delusion. In a word, the ceremonies of the Church of England are as necessary as the injunctions of an undoubtedly lawful authority, the practice of the primitive church, and the general rules of decency, determined to particulars of the greatest decency, can make them necessary. And I would not for all the world be arraigned at the last and great day for disturbing the church, and disobeying government, and have no better plea for so doing, than what those of the separation were ever yet able to defend themselves by. But some will here say, perhaps, If this be all that you require of us, we both can and do bring you scripture against your church ceremonies; even that which condemns all "will worship," Col. ii. 23, and such other like places. To which I answer, first, that the "will worship," forbidden in that scripture, is so termed, not from the circumstance, but from the object of religious worship; and we readily own, that it is by no means in the church's power to appoint or choose whom or what it will worship. But that does not infer, that it is not therefore in the church's power to appoint how and in what manner it will worship the true object of religious worship, provided that in so doing it observes such rules of decency as are proper and conducing to that purpose. So that this scripture is wholly irrelative to the case before us; and as impertinently applied to it, as any poor text in the Revelation was ever applied to the grave and profound whimsies of some modern interpreters. But secondly, to this objection about "will worship," I answer yet farther, that the forementioned ceremonies of the Church of England are no worship, nor part of God's worship at all, nor were ever pretended so to be; and if they are not so much as worship, I am sure they cannot be "will worship." But we own them only for circumstances, modes, and solemn usages, by which God's worship is orderly and decently performed. I say, we pretend them not to be parts of divine worship; but for all that, to be such things as the divine worship, in some instance or other, cannot be without; for that which neither does nor can give vital heat, may yet be necessary to preserve it; and he who should strip himself of all that is no part of himself, would quickly find, or rather feel, the inconvenience of such a practice, aud have cause to wish for a body as void of sense as such an argument. Now the consequence in both these cases is perfectly parallel; and if so, you may rest satisfied, that what is nonsense upon a principle of reason, will never be sense upon a principle of religion. But as touching the necessity of the aforesaid usages in the Church of England, I shall lay down these four propositions, 1. That circumstantials in the worship of God, (as well as in all other human actions,) are so necessary to it, that it cannot possibly be performed without them. 2. That decency in the circumstantials of God's worship is absolutely necessary. 3. That the general rule and precept of decency is not capable of being reduced to practice, but as it is exemplified in, and determined to, particular instances. And, 4thly and lastly. That there is more of the general nature of decency in those particular usages and ceremonies which the Church of England has pitched upon, than is or can be shewn in any other whatsoever. These things I affirm; and when you have put them all together, let any one give me a solid and sufficient reason for the giving up those few ceremonies of our church, if he can. All the reason that I could ever yet hear alleged by the chief factors for a general intromission of all sorts, sects, and persuasions into our communion is, that those who separate from us are stiff and obstinate, and will not submit to the rules and orders of our church, and that therefore they ought to be taken away which is a goodly reason indeed, and every way worthy of the wisdom and integrity of those who allege it. And to shew that it is so, let it be but transferred from the ecclesiastical to the civil government, from church to state; and let all laws be abrogated, which any great or sturdy multitude of men have no mind to submit to,—that is, in other words, let laws be made to obey, and not to be obeyed; and upon these terms, I doubt not but you will find that kingdom (or rather that commonwealth) finely governed in a short time. For And thus I have shewn the absurdity, folly, and impertinence of alleging the obligation of conscience, where there is no law or command of God, mediate or immediate, to found that obligation upon. And yet, as bad as this is, it were well if the bare absurdity of these pretences were the worst thing which we had to charge them with. But it is not so. our second and next inference from the foregoing principle of the vicegerency of conscience under God, will shew us also the daring impudence and downright impiety of many of those fulsome pleas of conscience, which the world has been too often and too scandalously abused by. For a mau to sin against his conscience, is, doubtless, a great wickedness; but to make God himself a party in the sin, is a much greater. For this is to plead God's authority against God's very law, which doubles the sin, and adds blasphemy to rebellion. And yet such things we have seen done amongst us,-an