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to believe what reason does not comprehend; but not what reason contradicts. Now, in order to believe the Trinity, it is absolutely and peculiarly necessary to divest the divine Being of all materiality; since reason would positivelycontradict the proposition, that three persons, having any materiality, could be one. God is a Spirit, whose attribute is ubiquity; and therefore there is no contradiction in reason to suppose and to affirm, that the divine nature might be and was united, though in a mysterious manner, to the man Jesus, in order to give efficacy: to his sufferings; while Jesus might pray to him as his father, who was in heaven. If God, then, be a Spirit-an all-present Spirit-he is the searcher of all hearts, and must be worshipped, not with feigned service, but in spirit and in truth; and the Trinity is valuable in proportion as it more strongly inculcates this doctrine of divine immateriality, by rendering the belief in it necessary.

Moreover: Christ having taken the manhood into God, hath sat down at the right hand of the Father. Now, believers are told that they are intimately united to their Saviour; that they are very members of his flesh and of his bones: a most powerful motive to their highest exertions in the improvement of divine grace; since, in virtue of this union, and of the words of their Master-" Where I am, there ye shall

be also," the highest places in the heavens are opened to their hopes.

Lastly this mystery weakens not, by dividing, our affections towards the Supreme Being, but strengthens, by multiplying, those tender ties which attach us to him in the bonds of love and of gratitude. When we regard the same Being as the Father, who, in calling us into life, hath placed us in the way of eternal salvation; as the Son, who interposed and suffered in order to restore us to those hopes of happiness which, by transgression, we had forfeited; and as the Holy Ghost, who strengthens and refreshes our frail natures, in that contest against the wiles and power of our adversary, in which we are, on our part, to make our election sure, and to work out our salvation with trembling: when, I say, we concentrate in one God the various attachments which we thus owe to our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier; how are we employed, but in contemplating that omnipotent and divine Nature, from whose purity and power we might well recoil, under various phrases and characters of amiableness and kindness? but in adoring a merciful Being, whom we find to have exerted and expended all the best attributes and perfections and capacities of his nature, for the welfare of fallen creatures? What love, what gratitude, naturally spring up in the breast, as resulting from such views of the almighty and

eternal Sovereign!-The purest motives to the purest service! for, while he hath himself, in the person of Christ, specified the keeping of his commandments, as the evidence and test of love, we know that this obedience is the most acceptably and the most effectually performed, when it flows from so celestial a principle.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE REIGN OF GEORGE II.

Contents.

I. Tranquillity of the English Church. II. Licentiousness of Manners: Drinking; Gaming; Dishonesty; the Drama; Novels.-III. Infidelity.-IV. Infidel Writers: Hobbes, Collins, Woolston, Tindal.-V. Hume, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke.-VI. Replies: Warburton, Leland, Lardner, Doddridge, Gibson, Sherlock, Secker, West, Lord Lyttelton.-VII. Differences among Churchmen: Warburton and Law; Middleton and Dodwell.-VIII. Society for Reformation of Manners-IX. Society for propagating the Gospel in foreign Parts; and Society for promoting Christian Knowledge.-X. Raine's Hospital; Magdalene; Asylum.-XI. Acts of Parliament relating to Colleges ; to Quakers, Jews, Marriages, &c.-XII. Learned Divines.-XIII. Learned Dissenters.-XIV. Methodists: History.-XV. Statement and Refutation of their Tenets.-XVI. Moravians.-XVII. Hutchinsonians.XVIII. Swedenborgians.

I. IT happens to the church as to individuals: they have naturally recourse to God, and seek him in the day of calamity; but, in the calm of prosperous affairs, become thoughtless, indo

lent, luxurious, and inattentive to the Giver of good.

When George II. ascended the throne, the Church of England reposed in tranquillity. Ecclesiastical controversies were lessened in number and violence. Those watchwords of opposition, the terms High and Low Church, had passed from religion to politics, and were insensibly mitigated into Court and Country Party; and among the prelates who adorned this portion of history we find the names of Butler, Gibson, King, Secker, Lowth, and Warburton *.

II. But, notwithstanding these advantages, the practice of real piety had experienced a melancholy decline, and licentiousness overspread the land.

A motion in the House of Lords, for altering the duties on spirituous liquors, and permitting them to be again sold with less restraint, occasioned a debate, in which some of the speakers took a retrospect of the gradual progress made by the people in dissipation, and on the connexion of intoxication with crime. In truth, spirituous liquors may be considered as the poisoned fountain, whence flows almost all the profligacy of the poor. Their excessive abuse

* In 1714 Convocation drew up a form of receiving converts from Popery.-Wilk. Com. v. 4. p. 660.

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