of the number of those who can ascribe such great and strange passages to chance, or satisfy my reason in assigning any other cause of this, but the kindness of God himself to the place of his worship; making the common influences of heaven to stop their course, and pay a kind of homage to the rearing of so sacred a structure. Though I must confess, that David's being prohibited, and Herod permitted to build God a temple might seem strange, did not the absoluteness of God's good pleasure satisfy all sober minds of the reasonableness of God's proceedings, though never so strange and unaccountable.

Add to all this, that the extraordinary manifestations of God's presence were still in the sanctuary: the cloud, the Urim and Thummim, and the oracular answers of God, were graces and prerogatives proper and peculiar to the sacredness of this place. These were the dignities that made it (as it were) the presence-chamber of the Almighty, the room of audience, where he declared that he would receive and answer petitions from all places under heaven, and where he displayed his royalty and glory. There was no parlour or dining-room in all the dwellings of Jacob, that he vouchsafed the like privileges to. And moreover, how full are God's expressions to this purpose! "Here have I placed my name, and here will I dwell, for I have a delight

therein."

But to evidence how different a respect God bears to things consecrated to his own worship, from what he bears to all other things, let that one eminent passage of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, be proof beyond all exception; in which the censers o those wretches, who, I am sure, could derive no sanctity to them from their own persons; yet upon this account, that they had been conseerated by the offering incense in them, were, by God's special command, sequestered from all common use, and appointed to be beaten into broad plates, and fastened as a covering upon the altar, (Numb. xvi. 38,) "The censers of these sinners against their own souls, let them make broad plates for a covering of the altar for they offered them before the Lord, therefore they are hallowed." It seems this one single use left such an indelible sacredness upon them, that neither the villainy of the persons, nor the impiety of the design, could be a sufficient reason to uuhallow and degrade them to the same common use that other vessels may be applied to. And the argument holds equally good for the consecration of places. The apostle would have no revelling, or junketting upon the altar, which had been used, and by that use consecrated to the celebration of a more spiritual and divine repast. "Have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? or despise ye the church of God?” says Saint Paul, (1 Cor. xi. 22.) It would

have been no answer to have told the apostle, What! is not the church stone and wood as well as other buildings? And is there any such peculiar sanctity in this parcel of brick and mortar? And must God, who has declared himself no respecter of persons, be now made a respecter of places? No, this is the language of a more spiritualized and refined piety than the apostles and primitive Christians were acquainted with. And thus much for the first argument, brought to prove the different respect that God bears to things and places consecrated and set apart to his own worship, from what he bears to others.

2. The second argument for the proof of the same assertion, shall be taken from those remarkable judgments shewn by God, upon the violators of things consecrated and set apart to holy uses.

A coal, we know, snatched from the altar, once fired the nest of the eagle, the royal and commanding bird; and so has sacrilege consumed the families of princes, broke sceptres, and destroyed kingdoms. We read how the victorious Philistines were worsted by the captivated ark, which foraged their country more than a conquering army; they were not able to cohabit with that holy thing; it was like a plague in their bowels, and a curse in the midst of them; so that they were forced to restore their prey, and to turn their triumphs into supplications. Poor Uzzah for but touching the ark, though out of care and zeal for its preservation, was struck dead with a blow from heaven. He had no right to touch it, and therefore his very zeal was a sin, and his care an usurpation; nor could the purpose of his heart excuse the error of his hand. Nay, in the promulgation of the Mosaic law, if so much as a brute beast touched the mountain, the bow of vengeance was ready, and it was to be struck through with a dart, and to die a sacrifice for a fault it could not understand.

But to give some higher and clearer instances of the divine judgments upon sacrilegious per

sons.

In 1 Kings, xiv. 26, we find Shishak king of Egypt spoiling and robbing Solomon's temple, and that we may know what became of him, we must take notice that Josephus calls him Susac, and tells us that Herodotus calls him Sesostris; and withal reports, that immediately after his return from this very expedition, such disastrous calamities befell his family, that he burnt two of his children himself; that his brother conspired against him; and lastly, that his son, who succeeded him, was struck blind, yet not so blind (in his understanding at least) but that he saw the cause of all these mischiefs; and therefore, to redeem his father's sacrilege, gave more and richer things to temples, than his father had stolen from them: though (by the way) it may seem to be a strange method

