Before such a solemn office of praise and worship were ever admitted among the institutions of the religion of truth, its originators and compilers should have built upon sure grounds; careful too should they also be who now join in the service, and so lend it the countenance of their example; more especially should those sift the evidence well, who, by their doctrine and writings, uphold, and defend, and advance it; lest they prove at the last to love Rome rather than the truth as it is in Jesus.  So solemn, so marked, a religious service in the temples and at the altar of HIM who is the truth, a service so exalted above his fellows, ought beyond question to be founded on the most sure warrant of Holy Scripture, or at the least on undisputed historical evidence, as to the alleged matter of fact on which it is built,—­the certain, acknowledged, uninterrupted, and universal testimony of the Church Catholic from the very time.  They incur a momentous responsibility who aid in propagating for religious truths the inventions of men[106].

[Footnote 106:  Very different opinions are held by Roman Catholic writers as to the antiquity of this feast.  All, indeed, maintain that it is of very ancient introduction; but whilst some, with Lambecius (lib. viii. p. 286), maintain the antiquity of the festival to be so remote, that its origin cannot be traced; and thence infer that it was instituted by a silent and unrecorded act of the Apostles themselves; others (among whom Kollarius, the learned annotator on the opinion of Lambecius) acknowledged, that it was introduced by an ordinance of the Church, though not at the same time in all countries of Christendom.  That annotator assigns its introduction at Rome to the fourth century; at Constantinople to the sixth; in Germany and France to the ninth.] {299}

But what is the real state of the case with regard to the fact of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary?  It rests (as we shall soon see) on no authentic history; it is supported by no primitive tradition.  I profess my surprise to have been great, when I found the most celebrated defenders of the Roman Catholic cause, instead of citing such evidence as would bear with it even the appearance of probability, appealing to histories written more than a thousand years after the alleged event, to forged documents and vague rumours.  I was willing to doubt the sufficiency of my research; till I found its defenders, instead of alleging and establishing by evidence what God was by them said to have done, contenting themselves with asserting his omnipotence, in proof that the doctrine implied no impossibility; dwelling on the fitness and reasonableness of his working such a miracle in the honour of her who was chosen to be the mother of his eternal Son; and whilst they took the fact as granted, substituting for argument glowing and fervent descriptions of what might have been the joy in heaven, and what ought to be the feelings of mortals on earth.