But for himself, no doubt, he has accepted this cultus on its most elevated and refined side.  He himself makes the distinction, and says that there is “a healthy” and an “artificial” form of it; a devotion which does not shock “solid piety and Christian good sense; I cannot help calling this the English style.”  And when other sides are presented to him, he feels what any educated Englishman who allows his English feelings play is apt to feel about them.  What is more, he has the boldness to say so.  He makes all kinds of reserves to save the credit of those with whom he cannot sympathise.  He speaks of the privileges of Saints; the peculiarities of national temperament; the distinctions between popular language and that used by scholastic writers, or otherwise marked by circumstances; the special characters of some of the writers quoted, their “ruthless logic,” or their obscurity; the inculpated passages are but few and scattered in proportion to their context; they are harsh, but sound worse than they mean; they are hardly interpreted and pressed.  He reminds Dr. Pusey that there is not much to choose between the Oriental Churches and Rome on this point, and that of the two the language of the Eastern is the most florid; luxuriant, and unguarded.  But, after all, the true feeling comes out at last, “And now, at length,” he says, “coming to the statements, not English, but foreign, which offend you, I will frankly say that I read some of those which you quote with grief and almost anger.”  They are “perverse sayings,” which he hates.  He fills a page and a half with a number of them, and then deliberately pronounces his rejection of them.

After such explanations, and with such authorities to clear my path, I put away from me as you would wish, without any hesitation, as matters in which my heart and reason have no part (when taken in their literal and absolute sense, as any Protestant would naturally take them, and as the writers doubtless did not use them), such sentences and phrases as these:—­that the mercy of Mary is infinite, that God has resigned into her hands His omnipotence, that (unconditionally) it is safer to seek her than her Son, that the Blessed Virgin is superior to God, that He is (simply) subject to her command, that our Lord is now of the same disposition as His Father towards sinners—­viz. a disposition to reject them, while Mary takes His place as an Advocate with the Father and Son; that the Saints are more ready to intercede with Jesus than Jesus with the Father, that Mary is the only refuge of those with whom God is angry; that Mary alone can obtain a Protestant’s conversion; that it would have sufficed for the salvation of men if our Lord had died, not to obey His Father, but to defer to the decree of His Mother, that she rivals our Lord in being God’s daughter, not by adoption, but by a kind of nature; that Christ fulfilled the office of Saviour by imitating her virtues; that, as the Incarnate God bore the