III. God is the object of all Religious Worship

With respect to the homage due to Almighty God, the Church teaches that it consists in acknowledging Him to be the Creator and Lord of All, and as such we are to adore Him with all the powers of soul and body, as the Author of our being, the Promoter of our good, our Defender from all sin and evil, and in Him we can find true joy alone. The external worship of God in His Church, and primarily the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar, is the exponent of this interior homage, of which He is alone the object ; she further inculcates that all worship has God for its object, and that if the honor paid to the Blessed Virgin and to the Saints can be called devotion, or worship, it is entirely because it has its end in God. But before I proceed to explain the nature of this honor, it may be as well to observe that the Reformers themselves, constrained by the force of truth, begin to allow that the custom of invocating saints and honoring their relics, was established in the Church from the 4th century. Monsieur Daille, in making this concession, does not hesitate to accuse St. Basil, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Chrysostom, St. Augustine, and several other great luminaries of antiquity who rose in this age, and especially St. Gregory Nazianzen, of altering the doctrines of the three preceding centuries on this head ; but not content with saying this, he brings forward passages which prove that in praying to the saints they were following the example of the early Christians, and surely they were better able to understand the meaning of the Church's doctrines, coming as they did so immediately after them, speaking as it were with their dying breath, than Monsieur Daille and his co-religionists can, after a lapse of so many centuries ; but rather than dispute further with him, I can only say how grateful I feel to him for the avowal he has made, and for the support of so many able men who taught these doctrines and themselves followed them in the 4th century ; for although he has aspersed their memories by branding them with the name of " Relic worshippers," I trust his followers will do more justice to them in future than to perpetuate a word which really only brings down ridicule upon those who use it. He does not go so far as to accuse them of idolatry, or of misplacing that trust which the Church teaches, is to rest in Jesus Christ alone ; and let us hope they will now be more careful how they accuse us of such perversions, since they cannot bring them against us without attacking these great men of the like inconsistencies, whose holy lives they profess to admire and revere. But as I am now stating the Church's belief, rather than the characters of those who defend her cause, T will return to the next point at issue, and speak of the