of repairing an injury done to the true God, by adorning the temples of the false. See the same sad effect of sacrilege in the great Nebuchadnezzar he plunders the temple of God, and we find the fatal doom that afterwards befell him; he lost his kingdom, and by a new unheard of judgment, was driven from the society and converse of men, to table with the beasts, and to graze with oxen; the impiety and inhumanity of his sin making him a fitter companion for them, than for those to whom religion is more natural than reason itself. And since it was his unhappiness to transmit his sin, together with his kingdom, to his son, while Belshazzar was quaffing in the sacred vessels of the temple, which in his pride he sent for to abuse with his impious sensuality, he sees his fatal sentence writ by the finger of God in the very midst of his profane mirth. And he stays not long for the execution of it, that very night losing his kingdom and his life too. And that which makes the story direct for our purpose is, that all this comes upon him for profaning those sacred vessels. God himself tells us so much by the mouth of his prophet, in Daniel, v. 23, where this only sin is charged upon him, and particularly made the cause of his sudden and utter ruin.

These were violators of the first temple, and those that profaned and abused the second sped no better. And for this, take for instance, that first-born of sin and sacrilege, Antiochus; the story of whose profaning God's house you may read in the first book of Maccabees, chap. i. And you may read also at large what success he found after it, in the sixth chapter, where the author tells us, that he never prospered afterwards in any thing, but all his designs were frustrated, his captains slain, his armies defeated, and lastly, himself falls sick, and dies a miserable death. And (which is most considerable as to the present business) when all these evils befell him, his own conscience tells him, that it was even for this, that he had most sacrilegiously pillaged and invaded God's house, (1 Maccab. vi. 12, 13,) "Now I remember," says he, "the evils I did at Jerusalem, how I took the vessels of gold and silver: I perceive therefore, that for this cause these evils are come upon me, and, behold, I perish for grief in a strange land." The sinner's conscience is for the most part the best expositor of the mind of God, under any judgment or affliction.

Take another notable instance in Nicanor, who purposed and threatened to burn the temple, 1 Maccab. vii. 35. And a curse lights upon him presently after his great army is utterly ruined, he himself slain in it, and his head and right hand cut off, and hung up before Jerusalem. Where two things are remarkable in the text. 1. That he himself was first slain, a thing that does not usually

befall a general of an army. 2. That the Jews prayed against him to God, and desired God to destroy Nicanor, for the injury done to his sanctuary only, naming no sin else. And God ratified their prayers by the judgment they brought down upon the head of him, whom they prayed against. God stopped his blasphemous mouth, and cut off his sacrilegious hand, and made them teach the world, what it was for the most potent sinner under heaven to threaten the almighty God, especially in his own house; for so was the temple.

But now, lest some should puff at these instances, as being such as were under a different economy of religion, in which God was more tender of the shell and ceremonious part of his worship, and consequently not directly pertinent to ours; therefore, to shew that all profanation, and invasion of things sacred, is an offence against the eternal law of nature, and not against any positive institution after a time to expire, we need not go many nations off, nor many ages back, to see the vengeance of God upon some families, raised upon the ruins of churches, and enriched with the spoils of sacrilege, gilded with the name of reformation. And for the most part, so unhappy have been the purchasers of church lands, that the world is not now to seek for an argument from a long experience to convince it, that though in such purchases men have usually the cheapest penny-worths, yet they have not always the best bargains. For the holy thing has stuck fast to their sides like a fatal shaft, and the stone has cried out of the consecrated walls they have lived within, for a judgment upon the head of the sacrile gious intruder; and heaven has heard the cry, and made good the curse. So that when the heir of a blasted family has rose up and promised fair, and perhaps flourished for some time upon the stock of excellent parts and great favour; yet at length a cross event has certainly met and stopped him in the career of his fortunes; so that he has ever after withered and declined, and in the end come to nothing, or to that which is worse. So certainly does that, which some call blind superstition, take aim when it shoots a curse at the sacrilegious person. But I shall not engage in the odious task of recounting the families which this sin has blasted with a curse. Only, I shall give one eminent instance in some persons who had sacrilegiously procured the demolishing of some places consecrated to holy uses.

