Untitled - Rore Sanctifica

The Difficulties of Re-union. 105
ing ascriptions of reverent love and laudation,
ascriptions, even apparently extravagant, and
such as almo.:t border upon the unlawful,
these are all one thing. A religious "cultus," a
religious worship of any kind offered to that
creature is surely quite another ; it is absolutely
different in
genere, and appears
to me to
be no logical sequence whatever of the first.
That it may be morally probable that it will
follow, is only to say, what is true, that human
nature has that peculiar tendency ; that it is a
logical ~ necessitv that it must, I deny.*
i/ /
But this is not the question now before us.
We are speaking of the withholding and even
the denying of due honour ; nay,
of what is too
often heard among us, of contemptuous speaking
of her, whom God hath honoured above all
created beings. And this contempt, this with
holding of due honour, I maintain indicates in
the surest way that the cause of Mary s
Blessedness is not appreciated, and not even
fully understood ; for if it were, no possible re
action against the opposite error could check the
love and reverence for the Mother of our Lord.
Here then is a large part of our first great work ;
it is no less than to teach the Upper and Middle
* That it has followed, as it has in the Latin Church, is
a cause of deepest sorrow to those, who, longing for a Keunion
with that Church, think, as many of us are constrained
to tLink, that it has thereby permitted a grievous infringe
ment of God s eternal laws.