of Christ. Indeed, when she is brought into view, one is apt to wonder that so little account is made of her; but the Spirit of God, no doubt foreseeing that she would be made an object of idolatrous worship, so ordered matters, that nothing should be done to her, or said of her, that should give the smallest countenance to such impiety.

In the church of Rome, however, she is as really an object of worship, as Diana was in Ephesus, or Venus in Paphos, or any other god or goddess in any heathen nation in the world. I hope to prove this at great length, before I finish this part of my subject; but, as an introduction to it, I shall quote the history of this idol as given by the Rhemish translators of the New Testament, who, no doubt, give the true doctrine of the church on the subject.

Annotation on Acts i. 14. " Mary the mother of Jesus.] This is the last mention that is made in scripture of our lady; for though she was full of all divine wisdom, and opened (no doubt) unto the evangelists and other writers of holy scriptures, divers of Christ's actions, speeches, and mysteries, whereof she had both experimental and revealed knowledge: yet, for that she was a woman, and the humblest creature living, and the pattern of all order and obedience, it pleased not God that there should be any farther note of her life, doings, or death, in the scriptures. She lived the rest of her time with the Christians, (as here is peculiarly noted and named among them,) and specially with St. John the apostle, to whom our Lord recommended her, who provided for her all necessaries; her spouse, Joseph, (as may be thought,) being deceased before. The common opinion is, that she lived 63 years in all. At the time of her death, (as St. Dennis first, and after him St. Damascene, de dormit Deipara writeth,) all the apostles, then dispersed into divers nations to preach the gospel, were miraculously brought together (saving St. Thomas, who came the third day after) to Jerusalem, to honour her divine departure and funeral, as the said St. Dennis witnesseth, who saith that himself, St. Timothy, and St. Hierotheus were present, testifying also of his own hearing, that both before her death, and after for three days, not only the apostles and other holy men present, but the angels also, and powers of heaven, did sing most melodious hymns. They buried her sacred. body in Gethsemane; but, for St. Thomas' sake, who desired to see and reverence it, they opened the sepulchre the third day, and finding it void of the holy body, but exceedingly fragrant, they returned, assuredly deeming that her body was assumpted into heaven, as the church of God holdeth, being most agreeable to the singular privilege of the mother of God, and, therefore, celebrated most solemnly the day of her assumption. And this is consonant not only to the said St. Dennis, and St. Damascene, but to holy Athanasius also, who avoucheth the same, Serm. in Evang. de Deipara; of which assumption of her body St. Bernard also wrote five notable sermons extant in his works."

Here is laid the foundation of the idolatrous worship of the Virgin Mary, a poor mortal creature, who owed her own salvation to free grace, like any other sinner who believed in the Saviour. The inven tive fancy of some early fathers, found out that all the apostles were miraculously assembled to witness her death, except Thomas, who, it seems, had a practice of being out of the way. Mary having been

buried, arose again the third day, and was assumpted, that is, taken up into heaven, as Christ had been; from which it was inferred, that she is raised to the same glory with him, and that she is to be worshipped: this, at least, is the practical inference which has been drawn from the doctrine, for many hundred years. The Rhemish doctors proceed as follows, to censure and condemn the Protestants, who will not fall down and worship the idol which the church of Rome has set up:

But neither these holy fathers, nor the church's tradition and testimony, do bear any sway now-a-days with the Protestants, that have abolished this her greatest feast of her assumption; who of reason should, at the least, celebrate it as the day of her death, as they do of other saints. For though they believe not that her body is assumpted, yet they will not (we trow) deny that she is dead, and her soul in glory; neither can they ask scripture for that, no more than they require for the deaths of Peter, Paul, John, and others, which be not mentioned in scriptures, and yet are still celebrated by the Protestants. But concerning the blessed Virgin Mary, they have blotted out, also, both her nativity and conception; so that it may be thought the devil beareth a special malice to this woman, whose seed broke his head. For as for the other two days of her purification and annunciation, they be not proper to our lady, but the one to Christ's conception, the other to his presentation; so that she, by this means, shall have no festival at all.

