As regards the third point--namely, that honour is sometimes shown to the saints and their images in “a superstitious fashion with a desire of unlawful things,” More would be ready to blame this as much as any man if it could be shown to be the case. “But I would not,” he says, “blame all things which are declared to be of this character by the new teachers. For example, to pray to St. Apollonia for the help of our teeth is no witchcraft, considering that she had her teeth pulled out for Christ’s sake. Nor is there any superstition in other suchlike things.” Still, where abuses can be shown they ought to be put down as abuses, and the difference between a lawful use and an unlawful abuse recognised. But because there may be abuses done on the Sunday, or in Lent, that is no reason why the Sunday observance, or the fast of Lent, should be swept away.[299] “In like manner it would not be right that all due worship of saints and reverence of relics, and honour of saints’ images, by which good and devout folk get much merit, should be abolished and put down because people abuse” these things. “Now, as touching the evil petitions,” he continues, “though they who make them were, as I trust they are not, a great number, they are not yet so many that ask evil petitions of saints as ask them of God Himself. For whatsoever such people will ask of a good saint, they will ask of God Himself, and where as the worst point it is said, ‘that the people do idolatry in that they take the images for the saints themselves, or the rood for Christ Himself,’--which, as I have said, I think none do; for some rood has no crucifix thereon, and they do not believe that the cross which they see was ever at Jerusalem, or that it was the holy cross itself, and much less think that the image that hangs on it is the body of Christ Himself. And though some were so mad as to think so, yet it is not ‘the people’ who do so. For a few doddering dames do not make the people.”[300]
It is hard to imagine any teaching about the use and abuse of images clearer than that which is contained in the foregoing passages from Sir Thomas More’s writings. The main importance of his testimony, however, is not so much this clear statement of Catholic doctrine on the nature of devotion to images, as his positive declaration that there were not such abuses, or superstitions, common among the people on the eve of the religious changes, as it suited the purpose of the early reformers to suggest, and of later writers with sectarian bias to believe.