4th. Hitherto, unauthorized and objectionable as the two last forms of
prayer are, still the petitions in each case were directed to God alone.
The next step swerved lamentably from that principle of worship, and the
petitioners addressed their requests to angels and sainted men in
heaven; at first, however, confining their petitions to the asking for
their prayers and intercessions with Almighty God.

5th. The last stage in this progressive degeneracy of Christian worship
was to petition the saints and angels, directly and immediately
themselves, at first for the temporal, and afterwards for the spiritual
benefits which the petitioners desired to obtain from heaven. For it
{69} is very curious, but not more curious than evident, that the
worshippers seem for some time to have petitioned their saints for
temporal and bodily benefits, before they proceeded to ask for spiritual
blessings at their hands, or by their prayers. (See Basil. Oral. in
Mamanta Martyrem.)

Of these several gradations and stages we find traces in the records of
Christian antiquity, after superstition and corruption had spread
through Christian worship, and leavened the whole. Of all of them we
have lamentable instances in the present ritual of the Church of Rome,
as we shall see somewhat at large when we reach that division of our
inquiry. But from the beginning it was not so. In the earliest ages we
find only the first of these forms of worship exemplified, and it is the
only form now retained in the Anglican Ritual; of which, among other
examples, the following passage in the prayer for Christ's Church
militant on earth supplies a beautiful specimen: "We bless Thy holy name
for all Thy servants departed this life in Thy faith and fear;
beseeching Thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that