g
tendency of a writer's sentiments any casual expressions which may admit
of two acceptations. We adopt this principle in our researches into the
remains of classical antiquity; we adopt the same principle in
estimating the testimony of a living witness. In the latter case,
indeed, the ingenuity of the adverse advocate is often exercised in
magnifying the discrepancies between some minor facts or incidental
expressions with the broad and leading assertions of the witness, with a
view to invalidate his testimony altogether, or at least to weaken the
impression made by it. But then a wise and upright judge, assured of the
truth of the evidence in the main, and of the integrity of the
individual, will not suffer unessential, apparent inconsistencies to
stifle and bury the body of testimony at large, but will either extract
from the witness what may account for them, or show them to be
immaterial. Inviting, therefore, your best thoughts to this branch of
our subject, I ask you to ascertain, by a full and candid process of
induction, this important and interesting point,--Whether we of the
Anglican Church, by religiously abstaining from the presentation, in
word or in thought, of any thing approaching prayer or supplication,
entreaty, request, or any invocation whatever, to any other being except
God alone, do or do not tread in the steps of the first Christians, and
adhere to the very pattern which they set; and whether members of the
Church of Rome by addressing angel or saint in any form of invocation
seeking {64} their aid, either by their intercession or otherwise, have
not unhappily swerved decidedly and far from those same footsteps, and
departed widely from that pattern?

In one point of view it might perhaps be preferable to enter at once
upon our investigation, without previously stating the conclusions to
which my own inquiries have led; but, on the whole, I think it more fair
to make that statement, in order, that having the inferences already
drawn placed before the mind, the inquirer may in each case weigh the
several items of evidence bearing upon them separately, and more justly
estimate its whole weight collectively at the last.

After then having examined the passages collected by the most celebrated
Roman Catholic writers, and after having searched the undisputed
original works of the primitive writers of the Greek and Latin Churches,
the conclusion to which I came, and in which every day of further
inq