horrid, unnatural, civil war raised and carried on-the purest and most primitively reformed church in the world laid in the dust-and one of the best and most innocent princes that ever sat upon a throne, by a barbarous unheard-of violence, hurried to his grave in a bloody sheet, and not so much as suffered to rest there to this day; and all this by men acting under the most solemn pretences of conscience, that hypocrisy perhaps ever yet presumed to outface the world with. And are not the principles of those wretches still owned, and their persons still sainted by a race of men of the same stamp, risen up in their stead, the sworn mortal enemies of our church? And yet, for whose sake some projectors amongst us have been turning every stone to transform, mangle, and degrade its noble constitution to the homely, mechanic model of those republican, imperfect churches abroad; which, instead of being any rule or pattern to us, ought in all reason to receive one from us. Nay, and so short sighted are some in their politics, as not to discern all this while, that it is not the service but the revenue of our church which is struck at; and not any passages of our Liturgy, but the property of our lands, which these reformers would have altered. For I am sure no other alteration will satisfy dissenting consciences; no, nor this neither very long, without an utter abolition of all that looks like order or government in the church. And this we may be sure of, if we do but consider both the inveterate malice of the Romish party, which sets these silly, unthinking tools a-work, and withal that monstrous principle or maxim, which those who divide from us (at least most of them) roundly profess, avow, and govern their consciences by; namely, That in all matters that concern religion or the church, though a thing or action be never so indifferent or lawful in itself, yet if it be commanded or enjoined by the government, either civil or ecclesiastical, it becomes ipso facto, by being so commanded, utterly unlawful, and such as they can, by no means, with good conscience comply with. Which one detestable tenet or proposition, carrying in it the very quintessence and vital spirit of all nonconformity, absolutely cashiers and cuts off all church government at one stroke; and is withal such an insolent, audacious defiance of Almighty God, under the mask of conscience, as perhaps none in former ages, who so much as wore the name of Christians, ever arrived to or made profession of. words, God says, they must submit; and they say, they must not. Again, in the forementioned Heb. xiii. 17, the apostle bids them (and in them all Christians whatsoever)" to obey those who have the rule over them;" speaking there of church rulers; for he tells them, "that they were such as watched for their souls." But, says the separatist, If those who have the rule over you, should command you any thing about church affairs, you cannot, you ought not in conscience to obey them; forasmuch as, according to that grand principle of theirs, newly specified by us, every such command makes obedience to a thing otherwise lawful, to become unlawful; and consequently, upon the same principle, rulers must not, cannot be obeyed; unless we could imagine, that there may be such a thing as obedienee on the one side, when there must be no such thing as a command on the other; which would make pleasant sense of it indeed, and fit for none but a dissenting reason, as well as conscience, to assert. For though these men have given the world too many terrible proofs of their own example, that there may be commands and no obedience; yet, I believe, it will put their little logic hard to it, to prove, that there can be any obedience where there is no command. And therefore it unanswerably follows, that the abettors of the forementioned principles plead conscience in a direct and barefaced contradiction to God's express command. And now, I beseech you, consider with yourselves (for it is no slight matter that I am treating of)-I say, consider what you ought to judge of those insolent, unaccountable boasts of conscience, which, like so many fireballs or mouth-granadoes, as I may so term them, are every day thrown at our church. The apostle bids us "prove all things." And will you then take conscience at every turn, upon its own word? upon the forlorn credit of every bold impostor who pleads it? Will you sell your reason, your church, and your religion, and both of them the best in the world, for a name? and that a wrested, abused, misapplied name? Knaves, when they design some more than ordinary villainy, never fail to make use of this plea; and it is because they always find fools ready to believe it. But you will say then, What course must be taken to fence against this imposture? Why truly, the best that I know of, I have told you before; namely, that whensoever you hear any of these sly, sanctified sycophants, with turned up eye and shrug of shoulder, pleading conscience for or against any thing or practice, you would forthwith ask them, what word of God they have to bottom that judgment of their conscience upon? Forasmuch as conscience, being God's vicegerent, was never commissioned by him to govern us in its own name; but must still have some divine word or law to support and warrant it. And