"This is the confidence that we have in HIM, that if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us; and if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him." St. John alludes to no intercessor, to no advocate, save only that " Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, who is also the propitiation for our sins 2." St. John never suggests to us the advocacy or intercession of saint or angel; with him God in Christ is all in all.

3

I will only refer to one more example, that of St. James: the instance is equally to the point, and is strongly illustrative of the truth. This Apostle is anxious to impress on his fellow Christians a due sense of the efficacy of our intercessions : "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much 3." He instances its power with God by the case of Elijah, a man so holy, that the Almighty suffered him not to pass through the regions of death and the grave, but translated him at once from this life to glory: "Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed that it might not rain; and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months; and he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit." And yet St. James is very far from suggesting the lawfulness or efficacy of any invocation to the hallowed spirit of this man, to whose prayer the elements and natural powers of the sky and the earth had been made obedient. He exhorts all men to pray, but it must be to God alone, and directly to God without applying for the intervention of any

mediators or intercessors from among angels or men. "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth liberally to all men, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him; but let him ask in faith, nothing wavering." Like the writer to the Hebrews, he would have us come ourselves "boldly" and directly "to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”

Surely, these Apostles, chosen vessels for conveying the truths of salvation throughout the world, knew well how the Almighty could best be approached by his children on earth; and had the invocation of saint or angel found a place in their creed, they would not have kept so important a truth from us.

Before leaving this part of our subject, I would propose the patient and unprejudiced weighing of the import of two passages in the New Testament, often quoted on this subject; one in the Acts of the Apostles, the other in the Apocalypse. The holy Apostles, Barnabas and Paul, by the performance of a striking miracle, had excited feelings of religious reverence and devotion among the people of Lystra, who prepared to offer sacrifice to them as two of their fabled deities 2. The indignant zeal with which these two holy men rushed forward to prevent such an act of impiety does not, however admirable and affecting, constitute the chief point for which reference is here made to this incident. They were men, still clothed with the tabernacle of the flesh, and the weakness of human nature; and the priests and people were ready to offer to them the wonted victims, the abomination of the heathen. Now, I am fully aware of the wide difference, in many

1

James i. 5.

2

Acts xiv. 11-18.

particulars, between such an act and the act of a Christian praying to their spirits after their departure hence, and supplicating them to intercede with the true God in his behalf: and on this difference Roman Catholic writers have maintained the total inapplicability of this incident to the present state of things. But, surely, if any such prayer to departed saints had been familiar to their minds, instead of repelling the religious address of the inhabitants of Lystra at once and for ever, they would have altered the tone of their remonstrance, and not have suppressed the truth when a good opportunity offered itself for imparting it.

And, supposing that it was part of their commission to announce and explain the invocation of saints at all, on what occasion could an explanation of the just and proper invocation of angels and saints departed have been more appropriate in the Apostles, than when they were denouncing the unjustifiable offering of sacrifice to themselves when living? But whether the more appropriate place for such an announcement were at Lystra, in Corinth, at Athens, or at Rome, it matters not; nor whether it would have been more advantageously communicated by their oral teaching, or in their epistles. Doubtless, had the Apostles, by their example or teaching, sanctioned the invocation of saints and angels, in the course of fifty years or more after our blessed Saviour's resurrection, it would infallibly have appeared in some page or other of the New Testament. Instead of this the whole tenor of the Holy Volume breathes in perfect accordance with the spirit of the apostolical remonstrance at Lystra, to the fullest and utmost extent of its meaning, "We preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities to serve the living God."

Of the other instance, which is in the Apocalypse, it well becomes every Catholic Christian to ponder on the weight and cogency. John, the beloved disciple of our Lord, when admitted to view with his own eyes and hear with his mortal ears the things of heaven, rapt in amazement and awe, fell down to worship before the feet of the angel who showed him these things'. If the adoration of angels were ever justifiable, surely it was then; and what a testimony to the end of the world would have been put upon record, had the adoration of an angel by the blessed John at such a moment, when he had the mysteries and the glories of heaven before him, been received and sanctioned. But what is the fact? "Then said he, See thou do it not. I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them who keep the sayings of this book. Worship God." I cannot understand the criticism by which the conclusiveness of this direct renouncement of all religious adoration and worship is attempted to be set aside. To my mind these words, uttered without any qualification at such a time, by such a being, to such a man, are conclusive beyond gainsaying. The interpretation put upon this transaction, and the words in which it is recorded, and the inference drawn from them by a series of the best divines, with St. Athanasius at their head, presents so entirely the plain common-sense view of the case to our minds, that all the subtilty of casuists, and all the ingenuity of modern refinements, will never be able to substitute any other in its stead. "The angel (such

are the words of that ancient defender of the true faith), in the Apocalypse, forbids John, when desiring

1 Rev. xxii. 8, 9.

to worship him, saying, 'See thou do it not; I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them who keep the saying of this book. Worship God.' Therefore, to be the object of worship belongs to God only; and this, even the angels themselves know: though they surpass others in glory, but they are all creatures, and are not among objects of worship, but among those who worship the sovereign Lord'." To say that St. John was too fully illuminated by the Holy Spirit to do, especially a second time, what was wrong; and thence to infer that what he did was right, is evidently an untenable position. He did wrong, or the angel would not have chided and warned him. And to say that the angel here forbade John personally to worship him, because he was a fellowservant and one of the prophets, and thus that the prohibition only tended to exalt the prophetic character, not to condemn the worship of angels, is proved to be also a groundless assumption, from the angel's own words, who reckons himself as a fellow-servant with not St. John only, but all those also who keep the words of the book of God, thus equally forbidding every faithful Christian to worship their fellow-servants the angels. They are almost the last words in the volume of inspired truth, and to me, together with those last words, they seem with "the voice of a great multitude, and of many waters, and of mighty thunderings," from the very throne itself of the Most High, to proclaim to every inhabiter of the earth, Fall down before no created being; adore no created being; pray to, invoke, call upon no created being, whether saint or angel: worship and adore God only; pray to God