things to which you are to pay "due honour and veneration"* (how vague the language! how uncertain the standard!) are but the creations of the painter's fancy.

think so.

times in "

But do they enkindle devotion? I do not I bowed before them a thousand going round the stations" in the chapel, and I never found that they produced this effect. If I looked on the picture, my attention was diverted from my prayers; and through the roving of the eye, many thoughts foreign to the business in hand were suggested. Thus the mind is distracted, and saying prayers becomes a mere mechanical exercise, which might be performed as well by an automaton. If some monk, who labours at his vocation in the smoky laboratory of superstition, were fortunate enough to invent a praying machine, what an acquisition it would be to the church! The Pope would certainly grant his letters patent to secure the property: and if the rich were allowed to use it on paying license, it would add greatly to the temporal comfort of both clergy and laity, without at all lessening the sanctity of either.

The obtrusive and disturbing influence of the

* Creed of Pope Pius IV.

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senses during the exercises of devotion has, I dare say, been experienced by pious persons of all denominations. But the whole machinery of the Church of Rome is calculated to produce it. Her festive illuminations, her tragic mourning, her gorgeous drapery, her high masses, her solemn processions, her gaudy paintings, her varied music, from the cheerful violin down to the melancholy muffled drum-these theatrical exhibitions may, like other shows of a similar kind, excite the admiration of the vulgar, and stir up the feelings of the sensitive, beguiling the vain and the thoughtless into the delusive notion that they are religious. But they never can inspire genuine devotion. They form no part of the means of grace under the Gospel dispensation, and we look in vain for any traces of them in the worship of the primitive church.

"The hour cometh," saith our Lord, "when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship him," (John iv. 23.) Such worshippers may be in the Church of Rome, but most assuredly they are not of it. Yours, my dear Friend, is not the religion "to mortify pride, or to quell the strong enmity of nature, or to arrest the currency of the affections, or to turn the constitutional habits, or to pour a new

complexion over the moral history, or to stem the domineering influence of things seen and things sensible, or to invest faith with a practical supremacy, or to give its objects such a vivacity of influence as shall overpower the near and the hourly impressions that are ever emanating upon man from a seducing world." "The religion of taste is one thing, the religion of conscience is another."* What ministers to the imagination does not always purify the heart. The eye and the ear may be charmed, and through them the feelings strongly excited; but the influence exerted is superficial and evanescent. It does not penetrate to the motives that lie deep in the bosom; it does not sanctify the will, nor move the springs of action, nor form anew the character, nor control the conduct. By their fruits ye shall know them. Look at France, where the most theatrical of people was gratified by an accommodating church with all sorts of pompous pageantry, till it " palled upon the sense." But all did not suffice to charm away the spirit of atheism, which suddenly changed these sentimental Christians into incarnate fiends.†

Great was my surprise when I first found the second commandment in the Douay Bible! A controversy in Waterford first led me to the dis† Note D.

* Chalmers.

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covery. But a Priest got out of the difficulty thus:- He argued that as adultery and theft are the objects of separate prohibitions, that, therefore," by parity of reasoning," the desires that lead to these crimes should be the subject of separate commands. But what is this but teach

ing logic and moral philosophy to God? Did not He know how to express his own commands? It is unfortunate for this argument that the word "wife" does not occur first in the enumeration of things not to be coveted, but is ranged with "the house," the man-servant and the maid-servant, the ox and the ass, so as to teach us clearly that they are all represented as the objects of one simple state of the mind, expressed by the word covetousness. It is simply the desire of what belongs to another, viewed as such, that is condemned in this precept.

But why such pains to split one commandment into two? Why, one of the commandments being expunged from the decalogue, because it expressly condemns the religious use of images, it was necessary someway or other to make up the number ten. How strong must be the infatuation of error, when men are led to alter and abridge a law communicated by God himself, under circumstances so tremendously awful!-a law written for perpetuity on tables of stone!

How can men who dare thus to trifle with the authority of JEHOVAH, hope to escape the curses that are written in that law? It is said, indeed, that this is done for the sake of brevity, and to ease the memory of the children! What nonsense! Did not God know the capacity of children as well as the modern compilers of Romish catechisms? And yet he commands these very words to be taught to children. Can any thing equal the assurance of men who shut out from the manuals of religious instruction a command which the JUDGE of all thought worthy of being engraved on stone, and that to make room for large quantities of trash of their own invention! My dear Friend, this is too bad!

Again, they say that what we call the second command is but a repetition of the first. And are these men, indeed, so chary of their words, so laconic in their style of praying and teaching, as to accuse the author of wisdom Himself of "vain repetitions," and idle prolixity!!

It is one thing to prefer Jupiter or Apollo to Jehovah ; it is a totally different thing to worship the true God through the medium of images. The gods of the heathen might be adored without ever bowing down to an image, and images might be worshipped by those who abhorred the gods of the heathen. The things are totally dis