Carry out this familiar idea; which, as human nature goes, is none the weaker as to illustration, because it is built upon the rule “parvis componere magna.”  Let us sketch a line or two of that great fore-shadowing cartoon, the probabilities of Romanism.

That our blessed Master, even in His state as man, beheld its evil characteristics looming on the future, seems likely not alone from both His human keenness and His divine omniscience, but from here and there a hint dropped in his biography.  Why should He, on several occasions, have seemed, I will say with some apparent sharpness, to have rebuked His virgin mother.—­“Woman, what have I to do with thee?”—­“Who are my mother and my brethren?”—­“Yea—­More blessed than the womb which bare me, and the paps that I have sucked, is the humblest of my true disciples.”  Let no one misunderstand me:  full well I know the just explanations which palliate such passages; and the love stronger than death which beat in that Filial heart.  But, take the phrases as they stand; and do they not in reason constitute some warning and some prophecy that men should idolize the mother?  Nothing, in fact, was more likely than that a just human reverence to the most favoured among women should have increased into her admiring worship:  until the humble and holy Mary, with the sword of human anguish at her heart, should become exaggerated and idealized into Mother of God—­instead of Jesus’s human matrix, Queen of heaven, instead of a ransomed soul herself, the joy of angels—­in lieu of their lowly fellow-worshipper, and the Rapture of the blessed—­thus dethroning the Almighty.

Take a second instance:  why should Peter, the most loving, most generous, most devoted of them all, have been singled out from among the twelve—­with a “Get thee behind me, Satan?”—­it really had a harsh appearance; if it were not that, prophetically speaking, and not personally, he was set in the same category with Judas, the “one who was a devil.”  I know the glosses, and the contexts, and the whole amount of it.  Folios have been written, and may be written again, to disprove the text; but the more words, the less sense:  it stands, a record graven in the Rock; that same Petra, whereon, as firm and faithful found, our Lord Jesus built his early Church:  it stands, a mark indelibly burnt into that hand, to whom were intrusted, not more specially than to any other of the saintly sent, the keys of the kingdom of heaven:  it stands, along with the same Peter’s deep and terrible apostacy, a living witness against some future Church, who should set up this same Peter as the Jupiter of their Pantheon:  who should positively be idolizing now an image christened Peter, which did duty two thousand years ago as a statue of Libyan Jove!  But even this glaring compromise was a matter probable, with the data of human ambitions, and a rotten Christianity.

Examples such as these might well be multiplied:  bear with a word or two more, remembering always that the half is not said which might be said in proof; nor in answering the heap of frivolous objections.