Now let any man of common understanding and straightforward principles say, whether any, the most ingenious refinement can interpret all this to mean merely that Bonaventura invoked the Virgin Mary to pray for him, or for his fellow-creatures. It looks as though he were resolved on set purpose to exalt her to an equality with the Almighty, when we find him not once, not casually, not in the fervent rapture of momentary excitement, but deliberately, through one hundred and fifty Psalms, applying to Mary the very words dictated by the Holy Spirit to the Psalmist, and consecrated {365} to the worship of the one supreme God; and then selecting the most solemn expressions by which the Christian Church approaches the Lord of heaven and earth, our Father, our Saviour, our Sanctifier: employing too the very words of her most solemn form of belief in the ever-blessed Trinity, and substituting Mary's name for the God of Christians. On the words, "By thy right of mother command thy Son," beyond the assertion of the fact that there they are to this day, I wish to add nothing, because the very denial of their existence often repeated shows, that many Roman Catholics themselves regard them as objectionable. But, if such a man as Bonaventura, one of the most learned and celebrated men of his age, could be tempted by the views cherished by the Church of Rome, to indulge in such language, what can be fairly expected of the large mass of persons who find that language published to the world with the highest sanction which their religion can give, as the work of a man whom the Almighty declared when on earth, by miracles, to be a chosen vessel, and to be under the guidance of the Holy Spirit; and of whom they are taught by the infallible testimony[134] of his canonization, that he is now reigning with Christ in heaven, and is himself the lawful and appointed object of religious invocation. I profess to you that I see no way by which Christians can hold and encourage this doctrine of the Invocation of Saints, without at the same time countenancing and cherishing what, were I to join in such invocation, would stain my soul with the guilt of idolatry. If the doctrine were confessedly Scriptural, come what would come, our duty would be to maintain it at all hazards, {366} and to brave every danger rather than from fear of consequences to renounce what we believe to have come from God; securing the doctrine at all events, and then putting forth our very best to guard against its perversion and abuse. But surely, it well becomes our brethren of the Church of Rome, to examine with most rigid and unsparing scrutiny into the very foundation of such a doctrine as this; a doctrine which in its mildest and most guarded form is considered by a very large number of their fellow Christians, as a dishonouring of God and of his Son, our Saviour; and which in its excess, an excess witnessed in the books of learned and