With regard to the gracious words of our Saviour in his prayer to the Father, on the eve of his death, St. Peter’s acts and words supply us with a plain and conclusive comment.  He was himself one of those to whom Christ had declared that He had given the glory which his Father had given to Him; and yet when Cornelius fell down at his feet to worship him, he took him up, saying, “Stand up; I myself also am a man.” [Acts x. 26.] The Saviour was pleased to impart his glory to his Apostles, dividing to them his heavenly gifts severally as He willed.  We praise Him for those graces which shone so brightly in them, and we pray to Him to enable us by his grace to follow them, as they followed his blessed steps.  We reverence their memory, but we give God alone the praise.

As to the other instance, the words of our Lord (assuring us that the angels should accompany Him at his second advent in their glory, the glory which He assigned to them in the order of creation,) no more authorize us to ascribe praise and glory by a religious act to them, when we praise the God of angels and men, than would {391} the assurance of an inspired apostle, that “there is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars,” sanction us in joining those luminaries in the same ascription of glory with their Almighty Creator and ours.  Just as reasonably would a pagan justify his worship of the sun, the moon, and the stars, by this passage of Scripture, as our Roman Catholic brethren would justify themselves by the former passage in their ascription of praise and glory to the holy angels, and saints, and the blessed Virgin.  We honour the holy angels, we praise God for the glory which He has imparted to them, and for the share which He has been pleased to assign to them in executing his decrees of mercy in the heavenly work of our salvation; and we pray to HIM to grant that they may by his appointment succour and defend us on earth, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  But we address no invocation to them; we ascribe no glory to them as an act of religious worship.  By offering thanks and praise to God He declares that we honour HIM; by offering thanks and praise, and by ascribing glory and honour to angel, saint, or virgin, we make them gods. {392}

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CONCLUSION.

We have now, my fellow Christians, arrived at the conclusion of the task which I proposed to undertake.  I have laid before you, to the utmost of my abilities and means, the result of my inquiry into the evidence of holy Scripture and primitive antiquity, on the invocation of saints and angels, and the blessed Virgin Mary.  In this inquiry, excepting so far as was necessary to elucidate the origin and history of the Roman Catholic tenet of the Assumption of the Virgin, we have limited our researches to the writers who lived before the Nicene Council.  That Council has always been considered a cardinal point,—­a