Hail, (Thomas!/Jesus!) Rod of Justice, the Brightness of the world, the Strength of the Church, the Love of the people, the Delight of the Clergy.  Hail, Glorious Guardian of the flock!  Save Thou those who delight in Thy glory.

* * * * *

We shall apply this same test to many of the collects and prayers used, and of necessity to be used, because they are authorized and appointed, even at the present day, in the ministrations of the Church of Rome.  The impiety in many of those instances is not couched in such startling language; but it is not the less real.  God forbid that we should charge our fellow-creatures with idolatry, who declare that they offer divine worship to the Supreme Being only; or that we should pronounce any professed Christian to have cast off his {226} dependence on the merits of Christ alone, who assures us that he looks for mercy only through those merits.  But I know and feel, that according to the standard of Christian truth, and of the pure worship of Almighty God, which the Scriptures and primitive antiquity compel me to adopt, I should stain my own soul with the guilt of idolatry, and with the sin of relying on other merits than Christ’s, were I myself to offer those prayers.

That this service excited much disgust among the early reformers, we learn from various writers[85].  On the merits of the struggle between Becket and his king; on the question of Becket’s moral and religious worth, (a question long and often discussed among the exercises of the masters of Paris in the full assembly of the Sorbonne[86],) or on the motives which influenced Henry the Eighth, I intend not to say one word:  those points belong not to our present inquiry.  It may not, however, be thought irrelevant here to quote a passage {227} from the ordinance of this latter monarch for erasing Becket’s service out of the books, and his name from the calendar of the saints.

[Footnote 85:  See Mornay “De la Messe,” Saumur, 1604. p. 826.  Becon, in his “New Year’s Gift,” London, 1564, p. 183, thus speaks:  “What saint at any time thought himself so pure, immaculate, and without all spot of sin, that he durst presume to die for us, and to avouch his death to be an oblation and sacrifice for our lives to God the Father, except peradventure we will admit for good payment these and such like blasphemies, which were wont full solemnly to be sung in the temples unto the great ignominy of the glorious name of God, and the dishonour of Christ’s most precious blood.”  Then quoting the lines from the service of Thomas Becket, on which we have above commented, he adds, “I will let pass many more which are easy to be searched and found out.”  Becon preached and wrote in the reign of Henry VIII. and was then persecuted for his religion, as he was afterwards in the reign of Mary.]

    [Footnote 86:  We are told that forty-eight years after his
    death, the masters of Paris disputed whether Thomas was a
    condemned sinner, or admitted into heaven.]