DISCOURSE V.-- 673 particular sermon, andwecry out, ", This is the best sermon that ever was preached, or the finest that ever was'composed." Or, perhaps your devout affections flag and languish under a sermon ; you sit indolent and unmoved, and then the sermon goes for a poor dry discourse, and the man that delivered it for a dull and heavy preacher. Each of these hasty and irregular judgments, built ou the passions, is very common to christians, and ought to be corrected. 7. I might add another instance a-kin to the last; and that 'is, when our devout affections of fear and hope, of holy love and heavenly delight, are raised in a place of public worship, whether at the established church, or among the several denominations of the protestant dissenters, and immediatelywe conclude, " This Is the right mode of . worship, this is most agreeable to the gospel, and these people are the only true church of Christ." How weak is this reasoning ! And yet how many-are there, who have been determined both in their opinion and practice, for or against such a particular community of christians, or mode of worship ; and that for their whole life-time, merely by the effects that one or two attendances at such a particular place of worship have had on their affections ? These arguments drawn from the passions, have been often employed to support idolatry and transubstantiation, and all the wild inventionsof men in the worship of God. What sighs and tears, what warm affections of sorrow and joy, have been some- times produced by some ingenious orators in the Roman church, in their sermons at Lent, when they have held lip 'acrucifix be- fore the face of the people in the midst of their discourse ? While they set forth the sufferings of our Saviour in most pa. thetic language, the preachers have fallen down on their knees, and embraced and adored thewooden image : The natural affec- tions of the hearers have been awakened in a very sensible man- ner, and being mingled with some thoughts of Christ and reli- gion, they have fallen down and worshipped the idol, and have imagined all this to he pure devotion and piety towards God, and his Son Jesus ; and after all they have'made their lively passions a sufficient argument that God approved all their fooleries, though in his own word, he bath expressly forbidden the worship of images. I have read of another instance ; when a poor devout crea- ture hath come to the sacrament of the mass of the Romish church, and her passions being raised to a rapturous degree, as she thought, by the presence of Christ there, Under the form of the consecratedwafer, she bath boldly declared, " should all the men on earth, and all the angels iu heaven, join together to assure me, that God himself was not there, I would not believe them, for I have seen him, and felt his divine presence." What
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