we adopt the same principle in estimating the testimony of a living witness.  In the latter case, indeed, the ingenuity of the adverse advocate is often exercised in magnifying the discrepancies between some minor facts or incidental expressions with the broad and leading assertions of the witness, with a view to invalidate his testimony altogether, or at least to weaken the impression made by it.  But then a wise and upright judge, assured of the truth of the evidence in the main, and of the integrity of the individual, will not suffer unessential, apparent inconsistencies to stifle and bury the body of testimony at large, but will either extract from the witness what may account for them, or show them to be immaterial.  Inviting, therefore, your best thoughts to this branch of our subject, I ask you to ascertain, by a full and candid process of induction, this important and interesting point,—­Whether we of the Anglican Church, by religiously abstaining from the presentation, in word or in thought, of any thing approaching prayer or supplication, entreaty, request, or any invocation whatever, to any other being except God alone, do or do not tread in the steps of the first Christians, and adhere to the very pattern which they set; and whether members of the Church of Rome by addressing angel or saint in any form of invocation seeking {64} their aid, either by their intercession or otherwise, have not unhappily swerved decidedly and far from those same footsteps, and departed widely from that pattern?

In one point of view it might perhaps be preferable to enter at once upon our investigation, without previously stating the conclusions to which my own inquiries have led; but, on the whole, I think it more fair to make that statement, in order, that having the inferences already drawn placed before the mind, the inquirer may in each case weigh the several items of evidence bearing upon them separately, and more justly estimate its whole weight collectively at the last.

After then having examined the passages collected by the most celebrated Roman Catholic writers, and after having searched the undisputed original works of the primitive writers of the Greek and Latin Churches, the conclusion to which I came, and in which every day of further inquiry and deliberation confirms me more and more in this:—­

In the first place, negatively, that the Christian writers, through the first three centuries and more, never refer to the invocation of saints and angels as a practice with which they were familiar:  that they have not recorded or alluded to any forms of invocation of the kind used by themselves or by the Church in their days; and that no services of the earliest times contain hymns, litanies, or collects to angels, or to the spirits of the faithful departed.

In the second place, positively, that the principles which they habitually maintain and advocate are irreconcileable with such a practice.