Diana in Ephesus, when the servants of the only
God called their fellow-creatures from such vanities, should I have seen
or heard more unequivocal proofs that the worshippers were addressing
their prayers to the idols as representations of their deities? Would
any difference have appeared in their external worship? When the
Ephesians worshipped their "great goddess Diana and the image which fell
down from Jupiter," could their attitude, their eyes, or their words
more clearly have indicated an assurance in the worshipper, that the
Spirit of the Deity was especially present in that image, than the
attitude, the eyes, the words of the pilgrims at Einsiedlin for example,
are indications of the same {243} belief and assurance with regard to
the statue of the Virgin Mary? These thoughts would force themselves
again and again on my mind; and though since I first witnessed such
things many years have intervened, chequered with various events of
life, yet whilst I am writing, the scenes are brought again fresh to my
remembrance; the same train of thought is awakened; and the lapse of
time has not in the least diminished the estimate then formed of the
danger, the awful peril, to which the practice of addressing saints and
angels in prayer, even in its most modified and mitigated form, exposes
those who are in communion with Rome. I am unwilling to dwell on this
point longer, or to paint in deeper or more vivid colours the scenes
which I have witnessed, than the necessity of the case requires. But it
would have been the fruit of a morbid delicacy rather than of brotherly
love, had I disguised, in this part of my address, the full extent of
the awful dread with which I contemplate any approximation to prayers,
of whatever kind, uttered by the lips or mentally conceived, to any
spiritual existence in heaven above, save only to the one God
exclusively. It is indeed a dread suggested by the highest and purest
feelings of which I believe my frame of mind to be susceptible; it is
sanctioned and enforced by my reason; and it is confirmed and
strengthened more and more by every year's additional reflection and
experience. Ardently as I long and pray for Christian unity, I could not
join in communion with a Church, one of whose fundamental articles
accuses of impiety those who deny the lawfulness of the invocations of
saints.

But I return from this digression on the peril of idolatry, to which as
well the theory as the practice of {244}