ctrine for minds of higher culture. Nor let it be said that
we are either unjust or uncharitable towards the Romish Church, in
suggesting the possibility of some such development; for what she has
already done, and what she still claims the power of doing, afford very
sufficient ground for our remarks. When Dr. Conyers Middleton published
his celebrated "Letter from Rome," showing an exact conformity between
Popery and Paganism, and that "the religion of the present Romans is
derived from that of their Heathen ancestors," many liberal Catholics
resented the imputation as an insult to their faith; but now Mr. Newman
not only admits the fact that the Church did _assimilate_ its ritual to
the Paganism of former ages, but vindicates her right to do so, and
ascribes to her _a power of assimilation_ to which it seems impossible
to assign any limits. "There is, in truth," says this writer, "a certain
virtue or grace in the Gospel, which changes the quality of doctrines,
opinions, usages, actions, and personal characters, which become
incorporated with it, and makes them right and acceptable to its Divine
Author, when before they were either contrary to truth, or, at best, but
shadows of it."--"Confiding, then, in the power of Christianity to
resist the infection of evil, and to _transmute the very instruments and
appendages of demon worship to an Evangelical use_, ... the rulers of
the Church from early times were prepared, should the occasion arise, to
adopt, or imitate, or sanction _the existing rites and customs of the
populace_, as well as _the philosophy of the educated class_."--"The
Church can extract good from evil, or, at least, gets no harm from it.
She inherits the promise made to the disciples, that they should take
up serpents, and, if they drank any deadly thing, it should not hurt
them."--"It has borne, and can bear, principles or doctrines which, in
other systems of religion, quickly degenerate into _fanaticism or
infidelity_." This marvellous power of assimilation, which made "those
observances pious in Christianity" that were "superstitions in
Paganism," advanced, rapidly in its work, and successively introduced
the deification of man, the _cultus_ of angels and saints, and the
beatification of Mary as Queen of heaven and earth. The sanctification,
or rather _the deification of the nature of Man_, is one of these
developments. Christ "is in them, because He is in human nature; and He
communicates to them that n