And for this (to shew the world that Papists can commit sacrilege as freely as they can object it to Protestants) it shall be in that great cardinal and minister of state, Wolsey, who obtained leave of Pope Clement the Seventh to demolish forty religious houses; which he did by the service of five men, to

whose conduct he committed the effecting of that business; every one of which came to a sad and fatal end. For the pope himself was ever after an unfortunate prince, Rome being twice taken and sacked in his reign, himself taken prisoner, and at length dying a miserable death. Wolsey (as is known) incurred a premunire, forfeited his honour, estate, and life, which he ended, some say, by poison; but certainly in great calamity. And for the five men employed by him, two of them quarrelled, one of which was slain, and the other hanged for it; the third drowned himself in a well; the fourth (though rich) came at length to beg his bread; and the fifth was miserably stabbed to death at Dublin in Ireland.

This was the tragical end of a knot of sacrilegious persons from highest to lowest. The consideration of which and the like passages, one would think, should make men keep their fingers off from the church's patrimony, though not out of love to the church, (which few men have,) yet at least out of love to themselves, which, I suppose, few want.

Nor is that instance in one of another religion to be passed over, (so near it is to the former passage of Nicanor,) of a commander in the parliament's rebel army, who, coming to rifle and deface the cathedral at Litchfield, solemnly at the head of his troops begged of God to shew some remarkable token of his approbation or dislike of the work they were going about. Immediately after which, looking out at a window, he was shot in the forehead by a deaf and dumb man. And this was on Saint Chadd's day, the name of which saint that church bore, being dedicated to God in memory of the same. Where we see, that as he asked of God a sign, so God gave him one, signing him in the forehead, and that with such a mark, as he is like to be known by to all posterity.

There is nothing that the united voice of all history proclaims so loud as the certain unfailing curse that has pursued and overtook sacrilege. Make a catalogue of all the prosperous sacrilegious persons that have been from the beginning of the world to this day, and I believe they will come within a very narrow compass, and be repeated much sooner than the alphabet.

Religion claims a great interest in the world, even as great as its object, God, and the souls of men. And since God has resolved not to alter the course of nature, and upon principles of nature, religion will scarce be supported without the encouragement of the ministers of it; Providence, where it loves a nation, concerns itself to own and assert the interest of religion, by blasting the spoilers of religious persons and places. Many have gaped at the church revenues, but, before they could swallow them, have had their mouths stopt in the churchyard.

And thus much for the second argument, to prove the different respect that God bears to things consecrated to holy uses; namely, his signal judgments upon the sacrilegious violators of them.

3. I descend now to the third and last thing proposed for the proof of the first proposition, which is, to assign the ground and reason, why God shews such a concern for these things. Touching which we are to observe, (1.) Negatively, that it is no worth or sanctity naturally inherent in the things themselves, that either does or can procure them this esteem from God; for by nature all things have an equally common use. Nature freely and indifferently opens the bosom of the universe to all mankind; and the very sanctum sanctorum had originally no more sacredness in it, than the valley of the son of Hinnom, or any other place in Judea. (2.) Positively therefore, the sole ground and reason of this different esteem vouchsafed by God to consecrated things and places, is this, that he has the sole property of them.

It is a known maxim, that "in Deo sunt jura omnia ;" and consequently, that he is the proprietor of all things, by that grand and transcendent right founded upon creation. Yet notwithstanding he may be said to have a greater, because a sole property in some things, for that he permits not the use of them to men, to whom yet he has granted the free use of all other things. Now this property may be founded upon a double ground.

First, God's own fixing upon, and institution of, a place or thing to his peculiar use. When he shall say to the sons of men, as he spoke to Adam concerning the forbidden fruit, of all things and places that I have enriched the universe with, you may freely make use for your own occasions; but as for this spot of ground, this person, this thing, I have selected and appropriated, I have enclosed it to myself and my own use; and I will endure no sharer, no rival, or companion in it: he that invades them, usurps, and shall bear the guilt of his usurpation. Now, upon this account, the gates of Sion, and the tribe of Levi, became God's property. He laid his hand upon them, and said, "These are mine."

Secondly, The other ground of God's sole property in any thing or place, is the gift, or rather the return of it made by man to God; by which act he relinquishes and delivers back to God all his right to the use of that thing, which before had been freely granted him by God. After which donation, there is an absolute change and alienation made of the property of the thing given, and that as to the use of it too; which being so alienated, a man has no more to do with it, than with a thing bought with another's money, or got with the sweat of another's brow.

