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 nature, deified by becoming His, that it may _deify_ them." The worship of saints is another of these developments: "Those who are known to be God's adopted sons in Christ are fit objects of worship on account of Him who is in them....