Of all these institutions however in honour of the Virgin, the Feast of the ASSUMPTION appears to be as it were the crown and the consummation[105]. This festival {298} is kept to celebrate the miraculous taking up (assumptio) of the Virgin Mary into heaven. And its celebration, in Roman Catholic countries, is observed in a manner worthy a cause to which our judgment would give deliberately its sanction; in which our feelings would safely and with satisfaction rest on the firmness of our faith; from joining in which a truly pious mind would have no ground for inward misgiving, nor for the aspiration, Would it were founded in truth! [Footnote 105: "The Assumption of the Virgin Mary is the greatest of all the festivals which the Church celebrates in her honour. It is the consummation of all the other great mysteries by which her life was rendered most wonderful. It is the birthday of her true greatness and glory, and the crown of all the virtues of her whole life, which we admire single in her other festivals." Alban Butler, vol. viii. p. 175.] Before such a solemn office of praise and worship were ever admitted among the institutions of the religion of truth, its originators and compilers should have built upon sure grounds; careful too should they also be who now join in the service, and so lend it the countenance of their example; more especially should those sift the evidence well, who, by their doctrine and writings, uphold, and defend, and advance it; lest they prove at the last to love Rome rather than the truth as it is in Jesus. So solemn, so marked, a religious service in the temples and at the altar of HIM who is the truth, a service so exalted above his fellows, ought beyond question to be founded on the most sure warrant of Holy Scripture, or at the least on undisputed historical evidence, as to the alleged matter of fact on which it is built,--the certain, acknowledged, uninterrupted, and universal testimony of the Church Catholic from the very time. They incur a momentous responsibility who aid in propagating for religious truths the inventions of men[106]. [Footnote 106: Very different opinions are held by Roman Catholic writers as to the antiquity of this feast. All, indeed, maintain that it is of very ancient introduction; but whilst some, with Lambecius (lib. viii. p. 286), maintain the antiquity of the festival to be so remote, that its origin cannot be traced; and thence infer that it was instituted by a silent and unrecorded act of the Apostles themselves; others (among whom Kollarius, the learned annotator on the opinion of Lambecius) acknowledged, that it was introduced by an ordinance of the Church, though not at the same time in all countries of Christendom. That annotator assigns its introduction at Rome to the fourth century; at Constantinople to the sixth; in Germany and France to the ninth.] {299}