576 THE HOLINESS OF PLACES OF WORSHIP. ent places forpublic worship under the christian dispensation*. And blessed be God, who has given this church and congrega. tien, in the midst of which we are nowworshipping such a con- venient building as this is, and who inspired the hearts of his people with liberality answerable to such an occasion. V. " When God was pleased to put an end to this Jewish dispensation, Land all that typical scheme of worship, with its forms and ceremonies, by the coming of the Messiah, lie put an elnd also to all the holiness of placés. " He removed his dwelling from places made with hands, and dwelt bodily in the Man Jesus Christ as his noblest tabernacle. The substance being come, the shadows must fly away ; for all these things were only figures for the time then present. And God therefore entirely finished all that shadowy frame of things which he erected for the Jewish church, and abolished hit own ancient ordinances, which affixed holiness to places, to mountains, or cities, or edifices}, and con- fined his worship to any particular place: Nor does our blessed Saviour require or permit christians to make new holy places of their own; John iv. 21. The hour cometh, saith our Saviour, when ye shall be confined to worship God the Father neither in this mountain, Gerizim, which you Samaritans suppose to be holy, nor at Jerusalemwhich God appointed to be the holy place for his own worship : But the time comes, and is just now at hand, when the trueworshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in.truth; without regard to particular places ; for it is such theFather seeheth to worship him : Such persons shall find accept. ance of him, wheresoever they pay their homage to him, without any distinction of places. Every place, where God is sincerely honoured shall be as holy for this purpose, as Jerusalem ever was. This is true christian liberty. * The Christian churches, and their constitution and worship is agreed by learned men to come much nearer to the assemblies andworship, in Jewish syna- gogues, than to that of the temple. fi It was a vain and idle imagination among the popish devotees, that boli ness still belongs to those towns, or spots of ground, or buildings, such as Judea and Jerusalem, where David lived and worshipped, where Christ and his apostles travelled and preached, and to the sepulchre and the garden wherein the body of Jesus was buried. This foolish notion worked up by the popes and priests of those blind ages, sent out thousands from their native homes, saunter- ing over sea and land in silly pilgrimages to Jerusalem. This set the princes of Europeon fire with frantic zeal to recover the holy land, and those holy ptaces out of the handsof theTurkish powers who possessed them. This was the spring of those croisades or holy wars, to which the pope sent kings and their armies, one age after another, on a ridiculous errand, to the destruction of many thou- sand lives of their subjects, and the utter neglect of their own important affairs at home. And if Tasso, the Italian poet, had not been a great bigot, be would never have employed and abused a noble muse to celebrate theknight-erientry of such wild attemptsand atchieverhents; nor would Casimire Sarbiewski, that ad- 'hirable Polish genius, have wasted such sublime odes in giving alarms to chris- tian princes, at the beginning of the last century to panne this impertinence of the holy war.
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