the Creator, that the body, with all the circumstances of time and place, were purified by the affections of the regenerate soul, and nothing left impure but sin; faith needing not the weak and fallible office of the senses to be either the ushers or interpreters of heavenly mysteries, save where our Lord himself, in his sacraments, ordained that such a doctrine should, through the grossness or blindness of her professors and the fraud of deceivable traditions, drag so downwards, as to backslide one way into the Jewish beggary of old-cast rudiments, and stumble forward another way into the new-vomited paganism of sensual idolatry; attributing purity or impurity to things indifferent, that they might bring the inward acts of the spirit to the outward and customary eye-service of the body; as if they could make God earthly and fleshly, because they could not make themselves heavenly and spiritual. They began to draw down all the Divine intercourse betwixt God and the soul, yea the very shape of God himself, into an exterior and bodily form; urgently pretending a necessity and obligement of joining the body in a formal reverence and worship circumscribed. They hallowed it, they fumed it, they sprinkled it, they bedecked it, not in robes of pure innocency, but of pure linen, with other deformed and fantastic dresses, in palls and mitres, gold and gewgaws fetched from Aaron's old wardrobe or the Flamen's vestry.

“Then was the priest set to con his motions and his postures, his liturgies and his lurries, till the soul, by this means of overbodying herself, given up justly to fleshly delights, bated her wing apace downwards, and finding the ease she had from her visible and sensuous colleague (the body), in the performance of religious duties, her pinions now broken and flagging, shifted off from herself the labour of high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull and droiling carcase to plod on in the old road and drudging trade of outward conformity.

“And here, out of question, from her perverse conceiting of God and holy things, she had fallen to believe no God at all, had not custom and the worm of conscience nipped her incredulity hence, to all the duties of evangelical grace, instead of the adoptive and cheerful boldness which our new alliance with God requires, came servile and thrall-like fear: for in very deed the superstitious man, by his good-will, is an atheist ; but being scared from thence by the pangs and gripes of a boiling conscience, all in a pudder shuffles up to himself such a god, and such a worship, as is most agreeable to remedy his fear; which fear of his, as is also his hope, fixed only upon the flesh, renders likewise the whole faculty of his apprehension carnal; and all the inward acts of worship, issuing from the native strength of the soul, run out lavishly to the upper skin, and there harden into a crust of formality. Hence men came to scan the Scriptures by the letter, and in the covenant of our redemption magnified the external signs more than the quickening power of the Spirit. And yet, looking on them through their own guiltiness with a servile fear, and finding as little comfort, or rather terror from them, again they knew not how to hide their slavish approach to God's behests, by them not understood nor worthily received, but by cloaking their servile crouching to all religious presentiments sometimes lawful, sometimes idolatrous, under the name of humility, and terming the piebald frippery and ostentation of ceremonies, decency."1

The distinguishing characteristic of Protestantism, as developed in her worship, is spirituality.

"God is a Spirit." And man's highest attainable worship of God is not through the aid of his senses, but during the suspension of his senses—in silence, in solitude, in darkness— when no impression from the world without is made on eye or ear; but the heart within, in all consciousness and all fervour

1 Milton, On Reformation in England, pp. 1-4.

of chastened feeling and desire, reposes and rejoices in the bosom of eternal love. St. Paul, describing this communion with God, said, "Whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell :" so little had the bodily senses to do with it. True Protestant worship is "the ascent of the human heart to God; the ascent of the heart, with all its wants, all its sins, all its misery, all its hopes."1 "Ye shall seek me," saith the Lord by the prophet, "and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart." "2 The individual who has been taught by Divine grace to know himself a sinner, Christ as a Saviour, the Holy Spirit as a Sanctifier, and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ as his God and Father-will seek him with the whole heart. And as in private, so also in public worship. He will not rest in secondary helps. He will not mistake emotion of his animal nature for spiritual worship. He will not mistake an ecstasy of admiration of art, whether in music, painting, or sculpture, for sanctifying communion with the invisible God. Still less will he mistake votive offerings in gold or silver, flowers or candles, to the saints or to the blessed mother of our Saviour, for heart-homage to the High and Lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy.

