Meditations on the holy sacrament of the Lords last Supper Written many years sinceMeditations on the holy sacrament of the Lords last Supper Written many yeares since

CHAP. XII.

Inferences of Practice from the consideration of the former Actions.

THESE are all the holy actions we find to have been by Christ and his Apostles, celebrated in the great mystery of this Supper: all other humane accessions and superstructions, that are by the policy of Satan and that carnal affection, which ever laboureth to reduce Gods service unto an outward and pompous gaudiness, foisted into the substance of so divine a work, are all of them that straw^a and stubble, which he who is a consuming ^bfire, will at last purge away. Impotent Christ was not that he could not, nor malignant that he would not appoint, nor improvident that he could not foresee, the needfulness of such actions, which are by some proposed, not as matter of ornament, comeliness and ceremony, (a thing left ever arbitrary to the Church) but are obtruded on consciences (swayed with superstitious pompousness) for matters substantial and necessary to be observed. As if God, who in the first Creation of the world from nothing, did immediately after the work produced cease from all manner of further Creations, ⟨p. 73⟩did in the second creation of the world from sin, not finish the work himself, but leave it imperfect, to be by another consummated and finished. Certainly whatsoever humane Inventions do claim, direct, proper, and immediate subscription of Conscience, and do propose themselves as essential, or integral, or any way necessary parts of divine mysteries; they do not only rob God of his honour, and intrude on his Sovereignty, but they do farther lay on him the aspersion of an imperfect Saviour, who standeth in need of the Churches concurrence, to consummate the work which he had begun. Away then with those Actions of elevation, adoration, oblation, circumgestation, mimcall gestures, silent whisperings, and other the like encroachments, in the supposed proper and real sacrifice of Christ in the Mass, (wherein I see not how they avoid the guilt of Saint Pauls fearful observation. To crucify again the Lord of glory, and put him unto an open shame:) In which things