And this is the ground of God's sole property in things, persons, and places, now under the Gospel. Men, by free gift, consign over a place to the divine worship, and thereby have no more right to apply it to another use, than they have to make use of another man's goods. He that has devoted himself to the service of God in the Christian priesthood, has given himself to God, and so can no more dispose of himself in another employment, than he can dispose of a thing that he has sold or freely given away. Now in passing a thing away to another by deed of gift, two things are required, –

1. A surrender on the giver's part, of all the property and right he has in the thing given. And to the making of a thing or place sacred, this surrender of it, by its right owner, is so necessary, that all the rites of consecration used upon a place against the owner's will, and without his giving up his property, make not that place sacred, forasmuch as the property of it is not hereby altered; and therefore says the canonist, "Qui sine voluntate Domini consecrat, revera desecrat." The like judgment passed that learned Bishop Synesius upon a place so consecrated. O ἱερὸν οὐδὲ μὲν ὅσιον ἡγοῦμαι. “I account it not," says he, "for any holy thing."

For we must know, that consecration makes not a place sacred, any more than coronation makes a king, but only solemnly declares it

so.

It is the gift of the owner of it to God, which makes it to be solely God's, and consequently sacred; after which, every violation of it is as really sacrilege, as to conspire against the king is treason before the solemnity of his coronation. And moreover, as consecration makes not a thing sacred without the owner's gift, so the owner's gift of itself alone makes a thing sacred, without the ceremonies of consecration; for we know that tithes and lands given to God are never, and plate, vestments, and other sacred utensils, are seldom consecrated yet certain it is, that after the donation of them to the church, it is as really sacrilege to steal or alienate them from those sacred uses, to which they were dedicated by the donors, as it is to pull down a church, or turn it into a stable.

2. As in order to the passing away a thing by gift, there is required a surrender of all right to it on his part that gives, so there is required also an acceptation of it on his part to whom it is given. For giving being a relative action, (and so requiring a correlative to answer it,) giving on one part transfers no property, unless there be an accepting on the other; for as volenti non fit injuria, so in this case nolenti non fit beneficium.

And if it be now asked, how God can be said to accept what we give, since we are not able to transact with him in person? To this I answer,-1. That we may and do converse

with God in person really, and to all the purposes of giving and receiving, though not visibly; for natural reason will evince, that God will receive testimonies of honour from his creatures; amongst which, the homage of offerings, and the parting with a right, is a very great one. And where a gift is suitable to the person to whom it is offered, and no refusal of it testified, silence in that case (even amongst those who transact visibly and corporally with one another) is, by the general voice of reason, reputed an acceptance. And therefore, much more ought we to conclude that God accepts of a thing suitable for him to receive, and for us to give, where he does not declare his refusal and disallowance of it. But, 2. I add farther, that we may transact with God in the person of his and Christ's substitute, the bishop, to whom the deed of gift ought, and uses to be delivered by the owner of the thing given, in a formal instrument, signed, sealed, and legally attested by witnesses, wherein he resigns up all his right and property in the thing to be consecrated. And the bishop is as really vicarius Christi to receive this from us in Christ's behalf, as the Levitical priest was vicarius Dei to the Jews, to manage all transactions between God and them.

These two things therefore concurring, the gift of the owner, and God's acceptance of it, either immediately by himself, which we rationally presume, or mediately by the hands of the bishop, which is visibly done before us, is that which vests the sole property of a thing or place in God. If it be now asked, Of what use then is consecration, if a thing were sacred before it? I answer, Of very much; even as much as coronation to a king, which confers no royal authority upon him, but by so solemn a declaration of it, imprints a deeper awe and reverence of it in the people's minds, a thing surely of no small moment. And, 2. The bishop's solemn benediction and prayers to God for a blessing upon those who shall seek him in such sacred places, cannot but be supposed a direct and most effectual means to procure a blessing from God upon those persons who shall address themselves to him there, as they ought to do. And surely, this also vouches the great reason of the episcopal consecration. Add to this, in the third place, that all who ever had any awful sense of religion and religious matters (whether Jews or Christians, or even heathens themselves) have ever used solemn dedications and consecrations of things set apart, and designed for divine worship, which surely could never have been so universally practised, had not right reason dictated the high expediency and great use of such practices.

