principles of belief in the Gospel and its chief characteristic doctrines, yet find it impossible to join conscientiously in the same prayer, or the same acts of faith and worship, then the necessity is imperative on all who would not be parties to the utter breaking up of Christian unity, nor assist in propagating error, to make sure of their {11} foundations; and satisfy themselves by an honest inquiry and upright judgment, that the fault does not rest with them.

Such appear to me both the doctrine and the practice of the invocation of saints.  I have endeavoured to conjecture in what light this doctrine and this practice would have presented itself to my mind, after a full and free inquiry into the nature and history and circumstances of the case, had I been brought up in communion with the Church of Rome; the question to be solved being, “Could I continue in her communion?” And the result of my inquiry is, that I must have either discarded that doctrine at once and for ever, or have joined with my lips and my knees in a worship which my reason condemned, and from which my heart shrunk.  I must have either left the communion of Rome, or have continued to offer prayers to angels, and the spirits of departed mortals.  Unless I had resolved at once to shut my eyes upon my own personal responsibility, and to surrender myself, mind and reason, soul and body, to the sovereign and undisputed control of others, never presuming to inquire into the foundation of what the Church of Rome taught; I must have sought some purer portion of the Catholic Church, in which her members addressed the One Supreme Being exclusively, without contemplating any other in the act of religious invocation.  The distinction invented in comparatively late years, of the three kinds of worship; one for God, the second for the Virgin Mary, the third for Angels and Saints;—­the distinction, too, between praying to a saint to give us good things, and praying to that saint to procure them for us at God’s hand, (or, as the distinction {12} is sometimes made, into prayer direct, absolute, final, sovereign, confined to the Supreme Being on the one hand; and prayer oblique, relative, transitory, subordinate, offered to saints on the other,) would have appeared to me the ingenious and finely-drawn inventions of an advocate, not such a sound process of Christian simplicity as the mind could rest upon, with an undoubting persuasion that all was right.

This, however, involves the very point at issue; and I now invite you, my Christian Brethren, to join with me, step by step, in a review of those several positions which have left on my mind the indelible conviction that I could never have passed my life in communion with that Church whose articles of fellowship maintained the duty of invoking saints and angels; and whose public offices were inseparably interwoven with addresses in prayer to other beings, than the Holy and undivided Trinity, the one only God.