248 Tat ARIAN INVITED TO ORTHODOX FAITH. Jews, and much labour to be spent in persuading them of the change of this great and fundamental article of their faith and practice, Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God, is one Lord, thou shalt have no God besides him. Here if it be said, Christ gave some intimations of a repeal of it when he speaks of his own future worship, and told them, that all men must honour the Son, as they honour the Father; John v. 22. Let us remember also, that he gave frequent inti- mations of his own communion in the godhead ; for he said, I am in the Father, and the Father in me; I and my Father are one; John xiv. 10, 11. x. 30. and thus the first command abides in its full force still. IV. That religions worship is the peculiar prerogative of God alone under the New Testament, as well as under the Old, is further provedby the continuance of this precept in force after the resurrection and exaltation of. Christ as well as before : For the apostle John was twice going to worship the angel ; Rev. xix. 10. and xxii. 8, 9. the angel refused the worshipboth times, and said, See thou do it not, I am thy fellow-servant ; worship God; which must necessarily signify worship God alone, or that God only is the proper object of. thy worship, otherwise it could not exclude the worship of an angel. Now if God alone was to be worshipped after the full glorification of Christ, when God had appointed every knee to bow to him, and when he was known and adored by the church as a proper object of worship, I think it is a very plain consequence that Christ is God ; that he has a glo- rious communion in the divine nature with the one true God, the God of Israel, who was the only proper object of worship under the Old Testament and is the same under the New. Whether St. John mistook this angel for Christ himself, or whether he might incautiously, and on a sudden, attempt to pay too sublime a respect and honour to a mere angel, is much the same to my argument; for the angel forbids this honour to be clone to himself, as being due to God alone; and this being the reason of his repeated prohibition, the same reason would. also exclude Jesus Christ from worship, if he were not. true God. And, perhaps, this redoubled occurrence and prohibition might be placed in the end of scripture, by divine providence, to let us see, that from the beginning of the bible to the end of it, God alone is entitled to religious worship. N. The Jews had learned from the Old Testament, the worship of one true God and him only ; and there is scarce any command more frequently renewed, or guarded with more awful sanctions, and more terrible examples of the wrath of God against the breakers of it : Now if Christ or his apostles had so much as pretended any repeal of this law, the Jews would have had a most public and glorious pretence against christianity.
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