66

"And

Plainly and well did the writer of our Church of England Homily, on the place and time of prayer, distinguish between Protestant and Romanist worship. Having referred to the Turkish conquests in Christendom as a sharp scourge of God's vengeance" for idolatry, and also to the calamities incurred by the Jews for the same cause, he then adds : have not the Christians of late days, and even in our days also, in like manner provoked the displeasure and indignation of Almighty God? partly because they have profaned and defiled their churches with heathenish and Jewish abuses; with images and idols; with numbers of altars, too superstitiously and intolerably abused; with gross abusing and filthy cor1 Howels. 2 Jer. xxix. 13.

rupting of the Lord's supper, the blessed sacrament of his body and blood; with an infinite number of toys and trifles of their own devices; to make a goodly outward show, and to deface the homely, simple, and sincere religion of Christ Jesus; partly, they resort to the church like hypocrites full of all iniquity and sinful life, having a vain and dangerous fancy and persuasion, that if they come to the church, besprinkle them with holy water, hear a mass, and be blessed with a chalice, though they understand not one word of the whole service, nor feel one motion of repentance in their hearts; all is well, all is sure. Fie upon such mocking and blaspheming of God's holy ordinance! Churches were made for another purpose, that is, to resort thither, and to serve God truly; there to learn his blessed will; there to call upon his mighty name; there to use his holy sacraments; there to travail how to be in charity with thy neighbour; there to have thy poor and needy neighbour in remembrance; from thence to depart better and more godly than thou camest thither. Finally, God's vengeance hath been and is daily provoked, because much wicked people pass nothing to resort to the church, either for that they are so blinded, that they understand nothing of God and godliness, and care not with devilish example to offend their neighbours ; or else for that they see the church altogether scoured of such gay gazing sights, as their gross fantasy was greatly delighted with; because they see the false religion abandoned, and the true restored, which seemeth an unsavoury thing to their unsavoury taste, as may appear by this, that a woman said to her neighbour, Alas! gossip, what shall we now do at church, since all the saints are taken away, since all the goodly sights we were wont to have are gone; since we cannot hear the like piping, singing, chanting, and playing upon the organ, that we could before?' But, dearly beloved, we ought greatly to rejoice, and give God thanks, that our churches are delivered of all those things which displeased God so sore, and filthily defiled

His holy house and His place of prayer; for the which he has justly destroyed many nations, according to the saying of St. Paul, 'If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy.' And this ought we greatly to praise God for, that such superstitious and idolatrous manners as were utterly naught, and defaced God's glory, are utterly abolished, as they most justly deserved; and yet those things that God was honoured with, or his people edified, are decently retained, and in our churches comely practised."

How seasonably might we now address, with all dutiful respect and unfeigned Christian attachment, to our beloved Sovereign, the words of Bishop Ridley to King Edward vi.: “We most humbly beseech your Majesty to consider, that besides weighty causes in policy, which we leave to the wisdom of your honourable councillors, the establishment of images"the endowment of Romanism-" by your authority shall not only utterly discredit our ministers as builders up of the things which we have destroyed, but also blemish the fame of your most godly Father, and also of such notable fathers as have given their lives for the testimony of God's truth, who by public law removed all images," rejected and repudiated Romanism.

"The almighty and everlasting God plentifully endue your Majesty with His Spirit and heavenly wisdom, and long preserve your most gracious reign and prosperous government over us, to the advancement of His glory, to the overthrow of superstition, and to the benefit and comfort of all your Highness's loving subjects."1 Substituting Victoria for Edward, our hearts respond, Amen! Other characteristic distinctions might be added, did time permit; particularly that universal mark of true Protestant worship, the civilisation of a language understood by the worshippers, in striking contrast as it stands with the universal barbarism of Romanist worship, in a language not

1 Treatise on the Worship of Images. By Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, last page.