"You may demonstrate to me, if you can, that we are mistaken in supposing that the souls of the faithful hear us; but why allege that we put our trust in them, because we pray to them? Don't you get your ministers to pray for you when you are sick? Don't they pray for you in your churches; and is our purpose in addressing the saints different from yours in your dealings with your pastor? We only beseech the Virgin, or St. John, to do that for us, which you get a man of like passions and frailties with yourself to do for you." Such is the Roman Catholic's mode of repelling the charge of idolatry which we bring against him; and in good truth I do not see how his argument is to be set aside. But take other grounds with him, and behold how the case stands. "I don't accuse you of idolatry, far from it; but I do assert that you are acting very absurdly. For, first, there is nothing in Scripture which justifies us in believing that the spirits of the deceased are aware of what is passing on earth at all; and secondly, were it otherwise, such creatures could not, unless they possessed the faculty of ubiquity, pay the smallest attention to petitions which are addressed to them at the same time from perhaps an hundred or a thousand different places. If St. John, for example, be at this moment listening to a devotee in the island of Sincapore, how can he hear me who am calling to him out of Bohemia? Our minister, on the other hand, acts but as our mouth-piece, and it is expressly ordered in the New Testament that the church shall pray for her sick members." Now here is a dilemma out of which I cannot understand how the saint-worshipper is to escape. For St. John is either a creature, or he is not. If he be a creature, it is impossible that he can be present in two spots at one and the same moment. He cannot, therefore, attend at once to me, who address him in Bohemia, and to the saint-worshipper who solicits his aid from the banks of the Mississippi. If he can be present with us both, and with tens of thousands besides, then he must possess the attribute of ubiquity, and is, of course, not a creature. In the latter case, what is he? This, then, I humbly conceive to be the weapon with which errors in the Roman Catholic's faith may most appropriately be assailed, for though it inflict a temporary wound upon men's self-love by questioning the powers of discrimination, leaves, at least, their moral and religious intentions unquestioned, and themselves, as a necessary consequence, unfettered by the strongest of all shackles, that of outraged principle.