"But, contrariwise, to consider how the ancient church and fathers esteemed, spake, and wrote of this excellent vessel of grace, may make us detest these men's impiety, that cannot abide the praises of her whom all generations shall call blessed, and that esteem her honours a derogation to her Son. Some of their speeches we will set down, that all men may see that we neither praise her, nor pray to her, more amply than they did. St. Athanasius, in the place alleged, after he had declared how all the angelic spirits, and every order of them, honoured and praised her with the Ave, wherewith St. Gabriel saluted her: 'we also,' saith he, of all degrees upon the earth, extol thee, with loud voice, saying, Ave, gratia, plena, &c. Hail, full of grace, our Lord is with thee, pray for us, O mistress, and lady, and queen, and mother of God.' Most holy and ancient Ephrem, also, in a special oration made in praise of our lady, saith thus, in divers places thereof, 'Intemerata Deipara, &c. Mother of God, undefiled, queen of all, the hope of them that despair, my lady most glorious, higher than the heavenly spirits, more honourable than the cherubims, holier than the seraphims, and without comparison more glorious than the supernal hosts, the hope of the fathers, the glory of the prophets, the praise of the apostles.' And a little after, Virgo ante partum, in partu, et post partum, by thee we are reconciled to Christ my God, thy Son: thou art the helper of sinners, thou the haven of them that are tossed with storms, the solace of the world, the deliverer of the imprisoned, the helper of orphans, the redemption of captives.' And afterwards, Vouchsafe me, thy servant, to praise thee. Hail, Mary, full of grace; hail, virgin, most blessed among women.' And much more in that sense, which were too long to repeat.

"St. Cyril hath the like wonderful speeches of her honour. Hom. 6, contra Nestorium. Praise and glory be to thee, O Holy Trinity:

to thee also be praise, O mother of God; for thou art the precious pearl of the world; thou the candle of unquenchable light; the crown of virginity; the sceptre of the Catholic faith. By thee the Trinity is glorified and adored in all the world; by thee heaven rejoiceth, angels and archangels are glad, devils are put to flight, and man is called again to heaven, and every creature that was held with the errors of idols, is turned to the knowledge of the truth: by thee churches are founded through the world; thee being their helper, the Gentiles come to penance;' and much more, which we omit. Likewise the Greek liturgies, or masses of St. James, St. Basil, and St. Chrysostom, make most honourable mention of our blessed lady, praying unto her, saluting her with the angelic hymn, Ave, Maria, and using these speeches: Most holy, undefiled, blessed above all, our queen, our lady, the mother of God, Mary, a virgin for ever, the sacred ark of Christ's incarnation, broader than the heavens that didst bear thy Creator: holy mother of unspeakable light, we magnify thee with angelic hymns. All things pass understanding; all things are glorious in thee, O mother of God. By thee the mystery before unknown to the angels is made manifest and revealed on the earth. Thou art more honourable than the cherubims, and more glorious than the seraphims. To thee, O full of grace, all creatures, both men and angels, do gratulate and rejoice. Glory be to thee, which art a sanctified temple, a spiritual paradise, the glory of virgins, of whom God took flesh, and made thy womb his throne, &c."

There is another long paragraph to the same purpose, containing the words of St. Augustine, or of St. Fulgentius, for the translators are not sure which; then of St. Damascene, and St. Ireneus, all puffing off the Virgin Mary as above the celestial hosts, as being the special hope of sinners, &c. &c. Fulke endeavours to show that some of the saints above named, never wrote any thing like what is ascribed to them, but that these things were forged in their names, hundreds of years after their death; and I have no doubt this is the fact, for the worship of creatures, that is of idols, was by no means gencral in the church for a long time after the death of some of the fathers, who are here cited as recommending and practising the worship of the Virgin Mary. Be that as it may, the popish fathers of Rheims, who were the first to give their brethren in England a version of the New Testament, in their own language, gave it with a strong recommendation of the Virgin Mary as an object of worship, as the hope of the guilty, as the refuge of the afflicted, and as a powerful intercessor with her Son for obtaining every blessing.

If the subject were not shocking for its impiety, it would be amusing to observe the shifts to which the reverend fathers are reduced, in order to support the credit of their idol. They admit that it pleased not God to give any further account of the history of Mary in the scriptures, than what we have there recorded. Christians would rest in such information as it pleased God to give; but this is not the case with our Rhemish translators. It has pleased them to relate what God did not think proper to make known; and for what they have related, they have no authority whatever, but the ravings of distempered imaginations of idle monks, who amused themselves in their solitude by composing such wild reveries, and imposing them upon the world as reveVOL. I.-38

lations from heaven. Such reveries, however, are received by our English Papists as the dictates of infallible truth, and the Virgin Mary is worshipped with greater devotion than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This I will prove before I leave the subject, by giving the prayers which are actually addressed to her, from some of their books of devotion. In the mean time, I shall give some account of another idol not so generally known, that is the mother of the Virgin Mary.

