596 FORMS OF WORSHIP. hint and intimation, and may be found by deductions and infer- ences from some of the occasional incidents in the sacred history : but though some of these, I think, are just and strong, yet others' of these inferences are but feeble and dubious,' and some have been found to be mistakes ; so that it must be granted after all, that, under the Jewish (economy, several things were required, in more express language of direction and command, than under the New Testament, This diffi- cult enquiry has sometimes exercised-and puzzled my thoughts, and the most considerable reasons, which I have ever been, able to suggest and assign for this difference, are such as these, viz. First, The state of the Jews was the infancy of the church of God, and children had need of every letter and syllable to be marked down for them with the plainest pen, that they might spell over their lessons, learn their duties, perform their bodily exercises, and fulfil their tasks. And therefore also their rites and ceremonies were so very numerous, to keep them always employed ; their infancy being less suited to the more spiritual parts of religion without such earn al aids. St. Paul in the epistle to the Galatians, seems to express this in plain words ; chapter iv. 3. We, when we were children, werein bondage under the elements of the world, so he call's the train of Jewish ceremonies. But our Lord Jesus, thegreat re- former of his church, finished that infant dispensation by his death, and raised his people to a more mature age, by his own resurrection, and the gospel ; and sent down his Spirit, and sent abroad his apostles, to teach the world a more manly, spiritual, and refined worship, and such as is more suited to the nature of God, and his intellectual creation. Now the more inward am! seraphic all the devotion is, the less dot h it need preciseness of form, either to assist or adorn it; therefore the modes of worship in the heavenly state shall, pro- bably, be the mere dictates of glorifiednature, and perhaps shall he incumberedwith ne prescribed ceremonies at all ; and for the same reason, the rites and ceremonies, that Christ ordained in the evangelical state, were few and easy ; and if the exact forms of them be not so very evident, in the New Testament, as the forms ofthe yokes of bondage were in the Old, it is to teach us, that the - nature of Christian worship is less ceremonious, is more spiritual and free, and approaches nearer to the heavenly statei . than that of the Jews; and it informs us also, that we, under tile gospel, are esteemed as out-growing the state of infancy, and it is supposed that manly prudence should direct us, especially iu all those common natural circumstances of worship, which were moreexactly prescribed to children. $erondl9, As the await or nation a the Jews, was a
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