The worship of images had stolen into the Church by insensible degrees: and each petty step was pleasing to the superstitious mind, as productive of comfort and innocent of sin. But, in the beginning of the eighth century, in the full magnitude of the abuse, the more timorous Greeks were awakened by an apprehension, that, UNDER THE MASK OF CHRISTIANITY, THEY HAD RESTORED THE RELIGION OF

THEIR FATHERS. They heard, with grief and impatience, the name of IDOLATERS; the incessant charge of the Jews and Mohammedans, who derived from the Law and the Koran an immortal hatred to graven images and all relative worship. The eloquence of the monks was exercised in the defence of images: but they were now opposed by the murmurs of many simple or rational Christians, who appealed to the evidence of texts and of facts and of the primitive times, and who secretly desired the reformation of the Church1.

1 Gibbon's Hist. of Decline and Fall, vol. ix. p. 261, 262, 114-116, 121, 122. See also Mede's Apost. of the latter times. Works, p. 623-693; Middleton's Letter from Rome,

2. Largely synchronical with this demonolatrous apostasy, and indeed provoked by its

passim ; and my own Difficulties of Romanism, book i. chap. 6. book ii. chap. 6. 2d edit. with Supplement to Diffic. of Romanism, chap. i.

If we seek any more modern proof of the incorrigible idolatry or the gross demonolatry of the Roman Church, we have it, ready to our hand, and under an authority which no Papist will dispute, in the Encyclical Letter of the present Pope Gregory XVI, dated at Rome, from St. Mary Major's, August 15, A. D. 1832.

But, that all may have a successful and happy issue, let us raise our eyes to the most blessed Virgin Mary, who ALONE destroys heresies, who is our GREATEST hope, yea the ENTIRE ground of our hope. May she exert her patronage to draw down an efficacious blessing on our desires, our plans, and our proceedings, in the present straitened condition of the Lord's flock. We will also implore, in humble prayer, FROM Peter the Prince of the Apostles, and FROM his fellow Apostle Paul, that you may all stand as a wall to prevent any other foundation than what hath been laid.

Here, as exhibited by the Pope himself, we have the authorised Popery of the nineteenth century. Here we may see revived, in all its undisguised offensiveness, the idolatrously blasphemous Collyridian Heresy, so justly stigmatised by Epiphanius as a βλάσφημον πρᾶγμα. Here, associated with the direct adoration of the Virgin, as our GREATEST hope, yea

incorrigible offensiveness, there has been yet another apostasy of a nature in some respects even still more deleterious.

(1.) Christ appeared, not only as the prophet of the Most High, but likewise as the incarnate Deity who should make atonement for the sins of mankind.

In avowed opposition to him, started up a

humble prayer, in which this Arch-Apostate directly implores, FROM Peter and FROM Paul, the power of standing firmly upon the foundation, alleged (I suppose) to have been laid by Christ, but really laid by the perverse industry of a lamentably corrupt Communion.

The common evasion, copied from Bossuet, that Romanists do not worship the Virgin and the Saints, but that they merely beg their intercessory prayers at the throne of grace, will not, in the present passage, avail. It cannot be too often repeated, that, in the year 1832, Mary has, by Pope Gregory himself, been declared to be the GREATEST hope, yea the ENTIRE ground of the hope, entertained by his most deplorably illtaught flock nor should it ever be forgotten, that the same Pope recommends, to the same flock, the imploring in humble prayer, FROM two of the Apostles, the grace of pretended Christian stedfastness.

If this be not rank unblushing idolatry, the word idolatry is a word without meaning.

simulated prophet, who claimed to be his superior, who boldly denied his godhead, and who renounced his proffered atonement.

(2.) Here again we may note the wretched tendency of man to the sin of apostasy.

Mohammedism, instead of being rejected with horror as an insult to God, has already prevailed full twelve centuries: and, in point of number, its deluded adherents probably even exceed the followers of the Messiah.

3. Eminently antichristian, however, as is the apostatic character of Islamism, a lower depth of iniquity still remained to be explored.

(1.) The first form of apostasy, that of the antediluvians, was an infidel rejection of a divine revelation: the last form of apostasy, as witnessed to a tremendous extent in our own days, is substantially the same presumptuous Infidelity, aggravated by the circumstance of an open rejection of the promised Seed of the woman even subsequent to his actual epiphany.

(2.) This is the very consummation of

of the Antichrist is that He should deny or renounce both the Father and the Son, the spirit of Infidelity is that spirit of the Antichrist, which shewed itself indeed even in the apostolic age through the medium of the early Gnostic and Ebionitic Heresies, but respecting which St. John prophetically warned the whole Church Catholic as about at some future time to be eminently and remarkably developed 1.

V. Thus, from the very fall of Adam, has our unhappy race again and again been marked with the deep and broad brand of determined apostasy.

1 1 John ii. 22. iv. 3.