a preceding generation of controversialists. But if, in any uncertain mood of mind, the hearing of the Roman services creates regrets in the heart, and those regrets commute themselves into immodest repinings, let the serious Englishman abroad bind, as an amulet, round his memory a note of native British melody, which will win his heart back to his humble Mother, while it interferes not with a nobler and patient aspiration after the fulness of Catholic teaching. "Dear Church, our island's sacred sojourner, A richer dress thy southern sisters own, And some would deem too bright their flowing zone Thy simple note, severe in character, By use made lovelier, for the loftier tone |