saints is expressed when we ask for the intercession of this or that saint, and is not essentially different from the asking for the prayers of any other human beings.  We commonly ask for one another’s prayers and feel that in doing so we are exercising our brotherhood in the Body of Christ in calling into action its mutual love and sympathy.  We should be beyond measure astonished if we were told that such requests for the prayers of our brethren were encroachments upon the honour of God and the sin of idolatry!  But if in this case our surprise is justified, it is difficult to see how the case is at all altered by the fact that the fellow members of the Body whose prayers we are asking happen to be dead, that is, as we believe and imply in our request for their intercession, have passed into a new and closer relation to our Blessed Lord.  Nor, again, does the case seem to be at all altered, if the brother whose prayers we ask has been dead a long time, and has, by the common consent of Catholic Christendom, been received into the number of the saints.  The ways in which the human mind works under the influence of prejudice are always interesting.  There are many devout persons who feel that it is a valuable element in their religion to have the privilege of following the Kalendar of the Church and to keep the saints’ days therein indicated by attendance at divine service; who yet would be horrified if it were suggested that a prayer should be offered to the saint whose day is being observed, and that the saint should be made the object of an act of worship.  But what essentially is the keeping of a saint’s day, with a celebration of the Holy Communion with special collect, epistle and gospel, but an act of worship (dulia) of the saint?  The nature of the act would be in no way changed if in addition to our accustomed collects there were added one which plainly asked for the prayers of the saint in whose honour we are keeping the feast.

In the worship of the Church of God a place apart is assigned to the honour to be paid to the blessed Mother of our Lord.  As the highest of all creatures, as highly favoured above all, as she whom God chose to be the Mother of His Son, the devout thought of generations of Christians has felt that their recognition of her relation to God in the Incarnation called for a special degree of honour rightly to express it.  The thought of the faithful lingers about all that was in any degree associated with the coming of God in the flesh:  so great was the deliverance thereby wrought for man that man’s gratitude ever seeks new means of expression and ever finds the means inadequate to his love.  Many of the expressions that are found in devotional writers associated with the cultus of the Blessed Virgin Mary are an outcome of this attitude of mind.  To those who are unused to them they seem exaggerated; in the vast mass of the devotional writings of Catholic Christendom there is no difficulty