Virgin does not flow of itself from the idea contained, for instance, in the word [Greek:  Theotokos], and even if it did, we should still want to be told, in the case of a creature, and remembering the known jealousy of religion of even the semblance of creature worship, what are the “religious regards,” which, not flowing from the nature of the case, but needing to be distinctly authorised, are right and binding.

The question is of a dogmatic and a popular system.  We most fully admit that, with Dr. Newman or any other of the numberless well-trained and excellent men in the Roman Church, the homage to the Mother does not interfere with the absolutely different honour rendered to the Son.  We readily acknowledge the elevating and refining beauty of that character, of which the Virgin Mother is the type, and the services which that ideal has rendered to mankind, though we must emphatically say that a man need not be a Roman Catholic to feel and to express the charm of that moral beauty.  But here we have a doctrine as definite and precise as any doctrine can be, and a great system of popular devotion, giving a character to a great religious communion.  Dr. Newman is not merely developing and illustrating an idea:  he is asserting a definite revealed fact about the unseen world, and defending its consequences in a very concrete and practical shape.  And the real point is what proof has he given us that this is a revealed fact; that it is so, and that we have the means of knowing it?  He has given us certain language of the early writers, which he says is a tradition, though it is only what any Protestant might have been led to by reading his Bible.  But between that language, taken at its highest, and the belief and practice which his Church maintains, there is a great gap.  The “Second Eve,” the [Greek:  Theotokos], are names of high dignity; but enlarge upon them as we may, there is between them and the modern “Regina Coeli” an interval which nothing but direct divine revelation can possibly fill; and of this divine revelation the only evidence is the fact that there is the doctrine.  So awful and central an article of belief needs corresponding proof.  In Dr. Newman’s eloquent pages we have much collateral thought on the subject—­sometimes instinct with his delicacy of perception and depth of feeling, sometimes strangely over-refined and irrelevant, but always fresh and instructive, whether to teach or to warn.  The one thing which is missing in them is direct proof.

He does not satisfy us, but he does greatly interest us in his way of dealing with the practical consequences of his doctrine, in the manifold development of devotion in his communion.  What he tells us reveals two things.  By this devotion he is at once greatly attracted, and he is deeply shocked.  No one can doubt the enthusiasm with which he has thrown himself into that devotion, an enthusiasm which, if it was at one time more vehement and defiant than it is now,