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can there be a doctrine more fatally deceptive, or one involving more blasphemous impiety? "Who can forgive sins but God only ?" But here is a man, himself a sinner, needing pardon at the hands of God, professing his ability to release other sinners from a debt declared by him to be owing to God; and that upon terms proposed by himself, contrary to those proposed in the gospel! There we are taught that pardon for sin can be had on no other ground but that of Christ's blood, and by none but those who sincerely mourn over sin with "a broken and contrite heart :" but the priests of Rome, teach their people that it may be obtained by an act of devotion before the shrine of a saint, and even by money! This last charge they attempt to deny, by declaring that the Council of Trent, against which they dare not act, prohibited "wicked gains." But what we call wicked, they do not. And what fact is more notorious in the practice of the Church of Rome than that men have been absolved from all sorts of crimes for a pecuniary consideration, and that by the same means souls said to be suffering for sin are released from their torments? And certainly money may as well procure the pardon of sin at the hands of the Pope, as the kissing a cross, or the doing honour to the Virgin, or the putting up prayers for "the extirpation of heresy." But what an encouragement to sin! What a cruel deception practised on the ignorant! What an insult offered to God! This roused the spirit of the Saxon Reformer: and here is a ground of difference, which must ever prevent the Church of England, if she

be true to her principles, from making common cause with the Papal Antichrist. We look for pardon to God alone, through His Son Jesus Christ. We glory in a free salvation, the purchase of Christ's finished work, applied to penitent and believing sinners. The cross is our resting place; our only source of hope, and peace, and joy. Cling to that, Brethren, renouncing every other dependence. By the power of that Cross, conquer your passions, die to sin, live above the world: and then, when you go hence, instead of passing into purgatory, you shall be in "God's presence," where there "is fulness of joy;" even at His "right hand," where there are "pleasures for evermore."

SERMON XI.

ON THE IDOLATRY OF ROMANISM.

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2 TIMOTHY, iv. 4.

They shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables."

You saw, Brethren, in the two Articles of the Romish faith, which I brought before you in my last discourse, on Purgatory and Pardons, how truly these words of the Apostle apply to that Church from which we separated. No longer following the Gospel, she teaches doctrines subversive of the Gospel false doctrines, " founded upon no warrant of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God." Standing here, where my Church places me, I do not contend with Popery about matters of no moment. The question between the two churches is not, as some suppose, which shall be uppermost; but whether salvation shall be wholly in Christ's hands, or in the hands of the Pope? Whether it shall be obtained only through the perfect work of the immaculate "Lamb of God," as the

ground of justification, or by something else, done or suffered by man? This, I say, is the question that divides the churches. There are others, certainly, which, if this were settled as we could wish it to be settled, would still demand from us a protest against Rome, and that on Scriptural grounds: but this is the one about which the champions of the pure faith, professed by our Church, have always most earnestly struggled. And is it not worthy of a struggle? The Socinian, the freethinking religionist, the man whose Protestantism is nothing but a name, the churchman whose religion is all form, these do not think so. With them, the sufferings of the martyrs are the pitiable follies of weak and rash men. And it is not unlikely that you may hear divines belonging to your own Church, corrupted by the poisonous leaven of false doctrine now taught at Oxford, denounce the great Protestant principle of justification by faith as one unfit to be retained amongst us. But, Brethren, it is the theme of the Gospel, the essential truth of God's blessed Word, the foundation of Christianity.

I now pass on to the other things condemned in the Twenty-second Article, as being superstitious vanities, opposed to God's Word. They are, "the worshipping and adoration of images and relics, and the invocation of saints."

The Article charges the Church of Rome with worshipping and adoring Images. Let us see whether this charge, which most seriously affects the character of that Church, is capable of proof.

There is no sin more strongly, solemnly, and repeatedly denounced than this; and the language used by God in reference to the same, is expressive of the abhorrence and of the high displeasure with which he regards it. The Second Commandment forbad even the making "a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, in heaven, in earth, and under the earth." In the fourth chapter of the book Deuteronomy, where Moses earnestly urges upon the people the duty of obeying that law, he reminds them that, when God spoke to them from the Mount upon which that law was given, they "saw no manner of similitude;" the Divine Being took no shape in which he might shew himself unto them and he states this as the reason, lest, if God had appeared to them in visible form, they would have made an image, resembling what they had seen, and have worshipped it. Twice in that chapter he says, "Take heed, take good heed to yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the Lord your God, and make you a graven image:" and again, a third time, warning them against it, he declares the punishment that would inevitably follow the commission of the sin. We find the injunction again repeated at the end of the 16th chapter; "Neither shalt thou set up any image, which the Lord thy God hateth:" and in the 26th chapter of the Book Leviticus, the same prohibition is thus strongly expressed; "Ye shall make you no idols, nor graven images, neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in the land to bow down unto it; for I

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