tional Church. She had "stood fast, and holden" inviolably, during the whole course of her earlier existence, that obviously rational "tradition" of holy Scripture, and of primitive antiquity, which restricts invocation to the Deity. But the tenth century came, pregnant with political convulsion, and overspread all but impenetrably with intellectual darkness, and her face was changed". Her monuments, posterior to the commencement of that unhappy age, exhibit instances of a departure from that wary spirit which had guided her divines in more auspicious periods. A practice had surreptitiously grown up, which tacitly invests the blessed Virgin with omniscience. Rhetorical apostrophe, accordingly, and prayers to God for the aid of Mary's intercession, contented no longer the generations immediately preceding the Norman Conquest. Individuals acquired an unauthorized habit of invoking directly our blessed Lord's mother after the flesh, urging her to press their several suits on high. Nor did masters in theology repress this innovation. On the contrary, exhortations appended occasionally to homilies for festivals, encouraged and incited the superstitious populace thus to forsake the tradition of their fathers".

This unhappy departure from ancient

usages and scriptural principles quickly extended to all the more illustrious members of our great Creator's unseen kingdom. Individuals, in their private devotions, appear to have led the way in calling upon the saintly dead". Metrical hymns also, containing such invocations, might seem to have been introduced among the public offices of piety. Such, at least, occur in an ancient service-book already mentioned, of which the prosaic portions exhibit no instance of this unauthorized usage. In such cases it may therefore, perhaps, not unfairly be presumed, that the prayers and hymns are by no means identical in age. Our Ante-Norman Church, indeed, accurately speaking, may never have distinctly sanctioned saintly invocation. Her liturgical remains, imperfect and scanty as they are, and often mutilated also, undoubtedly afford that practice but very slight encouragement. Among her formularies occur very rarely any deviations from the former usage, of commemorating by name the departed pillars of our holy faith, and of breathing a pious wish to God that their prayers might swell the mass of earthly supplication. Individuals, therefore, probably, must be considered as responsible, rather than their spiritual nursing-mother, for those instances of invoking intelligences, inferior

to the Deity, which occur among the later monuments of Anglo-Saxon theology. This habit, once established in the land, led men, however, onwards to the practice of confessing sins to saints5. Nor were angels overlooked among the created beings to whom our later Saxon fathers addressed in their devotions. Upon supplications, in aid of her own, from these mysterious ministers of Omnipotence, no less than from the saints, our ancient Church had been used to pray that she might calculate. But a wise and becoming caution had forbidden her masters in theology to speculate upon their nature". Unhappily, however, Englishmen ceased at length to "hold the tradition," at least in its full integrity, which had restricted the religious addresses of their fathers to the throne

of grace alone. To angels, accordingly, did the voice of prayer and penitence eventually appeal, no less than to other venerated members of the invisible creation. God's omniscience was thus indefinitely as well as unwarrantably attributed to his creatures; and he who "ever liveth to make intercession for us" was in danger of being half-forgotten amidst a crowd of spirits, invested with a

1 Heb. vii. 25.

mediatorial character, upon authority merely human.

Akin with this infringement of ancient usages, and probably anterior to it, was another change adopted in the Anglo-Saxon Church. In ordinary course, the places which had known those discerning, scriptural, and spirited divines, who rejected contemptuously the Deutero-Nicene decrees, "knew them no more"." A new race arose, with principles undermined by a long continuance of deferential amity with Rome; and, alas! it forgot the traditions, unquestionably divine, which deny adoration of any kind to the works of human hands. It is neither accurately known by what insidious means this palpable, this grievous innovation won its way, nor what height it gained 28. But it is, unhappily, undeniable, that within a century of the oncereprobated Bithynian council our national divines had ceased to look upon the worship of substantial forms as an usage "altogether execrated by the Church of God." They paid religious honours to the cross; they paid them to graven images; they paid them to real or imaginary remains of sainted mortals. Of this departure from the tradition of their fathers the humiliating consequence

m Psalm ciii. 16.

was an act at once cowardly and sacrilegious. Let a truncated Decalogue ignominiously attest the altered face of our ancient Church. Let it paint with vivid, mournful force of colouring the unwillingness of her divines to meet the charge of ceasing " to divide rightly the word of truth"." They never forgot, indeed, to impress upon the memories of the people those commandments by which Almighty God, amidst Sinai's awful thunders, taught men their duties to each other. Nor did they pretermit a corresponding care as to four of those injunctions which fingers more than human inscribed upon the first table. But with grief and shame it must be added, they ventured to curtail the heavenly code. They "shunned," as well they might, "to declare all the counsel of God";" inexcusably withholding the command against adoring created substances. This rebuked their infirmity of purpose. This tended to shake popular confidence in their decisions. How could they meet a general acquaintance with it? In order to fill the place thus dishonestly, nay, rather even impiously, left void, ordinarily the tenth commandment was divided into two 3°. Sometimes, however, the preamble

n 2 Tim. ii. 15.

• Acts xx. 27.