Eusebius, (the earliest church historian,) in the tenth book of his Ecclesiastical History, as also in the Life of Constantine, speaks of

these consecrations of churches, as of things generally in use, and withal sets down those actions particularly, of which they consisted, styling them Θεοπρεπεῖς ἐκκλησίας θεσμούς, “laws or customs of the church becoming God." What the Greek and Latin churches used to do, may be seen in their pontificals, containing the set forms for these consecrations; though, indeed, (for these six or seven last centuries,) full of many tedious, superfluous, and ridiculous fopperies; setting aside all which, if also our liturgy had a set form for the consecration of places, as it has of persons, perhaps it would be nevertheless perfect. Now from what has been above discoursed of the ground of God's sole property in things set apart for his service, we come at length to see how all things given to the church, whether houses, or lands, or tithes, belong to churchmen. They are but usufructuarii, and have only the use of these things, the property and fee remaining wholly in God; and consequently the alienating of them is a robbing of God, (Mal. iii. 8, 9,) "Ye are cursed with a curse, for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation, in tithes and offerings." If it was God that was robbed, it was God also that was the | owner of what was took away in the robbery: even our own common law speaks as much; for so says our Magna Charta, in the first chapter, Concessimus Deo-quod ecclesia Anglicana libera erit," &c. Upon which words, that great lawyer in his Institutes comments thus: "When any thing is granted for God, it is deemed in law to be granted to God; and whatsoever is granted to the church for his honour, and the maintenance of his service, is granted for and to God."

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The same also appears from those forms of expression, in which the donation of sacred things usually ran. As "Deo omnipotenti hac præsente charta donavimus," with the like. But most undeniably is this proved by this one argument: That in case a bishop should commit treason or felony, and thereby forfeit his estate with his life, yet the lands of his bishopric become not forfeit, but remain still in the church, and pass entire to his successor; which sufficiently shews that they were none of his.

It being therefore thus proved, that God is the sole proprietor of all sacred things or places; I suppose his peculiar property of them is an abundantly pregnant reason of that different respect that he bears to them. For is not the meum, and the separate property of a thing, the great cause of its endearment amongst all mankind? Does any one respect a common, as much as he does his garden? or the gold that lies in the bowels of a mine, as much as that which he has in his purse?

I have now finished the first proposition drawn from the words; namely, that God

bears a different respect to places set apart and consecrated to his worship, from what he bears to all other places designed to the uses of common life: and also shewn the reason why he does so. I proceed now to the other proposition, which is, That God prefers the worship paid him in such places, above that which is offered him in any other places whatsoever. And that for these reasons,

1. Because such places are naturally apt to excite a greater reverence and devotion in the discharge of divine service, than places of common use. The place properly reminds a man of the business of the place, and strikes a kind of awe into the thoughts, when they reflect upon that great and sacred Majesty they use to treat and converse with there. They find the same holy consternation upon themselves that Jacob did at his consecrated Bethel, which he called "the gate of heaven;" and if such places are so, then surely a daily expectation at the gate is the readiest way to gain admittance into the house.

It has been the advice of some spiritual persons, that such as were able should set apart some certain place in their dwellings for private devotions only, which if they constantly performed there, and nothing else, their very entrance into it would tell them what they were to do in it, and quickly make their chamber-thoughts, their table-thoughts, and their jolly, worldly, but much more their sinful thoughts and purposes, fly out of their hearts.

For is there any man (whose heart has not shook off all sense of what is sacred) who finds himself no otherwise affected, when he enters into a church, than when he enters into his parlour or chamber? If he does, for aught I know, he is fitter to be there always than in a church.

The mind of man, even in spirituals, acts with a corporeal dependence, and so is helped or hindered in its operations, according to the different quality of external objects that incur into the senses; and perhaps sometimes the sight of the altar, and those decent preparations for the work of devotion, may compose and recover the wandering mind much more effectually than a sermon, or a rational discourse. For these things in a manner preach to the eye, when the ear is dull, and will not hear, and the eye dictates to the imagination, and that at last moves the affections. And if these little impulses set the great wheels of devotion on work, the largeness and height of that shall not at all be prejudiced by the smallness of its occasion. If the fire burns bright and vigorously, it is no matter by what means it was at first kindled; there is the same force, and the same refreshing virtue in it, kindled by a spark from a flint, as if it were kindled by a beam from the sun.

I am far from thinking that these external