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What offices more unnecessary than those Roman rituals? yet what more necessary duties than to worship God in a spiritual and lively manner,—to press the power of godliness upon the consciences of professors,—to maintain and keep faithful and well qualified ministers in the church,—to bear the bowels of mercy and meekness,—not to offend the weak, nor to confirm Papists in Popery,—to have all things in God’s worship disposed according to the word, and not according to the will of man,—not to exercise lordship over the consciences of those whom Christ hath made free,—to abolish the monuments of by-past and badges of present idolatry; yet are those and other necessary duties shut quite out of doors by our needless ceremonial service.
My fourth argument against the lawfulness of the ceremonies followeth, by which I am to evince that they are not only idolatrous reductive, because monuments of by-past, and participative, because badges of present idolatry, but that likewise they make Formalists themselves to be formally, and in respect of their own using of them, idolaters, consideration not had of the by-past or present abusing of them by others.
It is not marvel I have been wicked, considering the wicked company that ever I have been in, but specially within the seven years by-past, in which I never saw two good men or one good deed, but all kind of wickedness, and yet God would not suffer me to be lost." See the whole confession in the State Trials.
That I was now a justified person, adopted among the number of God's children my name written in the Lamb's book of life, and that no by-past transgression, nor any future act of my own, or of other men, could be instrumental in altering the decree. "All the powers of darkness," added he, "shall never be able to pluck you again out of your Redeemer's hand.
I looked back on my by-past life with pain, as one looks back on a perilous journey, in which he has attained his end, without gaining any advantage either to himself or others; and I looked forward, as on a darksome waste, full of repulsive and terrific shapes, pitfalls, and precipices, to which there was no definite bourn, and from which I turned with disgust.
When he is gone, the new dog you get will never be like him; he may be, indeed, a far handsomer and more amiable animal, but he will not be your old companion; he will not be surrounded with all those old associations, not merely with your own by-past life, but with the lives, the faces, and the voices of those who have left you, which invest with a certain sacredness even that humble, but faithful friend.
Next, the presbytery declare and testify against the Revolution church, because plainly Erastian, and utterly inconsistent with the covenanted constitution of the reformed church of Scotland, anno 1648: the truth of which charge will appear obvious, from considering the act of parliament, on which the civil power settled the constitution of the Revolution church, viz., Act 114, James VI, Parl. 12th; where, inter alia, it is expressly declared, "That it shall be lawful to the kirk ministers, every year at least, and oftener, pro re nata, as occasion and necessity sall require, to hald and keepe general assemblies, providing that the king's majesty, or his commissioner with them, to be appointed be his highness to be present at ilk general assembly, before the dissolving thereof, nominate and appoynt time and place, quhen and quhair the next general assemblie sall be halden: and in case neither his majesty nor his said commissioner beis present for the time, in that town, quhair the said general assemblie beis halden, then, and in that case, it shall be lesum for the said general assembly be themselves, to nominate and appoint time and place, quhair the next general assembly of the kirk sall be keeped and halden, as they have been in use to do these times by-past."
And there they are wi' gun and pistol, dirk and dourlach, ready to disturb the peace o' the country whenever the laird likes; and that's the grievance of the Hielands, whilk are, and hae been for this thousand years by-past, a bike o' the maist lawless unchristian limmers that ever disturbed a douce, quiet, God-fearing neighbourhood, like this o' ours in the west here."
That reason also taken from the opposition of the shadow and the body, Col. ii. 17, doth militate against our holidays; for the Apostle there speaketh in the present time, ἐστι σκια: whereas the Judaical rites were abolished, whereupon Zanchius noteth, that the Apostle doth not so much speak of things by-past, as of the very nature of all rites, Definiens ergo ipsos ritus in sese, dixit eos nil aliud esse quam umbram.
It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait.
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