ractically enforced was, "My son,
give Me thy heart." The devotions then to angels and saints as little
interfered with the incommunicable glory of the Eternal, as the love
which we bear our friends and relations, our tender human sympathies,
are inconsistent with that supreme homage of the heart to the Unseen,
which really does but sanctify and exalt what is of earth. At a later
date Dr. Russell sent me a large bundle of penny or half-penny books
of devotion, of all sorts, as they are found in the booksellers'
shops at Rome; and, on looking them over, I was quite astonished to
find how different they were from what I had fancied, how little
there was in them to which I could really object. I have given an
account of them in my Essay on the Development of Doctrine. Dr.
Russell sent me St. Alfonso's book at the end of 1842; however, it
was still a long time before I got over my difficulty, on the score
of the devotions paid to the saints; perhaps, as I judge, from a
letter I have turned up, it was some way into 1844, before I could be
said to have got over it.

I am not sure that another consideration did not also weigh with me
then. The idea of the Blessed Virgin was as it were _magnified_ in
the Church of Rome, as time went on,--but so were all the Christian
ideas; as that of the Blessed Eucharist. The whole scene of pale,
faint, distant Apostolic Christianity is seen in Rome, as through a
telescope or magnifier. The harmony of the whole, however, is of
course what it was. It is unfair then to take one Roman idea, that of
the Blessed Virgin, out of what may be called its context.

Thus I am brought to the principle of development of doctrine in the
Christian Church, to which I gave my mind at the end of 1842. I had
spoken of it in the passage, which I quoted many pages back, in Home
Thoughts Abroad, published in 1836; but it had been a favourite
subject with me all along. And it is certainly recognised in that
celebrated Treatise of Vincent of Lerins, which has so often been
taken as the basis of the Anglican theory. In 1843 I began to
consider it steadily; and the general view to which I came is stated
thus in a letter to a friend of the date of July 14, 1844; it will be
observed that, now as before, my _issue_ is still Faith _versus_
Church:--

"The kind of considerations which weigh with me are such as the
following:--1. I am far more certain (according to the Fathers) that
we _are_ in a state of culpable separa