is still a most intense element in his religious convictions.  Nor do we feel entitled to say that in him it interferes with religious ideas and feelings of a higher order, which we are accustomed to suppose imperilled by it.  It leads him, indeed, to say things which astonish us, not so much by their extreme language as by the absence, as it seems to us, of any ground to say them at all.  It forces him into a championship for statements, in defending which the utmost that can be done is to frame ingenious pleas, or to send back a vigorous retort.  It tempts him at times to depart from his generally broad and fair way of viewing things, as when he meets the charge that the Son is forgotten for the Mother, not merely by a denial, but by the rejoinder that when the Mother is not honoured as the Roman Church honours her the honour of the Son fails.  It would have been better not to have reprinted the following extract from a former work, even though it were singled out for approval by the late Cardinal.  The italics are his own:—­

I have spoken more on this subject in my Essay on Development, p. 438, “Nor does it avail to object that, in this contrast of devotional exercises, the human is sure to supplant the Divine, from the infirmity of our nature; for, I repeat, the question is one of fact, whether it has done so.  And next, it must be asked, whether the character of Protestant devotion towards Our Lord has been that of worship at all; and not rather such as we pay to an excellent human being....  Carnal minds will ever create a carnal worship for themselves, and to forbid them the service of the saints will have no tendency to teach them the worship of God.  Moreover, ... great and constant as is the devotion which the Catholic pays to St. Mary, it has a special province, and has far more connection with the public services and the festive aspect of Christianity, and with certain extraordinary offices which she holds, than with what is strictly personal and primary in religion”.  Our late Cardinal, on my reception, singled out to me this last sentence, for the expression of his especial approbation.

Can Dr. Newman defend the first of these two assertions, when he remembers such books of popular Protestant devotion as Wesley’s Hymns, or the German hymn-books of which we have examples in the well-known Lyra Germanica?  Can he deny the second when he remembers the exercises of the “Mois de Marie” in French churches, or if he has heard a fervid and earnest preacher at the end of them urge on a church full of young people, fresh from Confirmation and first Communion, a special and personal self-dedication to the great patroness for protection amid the daily trials of life, in much the same terms as in an English Church they might be exhorted to commit themselves to the Redeemer of mankind?  Right or wrong, such devotion is not a matter of the “festive aspect” of religion, but most eminently of what is “personal and primary” in it; and surely of such a character is a vast proportion of the popular devotion here spoken of.