What a refreshing contrast do we find in the records of the Tinnevelly Mission, where the heathen idols have been used for pavement at the Church doors, so that none can enter God’s house for worship without first trampling the former idol under foot! From the same nature has sprung the system of saint worship. There is always a tendency to deify the great, and just in proportion as time advances does this tendency increase. The man’s human frailty is daily witnessed by his own contemporaries, and the humanity of his nature kept in view by visible facts; but when the corrective evidence of real life loses its power through the lapse of time, the human failures are forgotten, while the great acts are exaggerated, till something supernatural is attached to the memory, and the earthly benefactor is adored as a god. This is the history of all the tutelary deities of Pagan lands. Romulus, _e.g._, was no sooner dead than deified; the most popular deity of China, Laoutze, was one of the early emperors, and there is scarcely a nation in the world that has not elevated its benefactors into gods. Here, then, is the natural tendency of the natural heart—a tendency in direct opposition to Christianity. But, though thus opposed to the Gospel, it is not necessarily eradicated from the heart of every professing Christian; and, hence, it has produced within the Church a new mode of Christianized hero-worship, in which the martyrs have taken the hero’s honours, and the Virgin is crowned with the crown of Cybele. There was nothing wonderful in this. They witnessed the martyrs’ faith, and met for sacramental communion around the martyrs’ tombs; they knew their souls yet lived, and they knew not but what they might be even present. What, then, could be more natural than that the waiting heart should begin to adore them? It was not addressing a Pagan god, but a Christian saint, and the very prayer was an acknowledgment of all the great principles of Christianity. But when once that prayer was uttered, the Rubicon was crossed, and the principle of saint-worship established in the Church. Hence you find the guardian saints and angels of the Church of Rome filling exactly the same office as the tutelary deities of the Heathen. And, as we have just remarked the identity of Pagan and Roman image-worship as illustrated by the alteration of the image, so there is another curious fact which exhibits the similar correspondence between the hero-worship of the ancients and the saint-worship of modern Rome. When the Emperor Phocas issued his celebrated edict in recognition of the supremacy of the See of Rome, he made a present to the Pope of the ancient temple named Pantheon. Now this temple was originally dedicated to Cybele, and all the Pagan gods, and when it fell into the possession of the Pope, he made as slight a change as possible, for he just turned it over to the Virgin Mary and all the saints. The principle was left