that ritual bondage from which the Gospel was designed to emancipate them! And among the first converts, how obstinate was the propensity still to observe "days and months, and times "and years," in the very imbecility of superstition, and to cling to the obsolete ceremonies of the Law, till at length an Apostle was roused, in the indignant earnestness of his feelings, to declare, that "were they (with these views) "circumcised, Christ would profit them nothing."

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And what aspect did Christianity wear to the rest of mankind ?—a religion devoid of all external attraction, that had reference to nothing visible, that promised no temporal advantage, the very symbol of which was a type of ignominy! Such a religion was to the sensual Jew an utter stumbling block, and to the proud Pagan foolishness. Yet, at this very period, when the Church was externally characterised by the closest resemblance to the mean condition and poverty of its Divine Founder while on earth, it reflected, with the most evident lustre, his moral glory. It was during this very state that it best answered the design of its institution, and justified, in its actual character, those lofty expressions and that bold imagery in which the sacred writers love to describe the Church of Christ. The Jew, however, blind to the true glory of the second

E

temple of which the voice of prophecy spake; the Ephesian glorying in the splendid fane of his great goddess; and the Roman, whose boast was of that proud structure, the Capitol, raised to "the guardian of the empire, the "father of gods and men;" all met with equal hostility and contempt the simple forms and the purely spiritual worship of primitive Christianity. They viewed, with haughty derision, that novel sect, destitute of possessions and of the means of external splendour; without a temple or a priesthood,* whose very religion seemed to consist in waging war with the appearances, the captivations, and the pleasures of sense; whose belief seemed to pour contempt on worldly grandeur by asserting as its object and its founder, ONE, whose birthplace was a manger and whose end was crucifixion. How sublimely does the Apostle, as if in allusion to this very prejudice, avail himself of the associations connected with the glo

*"Another circumstance that irritated the Romans "against the Christians, was the simplicity of their worship, "which resembled in nothing the sacred rites of any other

people. The Christians had no sacrifices, temples, images, "oracles, or sacerdotal orders; and this was sufficient to "bring upon them the reproaches of an ignorant multitude, "who imagined that there could be no religion without "these. Thus they were looked upon as a sort of Atheists." Mosheim's Eccl. Hist. Vol. II. Cent. i. 1. C. v. § 7.

ry of those rival temples, to illustrate the intellectual and transcendent nature of the religion he taught! The Christian temple, built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, "Jesus Christ himself being the chief "corner-stone," was framed of living materials, of human intelligences: the building was still proceeding under the Divine Architect, and in a sense applicable to no earthly structure, it was a holy temple, the habitation of The Eternal Spirit.

corruptions

anity.

§ 10. The Christian revelation has dispelled Idolatrous the thick darkness which overspread the most of Christienlightened pagan nations, respecting the Object of religious worship, but it has not changed the natural tendencies of the heart. The idolatrous propensities by which the patriarchal religion, and the Mosaical institutions had so soon been corrupted, began early to exert themselves in the Christian Church; and when, after its alliance to the secular power, the extension of its nominal empire became the object of ambition to its rulers, were manifested in a studious accommodation of the external character of Christianity to those very prejudices it was designed to destroy.* As if the

*“A remarkable passage in the life of Gregory, sur"named Thaumaturgus, i. e. the wonder-worker, will illus "trate this point in the clearest manner. When Gregory

worldly spirit the Church had imbibed, bore equal affinity to every moral corruption, it gradually absorbed into its institutions so large a portion of both pagan and Jewish superstition, that the truth was at length lost in the vast concretion of errors. Idolatry has reference either to the object or to the mode of religious worship. The religious honours paid by the Romish Church to imaginary orders of angelic and beatified mediators, by whatsoever subtleties of distinction those honours were made to differ in theory from adoration, necessarily degenerated in the gross minds of the illiterate into idolatry of the worst kind: these guardian or mediating angels and patron saints, became as much the ultimate objects of religious faith with the vulgar as ever Jupiter Capitolinus, or

"perceived that the ignorant multitude persisted in their “'idolatry, on account of the pleasures and sensual gratifi. "❝cations which they enjoyed at the pagan festivals, he "granted them a permission to indulge themselves in the "like pleasures, in celebrating the memory of the holy

martyrs, hoping that, in process of time, they would re"turn of their own accord, to a more virtuous and regular 66 6 course of life.' There is no sort of doubt, that, by this "permission, Gregory allowed the Christians to dance, sport, " and feast at the tombs of the martyrs, upon their respective "festivals, and to do every thing which the pagans were "accustomed to do in their temples, during the feasts cele"brated in honour of their gods." Mosheim, Cent. II. 2, Ch. iv, 3.

any of the hundred gods had been, in whose fanes the semblance of Christian worship was solemnized. But idolatrous corruptions of the mode of worship are not less at variance with the religious principle.* Whatsoever tends to compromise the spiritual for the sensible, whatsoever transfers the attention of the mind from invisible realities to material forms, directly opposes the spirit and tendency of Christianity. Through every modification of superstition, the principle of irreligion preserves its essential identity, as characterized by an absence of faith, connected with a sensual disinclination to spiritual objects. The Holy Scriptures describe this indevout disposition as natural to the human mind, as presenting in the case of

*The descent of the human mind from the spirit to the "letter, from what is vital and intellectual to what is ritual "and external in religion, is the true source of idolatry "and superstition in all the multifarious forms which they "have assumed; and as if it began early to corrupt the

religion of nature, or more properly speaking, of patri"archal tradition, so it soon obscured the lustre and destroyed "the simplicity of the Christian institute. In proportion as

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genuine devotion declined, the love of pomp and ceremony "increased; the few and simple rites of Christianity were "extolled beyond all reasonable bounds; new ones were "invented to which mysterious meanings were attached, "till the religion of the New Testament became, in process "of time, as insupportable a yoke as the Mosaic law." Hall on the Terms of Communion, p. 97.