Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Church

A discreet use of becoming ceremonies renders the service of the church solemn and affecting, inspirits the sluggish, and inflames even the devout worshipper.

If we would drive out the demon of fanaticism from the people, we must begin by exorcising the spirit of Epicureanism from the higher ranks, and restore to their teachers the true Christian enthusiasm, the vivifying influences of the altar, the censer, and the sacrifice.

In every grand or main public duty which God requireth of his church, there is, besides that matter and form wherein the essence thereof consisteth, a certain outward fashion, whereby the same is in decent manner administered.

The service of God in the solemn assembly of the saints is a work, though easy, yet withal very weighty, and of great respect.

Then are the public duties of religion best ordered when the militant church doth resemble by sensible means that hidden dignity and glory wherewith the church triumphant in heaven is beautified.

Churches have names; some as memorials of peace, some of wisdom, some in memory of the Trinity itself, some of Christ under sundry titles; of the blessed Virgin not a few; many of one apostle, saint, or martyr; many of all.

Antiquity, custom, and consent, in the church of God, making with that which law doth establish, are themselves most sufficient reasons to uphold the same, unless some notable public inconvenience enforce the contrary.

That which should make for them must prove that men ought not to make laws for church regiment, but only keep those laws which in Scripture they find made.

Christ could not suffer that the temple should serve for a place of mart, nor the apostle of Christ that the church should be made an inn.

Manifest it is, that the very majesty and holiness of the place where God is worshipped hath, in regard to us, great virtue, force, and efficacy; for that it serveth as a sensible help to stir up devotion.

When neither the evidence of any law divine, nor the strength of any invincible argument otherwise found out by the law of reason, nor any notable public inconvenience, doth make against that which our own laws ecclesiastical have instituted for the ordering of these affairs, the very authority of the church itself sufficeth.

It is no more disgrace to Scripture to have left things free to be ordered by the church, than for Nature to have left it to the wit of man to devise his own attire.

Everywhere throughout all generations and ages of the Christian world no church ever perceived the Word of God to be against it.

The church has many times been compared by divines to the ark of which we read in the book of Genesis; but never was the resemblance more perfect than during that evil time when she rode alone, amidst darkness and tempest, on the deluge beneath which all the great works of ancient power and wisdom lay entombed, bearing within her that feeble germ from which a second and more glorious civilization was to spring.

We do not see that while we still affect, by all means, a rigid external formality, we may as soon fall again into a gross conforming stupidity, a stark and dead congealment of “wood, hay, and stubble,” forced and frozen together; which is more to the sudden degenerating of a church than many subdichotomies of petty schisms.

What means the service of the church so imperfectly and by halves read over? What makes them mince and mangle that in their practice which they could swallow whole in their subscriptions?

After this time came on the midnight of the church, wherein the very names of the councils were forgotten, and men did only dream of what was past.