But when we are required either to address our supplications to her, or else to sever ourselves from the communion of a large portion of our fellow-Christians, we have no room for hesitation; the case offers us no alternative.  Our love of unity must yield to our love {271} of truth; we cannot join in that worship which in our conscience we believe to be a sin against God.  Whether we are right or wrong in this matter, God will himself judge:  and, compared with his acquittal and approval, the severity of man’s judgment cannot turn us aside from our purpose.  But before any one pronounces a sentence of condemnation against us, or of approval on himself, it well becomes him patiently and dispassionately to weigh the evidence; lest his decision may not be consistent with justice and truth.

In addition to what has been already said on the general subject of addressing our invocation to any created being—­to any one among the principalities and thrones, dominions, powers, angels, archangels, and all the hosts of heaven, to any one among the saints, martyrs, confessors, and holy men departed hence in the Lord—­I would submit to my brethren of the Roman Catholic Church some considerations specifically applicable to the case of the blessed Virgin, and to the practice of the Church of Rome in the religious worship paid to her.

First, it will be well for us to possess ourselves afresh of whatever light is thrown on this subject by the Scriptures themselves.

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SECTION II.—­EVIDENCE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE.

The first intimation given to us that a woman was in the providence of God appointed to be the instrument, or channel by which the Saviour of mankind should be brought into the world, was made immediately after the Fall, and at the very first dawn of the day of salvation. {272} I am fully aware how the various criticisms on the words in which that first promise of a Saviour is couched, have been the well-spring of angry controversy.  I will not enter upon that field.  The authorized English version thus renders the passage:  “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” [Gen. iii. 15.] The Roman Vulgate, instead of the word “it,” reads “she.”  Surely such a point as this should be made a subject of calm and enlightened criticism, without warmth or heart-burnings on either side.  But for our present purpose, it matters little what turn that controversy may take.  I believe our own to be the true rendering:  but whether the word dictated here by the Holy Spirit to Moses should be so translated as to refer to the seed of the woman generally, as in our authorized version, or to the male child, the descendant of the woman, as the Septuagint renders it, or to the word “woman” itself; and if the latter, whether it refer to Eve, the mother