Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered Volume 2; Letter Addressed to the REV. E.B. Pusey, D.D., on Occasion of His Eirenicon. Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk, on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone's Recent Expostulation (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 4.?Belief of Catholics concerning the Blessed Virgin, as coloured by their Devotion to her. I Cannot help hoping that your own reading of the Fathers will on the whole bear me out in the above account of their teaching concerning the Blessed Virgin. Anglicans seem to me simply to overlook the strength of the argument adducible from the works of those ancient doctors in our favour; and they open the attack upon our mediseval and modern writers, careless of leaving a host of primitive opponents in their rear. I do not include you among such Anglicans, as you know what the Fathers assert; but, if so, have you not, my dear Friend, been unjust to yourself in your recent Volume, and made far too much of the differences which exist between Anglicans and us on this particular point ? It is the office of an Irenicon to smoothe difficulties; I shall be pleased if I succeed in removing some of yours. Let the public judge between us here. Had you happened in your Volume to introduce your notice of our teaching about the Blessed Virgin, with a notice of the teaching' of the Fathers concerning her, which you follow, ordinary men would have considered that there was not much to choose between you and us. Though you appealed ever so much, in your defence, to the authority of the " undivided Church," they would havesaid that you, who had such high notions of the Blessed Mary, were one of the last men who had a right to accuse us of quasi-idolatry. When they found you with the Fathers calling her Mother of God, Second Eve, and Mother of all Living, the Mother of Life, the Morning Star, the Mystical New Heaven, the Sceptre of Orthodoxy, the All-undefiled Mother of Holiness, and the like, they would have deemed it a poor compensation for such language, that you protested against her being called...