United States or Saint Kitts and Nevis ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The Puritans looked at him through spectacles of revolutionary fanaticism, and saw a glorious saint and hero. The clergy looked on Nonconformists through conservative glasses, and saw a rabble of fanatics and rebels. The Nonconformists looked on the clergy through revolutionary glasses, and saw a host of superstitious formalists, and blind, persecuting Pharisees.

And hence it followeth, that whensoever you may omit that which princes enjoin, without violating the law of charity, you are not holden to obey them for the majesty of princely authority. Be ashamed, O ye Formalists, of your ascribing to princes a jurisdiction so absolute! Bury it in the grave of eternal silence.

Now, to be free of contempt will not satisfy our Formalists, except we obey and do that very same thing which we are commanded to do.

So Mark, like other men we meet with, was proud of being a Publican; and his prayer was 'I thank Thee that I am not as other men are, spiritually proud, formalists, hypocrites, or even as this Pharisee. 'Do you wish another game? I asked. 'Just now, said Wylder, emitting first a thin stream of smoke, and watching its ascent.

We have already seen this bad consequence in a great part, for it is well enough known how many heterodox doctrines are maintained by Formalists, who are most zealous for the ceremonies anent universal grace, free-will, perseverance, justification, images, antichrist, the church of Rome, penance, Christ’s passion and descending into hell, necessity of the sacraments, apocrypha books, Christ’s presence in the eucharist, assurance of salvation, &c.

"Ask what questions you please," cried Margrave, impatiently, "later if I have strength left to answer them; but do not interrupt me, while I husband my force to say what alone is important to me and to you. Disappointed in the hopes I had placed in you, I resolved to repair to Paris, that great furnace of all bold ideas. I questioned learned formalists; I listened to audacious empirics.

It was very obvious that no impression was to be made upon the man by formalists. Poor Berty having conjugated his paradigm conscientiously through all its moods and tenses, returned to his green board in the council-room with his proces verbal of the conference.

The formalists, Pharisees and Scribes, having heard of the occurrence, gathered about the Master and accused Him of violating one of the forms and ceremonies prescribed by the ecclesiastical authorities the rite which required the faithful to wash their hands before beginning a meal.

To a people who have thus inherited the ceremonial instinct, who are Pharisees by a hundred-fold heritage and by sweet choice, it is not an easy thing for the man of the West, with his natural distrust of all that is formal and outward in life, to present effectively his Lord, whose bitterest woes were pronounced against the formalists of His time, and whose commands are always ethical, and whose life is, first of all, and last of all, spiritual.

Do not Formalists place the same necessity in the ceremonies, while, as they say, they urge them not as necessary in themselves, but only as necessary in respect of the determination of the church, and the ordinance of those who are set over us? Nay, Papists place not so great necessity in many ordinances of their church as Formalists place in the ceremonies.