duced, is taken directly from your own books; and you know, Sir, that such books are not permitted to be printed, till they have been revised, licensed and approved. It is well that when such curses as those of Mr. Gother and Dr. Challoner are denounced, the power does not accompany the will. You have presented their anathema, which strikes the great majority of the Roman Catholic world, as if it expressed your own sentiments; and yet I hope and believe, Sir, that were you called upon to pronounce a solemn "so be it" to the imprecation, you would hesitate;..or rather you would not hesitate, but say with your St. Odilo, si damnandus sum, malo damnari de misericordiâ, quàm de duritia.*

ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF THE HYPERDULIA.

HAVING thus seen, as Usher says, " what kind of monster is nourished in the Papacy under that strange name of Hyperdulia," if we inquire how it arose, it will be found to have originated not so much in error as in deceit. The superstition did not, like the worship of

*Martene et Durand. Coll. Amp. t. v. 994.

relics, grow from the abuse of a natural feeling; nor is it one into which men were led by credulity and apparent experience, as in the case of those curative miracles which were ascribed to the Saints. There is no other foundation for it than what existed in Paganism.

Throughout the heathen world the goddesses appear to have been objects of more especial veneration than the gods, though mythological fables generally represented them rather as more vindictive than more placable. At first the desire of vying with Paganism tended to bring on this great corruption,.. afterwards the system of accommodating Christianity to the old religion; a system of which proofs abundant and indubitable are at this day manifest in the rites, ceremonies,* practices and opinions of the Romish Church. The Jesuits have told us of a female devotee in Japan, who spent her life in invoking the name of Amida, uttering it, they say, 140,000 times in the course of every day and night; they converted her, and she then uttered the name of Mary in its stead, neither varying the mode nor abridging the labour of

* The reader who may be well acquainted with Middleton's Letter from Rome will find much additional light thrown upon this important subject in Mr. Blunt's Vestiges of Ancient Manners in Italy and Sicily.

her devotion.* The conversions were not very different from this, which were made when the Goddesses of Egypt, and Syria, and Greece, and Rome were superseded by the Magna Mater of the Paganizing Christians. It mattered not to the makers of silver shrines whether they wrought for Diana or for another divinity, so the magnificence and the craft by which they had their wealth, remained the same. Painters were equally willing to forsake Isis for a patroness whose pictures were in greater demand. The worshippers of Cybele transferred their festival from the Fasti to the Kalendar: the day was the same, and they addressed the object of their adoration as Mater Dei instead of Mater Deûm. They who were converted from their belief in Astarte, were still encouraged in burning incense to the Queen of Heaven. I need not instance the conformity which was prepared for the votaries of Juno: upon that point the extravagance of Romish impiety has gone farther than a Protestant may describe without a feeling of profanation.

Thus easily was the predilection gratified which prevailed every where for a female object of adoration. The name which was adored

* Vieyra. Sermoens, t. viii. 49.

was changed, not the spirit of the worship. And as there are cases in which it is known that an old idol retained its place and its honours under a new appellation; so a suspicious resemblance has been noticed between some of the oldest and most famous Images of the Virgin, and the coarse objects of earlier idolatry, which in like manner were said not to have been made by hands, but to have been sent from heaven.

The men by whom the prodigious structure of the Romish Church was erected were wise in their generation, according to that wisdom which is not of a better world than this wherein we have our present existence. They flattered the inclinations and the weakness of human nature as much in this point, as they condescended to old habits and rooted superstitions. For to those who can be content with creatureworship, and who are ignorant of the scriptures, what more attractive object of adoration could be presented than the Virgin Mother of our Lord? Did we meet with such a personage in some system of heathen mythology, we should perceive how beautifully the character had been conceived, as much as we now perceive how inconsistent it is with uncorrupted Christianity. To this attractiveness we may ascribe much of

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the indiscrete and reprehensible language in the fathers which prepared the way for the Hyperdulia. But that great corruption was in a far greater degree promoted by the rivalry of particular Churches, and of different religious orders, vying with each other in the fables whereby they set forth their own pretensions to public favour. Hence the enormous legends of Our Ladies of the Pillar and of Montserrat; hence the celebrity of the Ladies of Guadalupe and Nazareth, of Halle and Montaigu,..and of our own Walsingham, before all this trumpery was whisked off in a whirlwind. Hence the reputation of so many other such shrines at which all prayers were to be heard and all diseases cured. And hence the less pardonable falsehoods by which every order in its turn represented itself as enjoying in a peculiar degree the Mighty Mother's patronage. She fancies a habit for one, favours another with the cut of a hood, and invents a scapulary or a string of beads. Hence the fooleries and blasphemies with which the Seraphic and Cherubic friars strove to surpass each other,..the revolting impieties which they related in books and sermons, and represented in pictures, and which instead of exciting horror and indignation proved so gainful to these audacious impostors,