OT

CHAPTER VII.

many weeks after the events recorded in the last chapter, I met Mrs. Sutton and Magdalen Fernley on the turnpikeroad which runs through Yateshull, as

they returned from visiting a friend of the former in a neighbouring parish. After the usual greetings had passed between us, the younger of my two friends thus addressed herself to me.

"You are always so kind to me, Mr. Warlingham, that I am emboldened to lay open to you all the ideas which occur to my mind as bearing on the differences of opinion between Roman Catholics and Protestants. We are often charged by our opponents with idolatry Mrs. Hopkins did so the other day: do you look on me,' she added with much gravity and simplicity, "as an idolater ?"

"God forbid," said I; "I can hardly imagine that among the educated classes of Roman Catholics, in this country at least, any could be found who would deserve such an appellation. Your public formularies repudiate idolatry as a grievous sin; you yourselves most solemnly repel the imputation; and Christian charity would make me most anxious to believe you. The evil, however, is, that while you deny the charge in words, the tendency of your system is to foster practices, which among the ignorant and superstitious approach very nearly, if not quite, to idolatry."

You allude particularly to our veneration of images and relics ?"

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Yes; and to the invocation of saints and angels."

“You think the pictures and sculptures in Roman Catholic churches objectionable?" asked Magdalen. "Certainly I do."

"Then I must say," she replied, "that there appears to me to be a great deal of inconsistency in the objection; and if you will permit me, sir, I will tell you why. We have been walking to-day through the village of Riverscote; and as we passed the church, I could not help expressing a wish to see its interior

"I do not wonder," said I. "The church of Riverscote-Wydvile is confessedly one of the most exquisite specimens of Gothic architecture in this neighbourhood. Small as it is in size, and consisting of a single aisle, its proportions are so beautiful as to make it far exceed in general effect many edifices of a far more extensive and complicated plan: and such of its ornaments as have not been wilfully mutilated, are as perfect as on the day they left the chiseller's hands. How picturesque is the colour of the stone with which it is built! how graceful the designs of the windows! how delicate and elaborate, and yet how chaste, is the workmanship of the parapets and pinnacles! It was built, I believe, by three maiden sisters of the last lord Wydvile, in the reign of Henry the Seventh.”

"Ah,” said Magdalen, "it is well for the good ladies that they have long been mouldering in the dust: they were mercifully taken away from the evil to come. The rude hand of the spoiler has destroyed the glory of their costly fabric; and as I trod its broken and uneven floor, and looked on its tattered furniture, and on its damp and mildewed walls, I could not but think, that both in its past and present state it was a meet emblem of the two parties that have successively worshipped within it."

"Yes," said I, with a feeling of pain and shame, "I fear it has been sadly neglected of late. But the parish is a poor one, with no resident gentry; and there are a considerable number of Dissenters, who have effectually thwarted the wishes of Churchmen for its adequate repair."

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"May not the same thing, sir, be said, with respect to almost every ancient church in this country? The piety of Romanists reared, adorned, endowed them the piety of Protestants will scarcely preserve them weather-proof. Whatever our errors, and whatever our superstitions may be, we at least have not offered to God of that which cost us nothing.'

"Alas!" said I, "there is but too much truth in what you say. Nevertheless, I will not allow that the English Church can be justly charged with the evil deeds of Dissenters, nor made answerable for the niggardliness of some of her professing members. But how does all this bear on the point we were discussing?"

"I beg your pardon, sir, for the digression: I have not yet alluded to it. On entering the church, I was struck with the havock which at some former period of popular tumult had been made with its 'storied' windows. Once, no doubt, they had been entirely filled with pictured representations of apostles and prophets a few only now remain, and the head of every figure is wanting. So likewise, each bracket that supports the timbers of the roof was formed of a sculptured angel bearing a shield or label, but every angel is now mutilated and headless. Well, I thought within myself that these were marks of misjudging zeal, which could not endure the sight of images or pictures in the house of God; but what was my amazement at seeing on each side of the ten commandments (which according to Protestant notions forbid the use of pictures in churches) two gigantic

figures of Moses and Aaron, depicted with all the art which I suppose the village sign-painter could muster. Turning from this display of churchwarden's taste, I took up a prayer-book from one of the seats, and found it illustrated,' that is, filled with engravings of our blessed Lord and his apostles. Now, sir, how can Protestants, with all their outcry against idolatry, reconcile their minds to such things as these?"

First, because that very outcry has prevailed so long, that no Protestant would ever think of paying any act of religious worship before any image or picture whatsover. I deplore with you the outrages which, under the name of religion, have been committed in our churches; and it was a great blot on our Reformation, that things which had been dedicated to God's service were irreverently put to common or profane use. Wherever anything existed in our churches which ministered to superstition, it was right and needful to remove it. If at Canterbury the steps of Becket's shrine were worn away by the knees of pilgrims, while God's altar remained with scarce a visitor or an offering, it was right that Becket's shrine should be removed, or the pilgrims excluded from it; but it was grievous sin to make that the excuse for private plunder, by robbing the metropolitan church of all its plate and ornaments. Our churches suffered much at the time of the Reformation; but let it never be forgotten that it was by the Puritans,-by men who, to use the language of one that knew them well, 'expressed their honour to God, and their allegiance to their prince, by murdering the one, and desecrating the temples of the other,'-it was by such men that the most barbarous spoliation of our churches was committed. They thought it no shame to stable their horses in the choir of a cathedral, or bring calves to the font in mockery of the sacrament of baptism. What but havoc, and rapine, and cruelty, could be

expected from such tempers? But, I repeat it, the English Church is not responsible for the sacrilege committed by those who were permitted for a time to lay her even with the dust, and her children within her. Thus much in defence of ourselves. But now with reference to the question of pictures in Protestant churches. It is not often that you see them; but where you do, they have been simply introduced as ornaments; and no Churchman would ever think of paying them any more reverence than he would to the font or the pulpit. You, on the other hand, bow down,' kneel, and prostrate yourselves before images and pictures; to these you lift up your hands and eyes, and in that posture pray."

"But you would hardly call this worship, Mr. Warlingham ?"

"It is something too closely resembling it to be at all meet for servants of Him who hath proclaimed himself a jealous God."

"Protestants will never see the distinction between praying before images, and to them."

"I fear," I replied, "Protestants are not the only persons who so act. I fear that the uneducated among yourselves will hardly believe that there is no inherent virtue in the image or picture before which they bow, so long as you teach them that some of your images and pictures work miracles. Moreover, if you really pay no regard to the image itself, why is an image in one place looked upon to have so much more power and virtue than an image of the same person elsewhere? Why are pilgrimages made to our Lady at Loretto, or St. James at Compostella, but because you believe, that although the saints are in heaven, their images in those several places have a real and peculiar virtue of their own, superior to that which resides in their images in other places?"

"I conceive," said Magdalen, evading my ques