ermons, (or rather heads of sermons, as they seem to be, taken down by
a hearer,) there is much of what would be called legendary illustration;
but the substance of them is plain, practical, awful preaching upon the
great truths of salvation. What I can speak of with greater confidence
is the effect produced on me a little later by studying the Exercises of
St. Ignatius. For here again, in a matter consisting in the purest and
most direct acts of religion,--in the intercourse between God and the
soul, during a season of recollection, of repentance, of good
resolution, of inquiry into vocation,--the soul was "sola cum solo;"
there was no cloud interposed between the creature and the Object of his
faith and love. The command practically 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, not jealously destroy, 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 fully to have got over it.

2. I am not sure that I did not also at this time feel the force of
another consideration. 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.

3. Thus I am brought to the principle of development of doctrine in the
Chr