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.
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