United States or Cyprus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Being, altogether, a creature of impulses, he certainly could not be ever employed in doxologies, or engaged in the logomachy of churchmen; but he had the sentiment which at a tamer age might have made him more ecclesiastical. There was as much truth as joke in the expression, when he wrote, I am myself a moderate Presbyterian.
There is real eloquence in his appeal to the 'great number of Christians who, since the Apostles, under the influence of a belief in the Divinity of the Son and the Spirit, have paid divine honours to both, after they have sought the knowledge of the truth with the utmost diligence and prayer; when they have been in the holiest and most heavenly frames of spirit, and in their devoutest hours; when they have been under the most sensible impressions of the love of the Father and the Son, and under the most quickening influences of the Blessed Spirit himself; in the devotions of a death-bed, and in the songs and doxologies of martyrdom. 'Now can we, he asks, 'suppose that in such devout and glorious seasons as these, God the Father should ever thus manifest His own love to souls that are degrading Him by worshipping another God?
We have no cross to be compared with our corruptions, and when they have chased us close enough and deep enough into the secret place of God, then we will begin to understand and adorn the dangerous doxologies of Augustine and Gregory, Fraser and Fox. Yes; anything and everything is good that chases us up to God: crosses and corruptions, sin and death and hell.
When these fancy starveling songs get up to the gate of heaven, how do you suppose they look, standing beside the great doxologies of the glorified? Let an operatic performance, floating upward, get many hours the start, and it shall be caught and passed by the shout of the Sailors' Bethel, or the hosanna of the Sabbath-school children.
Harp, trumpet, grand march, anthem, amen, and hallelujah in the same orchestra. Choral meeting solo, and overture meeting antiphon, and strophe joining dithyramb, as they roll into the ocean of doxologies.
Accordingly, the ministering angels and all the other celestial hosts wait until the last tones of Israel's doxologies rising aloft from earth have died away, and then they proclaim in a loud voice, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts."
There was often a lax observance of the rubrics; but there appear to be no complaints of any serious omissions, until three or four of the Arian and semi-Arian clergy ventured, not only to leave out the Athanasian Creed, but to alter the doxologies, and to pass over the second and third petitions of the Litany.
It condemned "the conduct of adult persons who restricted themselves to set forms of prayer, whether read or whether repeated;" it acknowledged also that other parts of Scripture besides the Psalms were suitable for praise, and, with regard to the use of the Lord's Prayer in public worship, a matter which had caused much discussion within the Church in earlier times, it asserted that: "As Scripture Doxologies and the Divinely-approved petition of saints may be warrantably adopted in our devotional exercises, both public and personal, so may the Lord's Prayer be used by itself or in connection with other supplications."
He again recited the verse as he plodded along, fixing it in his memory for the future edification of his compatriots of the Concho. "The best thing I ever writ!" he assured himself. "Fust thing I know they'll be puttin' me in one of them doxologies for keeps. 'Sundown Slim, The Poet of the Mesas! Sounds good to me. Reckon that's why I never seen a woman that I wanted to get married to.
You want the soft, low, minor key of sweetest music to describe the pathos; but it needs an orchestra, under swinging of an archangel's baton, reaching from throne to manger, to drum and trumpet the doxologies of His praise.
Word Of The Day