" says
Dr. Newman, "we need not wonder that it should in no long time be
transmuted into devotion." The Fathers expressed a historical fact
about her in the term [Greek: Theotokos]; therefore, argues the later
view, she is the source of our present grace now. It is the _rationale_
of this inference, which is not an immediate or obvious one, which is
wanted. And Dr. Newman gives it us in the words of Bishop Butler:--

Christianity is eminently an objective religion. For the most part
it tells us of persons and facts in simple words, and leaves the
announcement to produce its effect on such hearts as are prepared
to receive it. This, at least, is its general character; and
Butler recognises it as such in his _Analogy_, when speaking of
the Second and Third Persons of the Holy Trinity:--"The internal
worship," he says, "to the Son and Holy Ghost is no farther matter
of pure revealed command than as the relations they stand in to us
are matters of pure revelation; but the relations being known, the
obligations to such internal worship are _obligations of reason
arising out of those relations themselves_."

We acknowledge the pertinency of the quotation. So true is it that "the
relations being known," the obligations of worship arise of themselves
from these relations, that if the present relation of the Blessed
Virgin to mankind has always been considered to be what modern Roman
theology considers it, it is simply inconceivable that devotion to her
should not have been universal long before St. Athanasius and St.
Augustine; and equally inconceivable, to take Dr. Newman's remarkable
illustration, that if the real position of St. Joseph is next to her,
it should have been reserved for the nineteenth century, if not,
indeed, to find it out, at least to acknowledge it; but the whole
question is about the fact of the "relations" themselves. If we believe
that the Second and Third Persons are God, we do not want to be told to
worship them. But such a relation as Dr. Newman supposes in the case of
the Blessed Virgin does not flow of itself from the idea contained, for
instance, in the word [Greek: Theotokos], and even if it did, we should
still want to be told, in the case of a creature, and remembering the
known jealousy of religion of even the semblance of creature worship,
what _are_ the "religious regards," which, not flowing from the nature
of the case, but needing to be distinctly