After then having examined the passages collected by the most celebrated
Roman Catholic writers, and after having searched the undisputed
original works of the primitive writers of the Greek and Latin Churches,
the conclusion to which I came, and in which every day of further
inquiry and deliberation confirms me more and more in this:--
In the first place, negatively, that the Christian writers, through the
first three centuries and more, never refer to the invocation of saints
and angels as a practice with which they were familiar: that they have
not recorded or alluded to any forms of invocation of the kind used by
themselves or by the Church in their days; and that no services of the
earliest times contain hymns, litanies, or collects to angels, or to the
spirits of the faithful departed.
In the second place, positively, that the principles which they
habitually maintain and advocate are irreconcileable with such a
practice.
In tracing the history of the worship of saints and angels, we proceed
(gradually, indeed, though by no {65} means at all periods, and through
every stage, with equal rapidity,) from the earliest custom established
and practised in the Church,--of addressing prayers to Almighty God
alone for the sake of the merits of his blessed Son, the only Mediator
and Intercessor between God and man,--to the lamentable innovation both
of praying to God for the sake of the merits, and through the mediation
of departed mortals, and of invoking those mortals themselves as the
actual dispensers of the spiritual blessings which the suppliant seeks
from above.
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