I am unwilling to dwell on this
point longer, or to paint in deeper or more vivid colours the scenes
which I have witnessed, than the necessity of the case requires. But it
would have been the fruit of a morbid delicacy rather than of brotherly
love, had I disguised, in this part of my address, the full extent of
the awful dread with which I contemplate any approximation to prayers,
of whatever kind, uttered by the lips or mentally conceived, to any
spiritual existence in heaven above, save only to the one God
exclusively. It is indeed a dread suggested by the highest and purest
feelings of which I believe my frame of mind to be susceptible; it is
sanctioned and enforced by my reason; and it is confirmed and
strengthened more and more by every year's additional reflection and
experience. Ardently as I long and pray for Christian unity, I could not
join in communion with a Church, one of whose fundamental articles
accuses of impiety those who deny the lawfulness of the invocations of
saints.
But I return from this digression on the peril of idolatry, to which as
well the theory as the practice of {244} the Roman Catholic Church
exposes her members; and willingly repeat my disclaimer of any wish or
intention whatever to fasten and filiate upon the Church of Rome the
doctrines or the practice of individuals, or even of different sections
of her communion.
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