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with God than many Protestants who idolise nothing but their own opinions or their own interests. I believe that those who have worshipped the thorns of Christ’s crown will be found at last to have been holier and wiser than those who worship the thorns of the world’s service, and that to adore the nails of the cross is a less sin than to adore the hammer of the workman.

But, on the other hand, though the idolatry of the lower orders in the Romish Church may thus be frequently excusable, the ordinary subterfuges by which it is defended are not so. It may be extenuated, but cannot be denied; and the attribution of power to the image,* in which it consists, is not merely a form of popular feeling, but a tenet of priestly instruction, and may be proved, over and over again, from any book of the Romish Church services. Take, for instance, the following prayer, which occurs continually at the close of the Service of the Holy Cross:

“Saincte vraye Croye aourée,

Qui du corps Dieu fu aournée,

Et de sa sueur arrousée,

Et de son sanc enluminée,

Par ta vertu, par ta puissance,

Defent mon corps de meschance,

Et montroie moy par ton playsir

Que vray confes puisse mourir.”

“Oh holy, true, and golden Cross, which wast adorned with God’s body and watered with His sweat, and illuminated with His blood, by thy healing virtue and thy power, defend my body from mischance; and by thy good pleasure, let me make a good confession when I die.”

There can be no possible defence imagined for the mere terms in which this prayer and other such are couched; yet it is always to be remembered, that in many cases they are rather poetical effusions than serious prayers; the utterances of imaginative enthusiasm, rather than of reasonable conviction; and as such, they are rather to be condemned as illusory and fictitious than as idolatrous, nor even as such condemned altogether, for strong love and faith are often the roots of them, and the errors of affection are better than the accuracies of apathy. But the unhappy results, among all religious sects, of the habit of allowing imaginative and poetical belief to take the place of deliberate, resolute, and prosaic belief, have been fully and admirably traced by the author of the Natural History of Enthusiasm.¹

* I do not like to hear Protestants speaking with gross and uncharitable contempt even of the worship of relics. Elisha once trusted his own staff too far; nor can I see any reasonable ground for the scorn, or the unkind rebuke, of those who have been taught from their youth upwards that to hope even in the hem of the garment may sometimes be better than to spend the living on physicians.²

¹ [For a further reference to this book, and an extract from it-in a very different sense from that here indicated-see Practerita, ii. ch. iii. § 53. The book was published anonymously in 1829, and ran through several editions (6th ed. 1832). The author was Isaac Taylor.]

² [2 Kings iv. 31, 32; Matthew ix. 20.]

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