therefore call for such a word; and that, either from scripture or from manifest universal reason, and insist upon it, so as not to be put off without it. And if they can produce you no such thing from either of them, (as they never can,) then rest assured that they are arrant cheats and hypocrites; and that, for all their big words, the consciences of such men is so far from being able to give them any true confidence towards God, that it cannot so much as give them confidence towards a wise and good man, no, nor yet towards themselves, who are far from being either. And thus I have shewn you the first ground upon which the testimony of conscience (concerning a man's spiritual estate) comes to be so authentic, and so much to be relied upon; to wit, the high office which it holds, as the vicegerent of God himself in the soul of man; together with the two grand inferences drawn from thence. The first of them shewing the absurdity, folly, and impertinence of pretending conscience against any thing, when there is no law of God, mediate or immediate, against it; and the other setting forth the intolerable blasphemy and impiety of pretending conscience for any thing, which the known law of God is directly against, and stands in open defiance of. Proceed we now to the second ground, from which conscience derives the credit of its testimony in judging of our spiritual estate; and that consists in those properties and qualities which so peculiarly fit it for the discharge of its forementioned office, in all things relating to the soul. And these are three : First, The quickness of its sight. Secondly, The tenderness of its sense; and, Thirdly and lastly, Its rigorous and impartial way of giving sentence. Of each of which in their order. And first, for the extraordinary quickness and sagacity of its sight, in spying out every thing which can any way concern the estate of the soul. As the voice of it, I shew, was as loud as thunder; so the sight of it is as piercing and quick as lightning. It presently sees the guilt, and looks through all the flaws and blemishes of a sinful action; and on the other side, observes the candidness of a man's very principles, the sincerity of his intentions, and the whole carriage of every circumstance in a virtuous performance. So strict and accurate is this spiritual inquisition. Upon which account it is, that there is no such thing as perfect secrecy, to encourage a rational mind to the perpetration of any base action. For a man must first extinguish and put out the great light within him, his conscience, he must get away from himself, and shake off the thousand witnesses, which he always carries about him, before he can be alone. And where there is no solitude, I am sure there can be no secrecy. It is confessed, indeed, that a long and a bold course of sinning may (as we have shewn elsewhere) very much dim and darken the discerning faculty of conscience. For so the apostle assures us it did with those in Rom. i. 12, and the same, no doubt, it does every day; but still so as to leave such persons, both then and now, many notable lucid intervals, sufficient to convince them of their deviations from reason and natural religion, and thereby to render them inexcusable; and so, in a word, to stop their mouths, though not save their souls. In short, their conscience was not stark dead, but under a kind of spiritual apoplexy or deliquium. The operation was hindered, but the faculty was not destroyed. And now, if conscience be naturally thus apprehensive and sagacious; certainly this ought to be another great ground, over and above its bare authority, why we should trust and rely upon the reports of it. For knowledge is still the ground and reason of trust and so much as any one has of discernment, so far he is secured from error and deception, and for that cause fit to be confided in. No witness so much to be credited as an eye-witness. And conscience is, like the great eye of the world, the sun, always open, always making discoveries. Justly, therefore, may we by the light of it take a view of our condition. 2dly, Another property or quality of conscience, enabling it to judge so truly of our spiritual estate, is the tenderness of its sense. For as, by the quickness of its sight, it directs us what to do, or not to do; so, by this tenderness of its sense, it excuses or accuses us, as we have done or not done according to those directions. And it is altogether as nice, delicate, and tender in feeling, as it can be perspicacious and quick in seeing. For conscience, you know, is still called and accounted the eye of the soul; and how troublesome is the least note or dust falling into the eye! and how quickly does it weep and water, upon the least grievance that afflicts it! And no less exact is the sense which conscience, preserved in its native purity, has of the least sin. For as great sins waste, so small ones are enough to wound it; and every wound, you know, is painful till it festers beyond recovery. As soon as ever sin gives the blow, conscience is the first thing that feels the smart. No sooner does the poisoned arrow enter, but that begins to bleed inwardly; sin and sorrow, the venom of one and the anguish of the other, being things inseparable. Conscience, if truly tender, never complains without