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If you make all your great names bow and pay homage to Christ, let them bring forth their army on the other side; and let Calvin, and Luther, and Zuinglius, and Knox, and Laud, and Baxter, and all other idols, bow down to the same Christ. Let Christians cease to be called by their names; and let them, who have one master, have but one common denomination.

And let the whole be sealed with the kiss of charity, and with all the tokens of benevolence and love.

But whether you, or they, will hear, or will forbear; whether any thing of this sort shall be done, or not done; I have delivered my own soul.

I had an impulse upon me, to say all this. I have followed that impulse; and, what I have said, I have said.

I have opened my heart to your Holiness; and you may make what use you please of it.

If you think fit to accept of my correspondence, I faithfully promise to give you, from time to time, an exact account of the state, in which we protestants are, or are like to be.

For the present, without any farther ceremony or apology, I kiss your Holiness' feet, not in a religious, but a civil manner; and am,

Your most faithful friend,

or generous adversary,

RICHARD STEELE.

SERMON

ON THE NATURE OF THE KINGDOM, OR CHURCH,

OF CHRIST.

ST JOHN Xviii. 36.

Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world.

ONE of those great effects, which length of time is seen to bring along with it, is the alteration of the meaning annexed to certain sounds. The signification of a word, well known and understood by those who first made use of it, is very insensibly varied, by passing through many mouths, and by being taken and given by multitudes, in common discourse; till it often comes to stand for a complication of notions, as distant from the original intention of it, nay, as contradictory to it, as darkness is to light. The ignorance and weakness of some, and the passions and bad designs of others, are the great instruments of this evil; which, even when it seems to affect only indifferent matters, ought in reason to be opposed, as it tends, in its nature, to confound men's notions

in weightier points; but, when it hath once invaded the most sacred and important subjects, ought, in duty, to be resisted with a more open and undisguised zeal, as what toucheth the very vitals of all that is good, and is just going to take from men's eyes the boundaries of right and wrong.

The only cure for this evil, in cases of so great concern, is to have recourse to the originals of things, to the law of reason, in those points which can be traced back thither; and to the declarations of Jesus Christ and his immediate followers, in such matters as took their rise solely from those declarations. For the case is plainly this, that words and sounds have had such an effect, not upon the nature of things, which is unmoveable, but upon the minds of men in thinking of them; that the very same word remaining, which at first truly represented one certain thing, by having multitudes of new inconsistent ideas, in every age, and every year, added to it, becomes itself the greatest hindrance to the true understanding of the nature of the thing first intended by it.

For instance, religion, in St James' days, was virtue and integrity as to ourselves, and charity and beneficence to others; before God, even the father.* By degrees, it is come to signify, in most of the countries throughout the whole world, the performance of every thing almost, except virtue and

* James i. 27.

charity; and particularly, a punctual exactness in a regard to particular times, places, forms, and modes, diversified according to the various humours of men ; recommended and practised under the avowed name of external religion; two words, which, in the sense fixed upon them by many christians, God hath put asunder; and which, therefore, no man should join together. And, accordingly, the notion of a religious man differs in every country, just as much as times, places, ceremonies, imaginary austerities, and all other outward circumstances, are different and various; whereas in truth, though a man, truly religious in other respects, may make use of such things, yet they cannot be the least part of his religion, properly so called, any more than his food, or his raiment, or any other circumstance of his life.

Thus, likewise, the worship of God, to be paid by christians, was, in our Saviour's time, and in his own plain words, the worship of the Father in spirit and truth; and this declared to be one great end proposed in the christian dispensation. "The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship him."* But the notion of it is become quite another thing; and, in many christian countries, that, which still retains the name of the worship of God, is indeed the neglect and the diminution of the Father, and the worship

*John iv. 23.

of other beings besides, and more than the Father. And this, performed in such a manner, as that any indifferent spectator would conclude, that neither the consciences nor understandings of men, neither spirit nor truth, were at all concerned in the matter; or rather, that they had been banished from it by an express command. In the mean time the word, or sound, still remains the same in discourse. The whole lump of indigested and inconsistent notions and practices; every thing that is solemnly said or done, when the worship of God is professed, is equally covered under that general name; and, by the help of using the same original word, passeth easily for the thing itself.

Again; prayer, in all our Lord's directions about it, and particularly in that form, which he himself taught his followers, was a calm, undisturbed address to God, under the notion of a Father, expressing those sentiments and wishes before him, which every sincere mind ought to have. But the same word, by the help of men and voluminous rules of art, is come to signify heat and flame, in such a manner and to such a degree, that a man may be in the best disposition in the world, and yet not be devout enough to pray; and many an honest person hath been perplexed, by this means, with doubts and fears of being uncapable of praying, for want of an intenseness of heat; which hath no more relation to the duty, than

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