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Updated: June 13, 2025
This was fulfilled in Luther's time, and in all those after separations which any of the churches have made from Rome, and from those relics and remains of superstition and will-worship, wherewith themselves and the ordinances of Jesus Christ have been denied.
Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that erection of a melancholy agnosticism plus asceticism into a creed, was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of Pride, we need not here argue out. But we have seen how faithfully the note of it rings through the verse of these years. And here it rings not only faithfully, but almost triumphantly.
Let us thank Him, bless Him, serve Him, die for Him, if need be, in return for all He endured for us: but let us keep our sorrow and our pity, and our tears, for our own daily sins we have enough of them to employ all our sorrow, and more; and not in voluntary humility and will-worship, against which St Paul warns us, lose sight of our real Christ, of Him who was dead and is alive for evermore, and dwells in us by faith; now and for ever, amen; and hath the keys of death and hell, and has opened them for us, and for our fathers before us, and for our children after us, and for nations yet unborn.
When all such deductions are made, education is at least a form of will-worship; not of cowardly fact-worship; it deals with a department that we can control; it does not merely darken us with the barbarian pessimism of Zola and the heredity-hunt. We shall certainly make fools of ourselves; that is what is meant by philosophy.
For the heart of man is just as fond as it ever was of idolatry, and superstition, and will-worship, and voluntary humility, and paying tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, while it neglects the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and judgment: and, therefore, there is very great danger, if we make too much of these ceremonies, harmless and even good as many of them may be, of getting to rest in them, and thinking that God is pleased with them themselves.
I would otherwise have its ornaments subsist, unless as they are, or may be, a snare to the souls of men; and especially do I condemn those ravages which have been made by the heady fury of the people, stung into zeal against will-worship by bloody persecution. Against such wanton devastations I lift my testimony."
Col. ii. 20 "Wherefore, if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world; why as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances? verse 21, Touch not, taste not, handle not: verse 23, Which things have indeed a show of wisdom in will-worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body, not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh."
The first difference makes them no help; for though the ordinance and institution of God makes the use of sacramental images to be no will-worship, yet doth it not any whit avail to show that adoration before them is no idolatry.
If we would seek peace, let us clothe all our treaties for peace with acceptable words; and where one word may better accommodate than another, let that be used to express persons or things by, and let us not, as some do, call the different practices of our brethren will-worship, and their different opinions doctrines of devils, and the doctrine of Balaam, who taught fornication, &c., unless we can plainly, and in expressness of terms, prove it so; such language as this hath strangely divided our spirits, and hardened our hearts one towards another.
The symptoms are your high places not yet taken away, many of your old superstitious ceremonies to this day remaining, which, though not so evil as the high places of idolatry in which idols were worshipped, yet are parallel to the high places of will-worship, of which we read that the people, thinking it too hard to be tied to go up to Jerusalem with every sacrifice, “did sacrifice still in the high places, yet unto the Lord their God only,” 2 Chron. xxxiii, 17; pleading for their so doing, antiquity, custom, and other defences of that kind, which have been alleged for your ceremonies.
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