and to good men to grow better; and also be the means of their doing so.
That which men have accounted religion in the several countries of the world, generally speaking, has had a great and conspicuous part in all public appearances, and the face of it been kept up with great reverence throughout all ranks, from the highest to the lowest; not only upon occasional solemnities, but also in the daily course of behaviour. In the heathen world, their superstition was the chief subject of statuary, sculpture, painting, and poetry. It mixed itself with business, civil forms, diversions, domestic entertainments, and every part of common life. The Mahometans are obliged to short devotions five times between morning and evening. In Roman Catholic countries, people cannot pass a day without having religion recalled to their thoughts, by some or other memorial of it; by some ceremony, or public religious form, occurring in their way;[1]
- ↑ In Roman Catholic countries, people cannot pass a day without having religion recalled to their thoughts—by some ceremony, or public religious form, occurring in their way.]—"What in the former period (when speaking of the Heathen world) was called superstition, becomes in this, (when speaking of Roman Catholics,) Religion, and Religious forms; which the Papists pretending to connect with Christianity, and the Charge giving no hint that this is no more than a pretence, a plain
performance we are here examining. What reasonable man ever denied that the pomp of outward worship has been sometimes mistaken for inward piety? that positive institutions, when rested in as ends, instead of being applied as means, are hurtful to the interests of true religion? Not Bishop Butler, certainly, who blames the observances of the Papists on this account, some of them as being "in themselves wrong and superstitious;" and others, as being "made subservient to the purposes of superstition," and for this reason "abolished by our reformers." In the meanwhile, it will still be true, that bodily worship is by no means to be discarded, as unuseful in exciting spiritual devotion; on the contrary, that they mutually assist and strengthen each other; and that a mere mental intercourse with God, and a religious service purely intellectual, is altogether unsuitable to such a creature as man, during his present state on earth.