a cause; though I confess there is a new-fashioned sort of tenderness of conscience, which always does so; but that is like the tenderness of a bog or quagmire; and it is very dangerous coming near it, for fear of being swallowed up by it. For when con- it is much otherwise with conscience; no artifice can induce it to accuse the innocent, or to absolve the guilty. No; we may as well bribe the light and the day to represent white things black, or black white. What pitiful things are power, rhetoric, or riches, when they would terrify, dissuade, or buy off conscience from pronouncing sentence according to the merit of a man's actions; For still, as we have shewn, conscience is a copy of the divine law; and though judges may be bribed or frightened, yet laws cannot. The law is impartial and inflexible; it has no passions or affections, and consequently never accepts persons, nor dispenses with itself. For let the most potent sinner upon earth speak out, and tell us, whether he can command down the clamours and revilings of a guilty conscience, and impose silence upon that bold reprover. He may perhaps for a while put on a high and a big look; but can he, for all that, look conscience out of countenance? And he may also dissemble a little forced jollity; that is, he may court his mis In the meantime, let no man deceive himself, or think, that true tenderness of conscience is any thing else but an awful and exact sense of the rule which should direct, and of the law which should govern it. And while it steers by this compass, and is sensible of every declination from it, so long it is truly and properly tender, and fit to be relied upon, whether it checks or approves a man for what he does. For from hence alone springs its excusing or accusing power; all accusation, in the very nature of the thing, still suppos-tress, and quaff his cups, and perhaps sprinkle ing, and being founded upon, some law; for where there is no law, there can be no transgression; and where there can be no transgression, I am sure there ought to be no accusation. And here, when I speak of law, I mean both the law of God and of man too. For where the matter of a law is a thing not evil, every law of man is virtually, and at a second hand, the law of God also; forasmuch as it binds in the strength of the divine law, commanding obedience to every ordinance of man," as we have already shewn. And therefore all the tenderness of conscience against such laws is hypocrisy, and patronized by none but men of design, who look upon it as the fittest engine to get into power by; which, by the way, when they are once possessed of, they generally manage with as little tenderness as they do with conscience; of which we have had but too much experience already, and it would be but ill venturing upou more. In a word, conscience, not acting by and under a law, is a boundless, daring, and presumptuous thing; and for any one, by virtue thereof, to challenge to himself a privilege of doing what he will, and of being unaccountable for what he does, is in all reason too much either for man or angel to pretend to. 3dly, The third and last property of conscience which I shall mention, and which makes the verdict of it so authentic, is its great and rigorous impartiality. For as its wonderful apprehensiveness made that it could not easily be deceived, so this makes that it will by no means deceive. A judge, you know, may be skilful in understanding a cause, and yet partial in giving sentence. But them now and then with a few dammees; but who, in the meantime, besides his own wretched, miserable self, knows of those secret, bitter infusions which that terrible thing, called conscience, makes into all his draughts? Believe it, most of the appearing mirth in the word is not mirth, but art. The wounded spirit is not seen, but walks under a disguise; and still the less you see of it, the better it looks. On the contrary, if we consider the virtuous person, let him declare freely, whether ever his conscience checked him for his innocence, or upbraided him for an action of duty; did it ever bestow any of its hidden lashes or concealed bites on a mind severely pure, chaste, and religious? But when conscience shall complain, cry out, and recoil, let a man descend into himself with too just a suspicion that all is not right within. For surely that hue and cry was not raised upon him for nothing. The spoils of a rifled innocence are borne away, and the man has stolen something from his own soul, for which he ought to be pursued, and will at last certainly be overtook. Let every one, therefore, attend the sentence of his conscience; for he may be sure it will not daub nor flatter. It is as severe as law, as impartial as truth. It will neither conceal nor pervert what it knows. And thus I have done with the third of those four particulars at first proposed, and shewn whence, and upon what account it is, that the testimony of conscience, concerning our spiritual estate, comes to be so authentic, and so much to be relied upon; namely, for that it is fully empowered and commissioned to this great office by God himself; and withal, that it is extremely quicksighted to apprehend and discern; and moreover very tender and sensible of every thing that concerns the soul. And lastly, that it is most exactly and severely impartial in judging of whatsoever comes before it. Every one of which qualifications justly contributes to the credit and authority of the sentence which shall be passed by it. And so we are at length arrived at the fourth and last thing proposed from the words; which was, to assign some particular cases or instances, in which this confidence towards God, suggested by a rightly informed conscience, does most eminently shew and exert itself. I shall mention three. 