I give the following extracts from "An Abridgment of the Prerogatives of St. Ann, mother of the mother of God;" which has the approbation of the doctors (of the Sorbonne) at Paris, London, 1688. If my readers should feel shocked by the grossness and impiety of it, I can truly say that I sympathize with them; and that, though I feel it my duty to expose the abominable wickedness of popery, I have no pleasure in making such an exposure as the following:

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Chap. 2d. She (St. Ann) was the mother of the mother of God, and the grandmother of God himself. Figure to yourself, chaste spouse of Jesus Christ, a royal eagle flies from mountain to mountain, to choose a tree which may serve the design, to feed there and breed her young ones. Imagine now that God is this eagle, who, running over with his eyes, as it were, so many beautiful trees, all the women who were to be found from the first to the last, perceived not any one so worthy to receive the glorious virgin, who was to be the little nut of the heavenly eaglet, who is the Word incarnate, as St. Ann, in whom he rested himself as in the tree of paradise, which he knew to be the tallest in devotion, the deepest in humility, the largest in charity, and of the most pleasant odour in sanctity. So if, in one word, you would know the price of that crown which St. Ann bore on earth and in heaven, it must be said, and this is to say all, that her treasure and her crown was the giving being to her who gave it to God; which is to be crowned with the merits of Mary, like the tree with its flowers and fruit. Whence it is to be concluded, that the dignity, the grace, and the holiness of this only, and only perfect daughter, ought to reflect back on her mother, even to a point. That she rendered her incomparable in sanctity, as she was in her dignity; for of two things, one must of necessity happen, either that this holy virgin had not the power, or that having the power, she communicated to her whatever we can fancy greater in grace. Her paps have too much credit and access with the Word, her Son, not to have the power, who being, in the terms of Clement of Alexandria, the pap of his heavenly Father, which gave fecundity to all nature, would also as he had been the principle of the universe, by being mamelle de son Pere, the virgin should be his, (but yet not without proportion,) and a force to establish a world of grace, to make saints, and to make them worthy of glory. So that it is true, in some sort, and good divinity to say, that the felicity of the saints is derived from Mary, and that there is nobody who is not obliged to her for the fortification of his patience, for the victory over his temptations, for preservation from falls, for augmentation of his merits, for his final grace, and finally for his glory.

This principle supposed, who will doubt that St. Ann was not the masterpiece of Mary's workmanship, and that the power of this last was not the measure of the excellence of the former ? And it is one of

the greatest miracles of mysteries of our religion, that the children give life to their parents, and those who are not yet, give admirable advantage to those who already are. Thus Jesus is the son of Adam according to nature, and his father according to grace ;-the virgin is the mother of the Saviour, by the shadowing of the Holy Spirit; and is likewise the eldest daughter to the Redeemer. Thus, St. Ann is in the state of grace, the daughter of her daughter, the holy virgin, by a plenitude of grace which she from her received. Which ought not to be thought strange by him who has tasted the sense and universal consent of the fathers, who assert, that what was given in plenitude to Christ, ought in proportion to be attributed to the holy virgin.

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The glory of Jesus Christ, the fourth reason of the prerogatives of St. Ann, requires, that St. Ann should be such, to be his worthy grandmother. St. Ann having been chosen in the ideas of eternal predestination to be the grandmother of Jesus Christ; ought not this step to comprehend as many excellencies as demonstrate the sublimeness of this saint's perfection? There need be used only the dignity of her name, as grandmother of Jesus Christ. An argument which the apostle uses to prove the pre-eminence of Jesus Christ above the angelic natures, for that he was the Son of God. The dignity, therefore, of St. Ann, that having entered by the conception and nativity of the virgin, into the economy of the incarnation, and into the state of the hypostatical union, she was by this her daughter exalted into so dazzling a throne of glory, that there is only above it, the trinity of uncreated persons, the humanity of Jesus Christ, and the holiness of her daughter, mother of God.-In our indigences and our needs, we must address ourselves by St. Ann to the virgin, and by the virgin to Jesus Christ, and by Jesus Christ to God the Father, who can refuse nothing to his Son, no more than he can to his mother, or she to hers, who is St. Ann."

Then follows a prayer addressed to the said St. Ann, which will be introduced with more propriety when I come to give specimens of the style of devotion used in the church of Rome, in the worship of her idols. The work from which the above extracts are made, has the approbation of the doctors in divinity in the faculty in Paris, who declare that they think it worthy to be published; and a certificate to this effect is signed at Paris, the 10th July, 1643, by "Vincent Jude, C. Bourbon."

As an introduction to what I have to write on the subject of the idolatry of the church of Rome, I thought it proper to give this short history of their principal idol, and of her mother, in the very words of their own writers; and if it shall be said that this account is too much like what heathen authors have written about the genealogy of their gods and goddesses, I have only to reply, that I cannot help it. They have chosen such idols for themselves, and such is the account which their authors give of them.

I had marked off for insertion here, Mr. ANDREWS' account of the Virgin Mary; but as I have not room for the whole, and as it would not be doing him justice to cut it through the middle, I reserve it for my next; and conclude the present number with the following anecdote, which came to my knowledge since I finished what I had to say on the subject of withholding the Bible from the people.