Page images
PDF
EPUB

implies a copious supply of all things necessary for every particular exercise of soul connected with our pardon, access to God, acceptance, strength for obedience, final salvation.

But the joints and bands being dislocated and severed, all this divine, life-giving, abundant nourishment ceases to flow. Such is the effect of one false principle, angel-worship.

4. The union, also, amongst all the several parts both of the natural and mystical body is dissolved, the instant any member holds no longer by the head. For there are ligaments and bands, as well as joints, and arteries, and nerves, and veins. These bands are love. The apostle speaks of the living members of Christ being knit together. He had previously told them what a conflict he had for them that

their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, unto all the riches of the full assurance of understanding to the acknowledgment of the mystery of God, and the Father, and of Christ." Accordingly, when this mystery is no longer understood and acknowledged, and a miserable idolatry of angels, and the Virgin, and saints, and images, shares the heart of the worshipper, he is knit together by love with the spiritual christian worshipper

no more.

The bands and ties are dissevered. Union is dissolved. Divisions, sects, party-spirit, bitterness, pride, self-will, quarrels, separation, an intruding, arrogant spirit, lust of novelty, and the vain puffing up of the fleshly mind, rend the church asunder, and

expose it to all the heresies and confusion which Satan, the author of division and all evil, can engender. A compulsory union under the pope, as an usurping external head of a corrupt and apostate church, may continue, but not the spiritual and tender union between the hearts of the faithful, by holy love in Christ, the living and true source of grace, life, and influence to his spiritual body.

5. The increase of God must be looked for no longer; that increase and growth in grace, of which God is the author, which is agreeable to his will, and tends to his glory.

There may be a morbid increase, as by the inflation of dropsy, or the disproportionate enlargement of a separate limb in the human frame. There may be an external progress as in the spread of popery or semi-popery; but this is not the increase of God; it is a morbid tumor; it is the diseased swelling of worldly splendour and human traditions and superstitions, sustained by the persecuting power of secular governments. There is, also, a fleshly and carnal increase of a more insidious character from an imaginative, instrumental kind of religion, the combined effects of music, drawing, incense, architecture, history, poetry; which the natural man, conscious of an impression from these things, mistakes for the works of the Spirit. But this is not the increase of God, but the mere inflation of ignorance and pride. All real, proportionate, solid, abiding, spiritual growth in grace is stopped; and a worldly, carnal, dead profession is all that remains.

Such are the consequences of holding by angelmediators and protectors, instead of holding by Christ the Head. The difference seems to the fleshly mind to be slight-no denial of Christ is intended—the corruption is not introduced as a corruption, but with beguiling and enticing words. The terms of Scripture are retained for a time; distinctions are made between mediation of redemption and mediation of intercession; idolatry is stoutly denied; supreme religious worship is pretended to be still reserved for Christ, and "due honour" only and " veneration" are attributed to the Virgin and the saints. And doubtless some pious and awakened souls hold in substance to Christ, the Head, still, notwithstanding the errors of their church; but the great mass of an ignorant people, from whose hands the Bible has been withdrawn, and who have been taught to rely for justification in part on their own works, place, of course, their main reliance on these idols, from the mere corruption of human nature, and hold no longer by Christ, the Head.

Can it be wondered at, then, that the bishops and clergy of the Protestant Church of England, which was brought out from these superstitions and idolatries three centuries since by the martyred founders of our Reformation, should have taken alarm at the strong leaning towards Rome (for that is all that my argument requires in these lectures) for the last ten years or more in our Tract divines? Or can we be

thankful enough to God for the condemnation, so far as it has gone, of this semi-popish party; or careful enough to watch against the remaining tendencies of it lurking in the breasts chiefly of some of our younger divines? Or can we take any other safe course to guard ourselves from the revival of such errors, than that of our apostle, that is, by a strong and decisive condemnation of them on proper occasions; by showing that they begin in a false humility, are nourished by a spirit of intrusion into the unseen world, are ripened by the ill-concealed pride of a fleshly mind, and end in severing the soul from Christ and salvation; and by going on with the apostle to exhibit in our ordinary doctrine the overwhelming glory and sufficiency of the one divine Mediator between God and man?

LECTURE XXV.

REMONSTRANCE AGAINST THE DOCTRINES AND COMMANDMENTS OF MEN.

COL. ii. 20-23.

20. Wherefore, if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances?

21. Touch not; taste not; handle not;

22. Which all are to perish with the using, after the commandments and doctrines of men.

23. Which things have indeed a show of wisdom in willworship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh.

We must go on now with our inspired guide, St. Paul, to the last of the three classes of corruptions at Colosse, which he had summarily noticed in verse 8, and which was the result of the two former. He had resumed, as we have seen, the consideration of the first two, and passed sentence on them, verses 11-19; he now sits in judgment on the third, verses 20-23, the mere traditions and commandments of men which never had an original authority from Almighty God; but were the dictates of hea

« EelmineJätka »