1st, In our addresses to God by prayer. When a man shall presume to come and place himself in the presence of the great searcher of hearts, and to ask something of him, while his conscience is all the while smiting him on the face, and telling him what a rebel and a traitor he is to the majesty which he supplicates; surely such an one should think with himself, that the God whom he prays to is greater than his conscience, and pierces into all the filth and baseness of his heart with a much clearer and more severe inspection. And if so, will he not likewise resent the provocation more deeply, and revenge it upon him more terribly, if repentance does not divert the blow? Every such prayer is big with impiety and contradiction, and makes as odious a noise in the ears of God, as the harangues of one of those rebel fasts, or humiliations in the year forty-one, invoking the blessings of Heaven upon such actions and designs as nothing but hell could reward. One of the most peculiar qualifications of a heart rightly disposed for prayer, is a well grounded confidence of a man's fitness for that duty. In Heb. x. 22, "Let us draw near with a true heart, in full assurance of faith," says the apostle. But whence must this assurance spring? Why, we are told in the very next words of the same verse, "having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience;" otherwise the voice of an impure conscience will cry much louder than our prayers, and speak more effectually against us than these can intercede for us. And now, if prayer be the great conduit of mercy, by which the blessings of heaven are derived upon the creature, and the noble instrument of converse between God and the soul, then surely that which renders it ineffectual and loathsome to God, must needs be of the most mischievous and destructive consequence to mankind imaginable; and consequently to be removed with all that earnestness and concern, with which a man would rid himself of a plague or a mortal infection. For it taints and pollutes every prayer; it turns an oblation into an affront; and the odours of a sacrifice into the exhalations of a carcass. And, in a word, makes the heavens over us brass, denying all passage, either to descending mercies or ascending petitions. But, on the other side, when a man's breast is clear, and the same heart which indites does also encourage his prayer-when his innocence pushes on the attempt, and vouches the success, such an one goes boldly to the throne of grace, and his boldness is not greater than his welcome. God recognizes the voice of his own Spirit interceding within him, and his prayers are not only followed, but even prevented, with an answer. 2dly, A second instance in which this confidence towards God does remarkably shew itself, is at the time of some notable trial or sharp affliction. When a man's friends shall desert him, his relations disown him, and all dependencies fail him, and, in a word, the whole world frown upon him, certainly it will then be of some moment to have a friend in the court of conscience, which shall, as it were, buoy up his sinking spirits, and speak greater things for him than all these together can declaim against him. For as it is most certain, that no height of honour, nor affluence of fortune, can keep a man from being miserable, nor indeed contemptible, when an enraged conscience shall fly at him, and take him by the throat; so it is also as certain, that no temporal adversities can cut off those inward, secret, invincible supplies of comfort, which conscience shall pour in upon distressed innocence, in spite and in defiance of all worldly calamities. Naturalists observe, that when the frost seizes upon wine, they are only the slighter and more waterish parts of it that are subject to be congealed; but still there is a mighty spirit, which can retreat into itself, and there, within its own compass, lie secure from the freezing impression of the element round about it. And just so it is with the spirit of a man, while a good conscience makes it firm and impenetrable. An outward affliction can no more benumb or quell it, than a blast of wind can freeze up the blood in a man's veins, or a little shower of rain soak into his heart, and there quench the principle of life itself. Take the two greatest instances of misery which, I think, are incident to human nature; to wit, poverty and shame, and I dare oppose conscience to them both. And first, for poverty. Suppose a man stripped of all, driven out of house and home, and perhaps out of his country too, (which having, within our memory, happened to so many, may too easily, God knows, be supposed again,) yet if his conscience shall tell him that it was not for any failure in his own duty, but from the success of another's villainy, that this befell him; why, then his |