A Continuation of morning-exercise questions and cases of conscience practically resolvedA Continuation of morning-exercise questions and cases of conscience practicaly resolved

3. Hereby our Religion would revive, and become a vital powerful thing; and consequently more grateful to God, and awful to men.

1. More grateful to God, who is not pleased with the stench of Carcasses, or with the dead shows of Religion instead of the living substance. We should hereupon not be deserted of the divine presence, which we cannot but reckon will retire when we entertain him but with insipid formalities. What became of the Christian interest in the world, when Christians had so sensibly diverted from ⟨p. 103⟩minding the great things of Religion to little minute circumstances, about which they affected to busy themselves, or to the pursuit of worldly advantages and delights?

1. More grateful to God, who is not pleased with the stench of Carkasses, or with the dead shewes of Religion instead of the living substance. We should hereupon not be deserted of the divine presence, which we cannot but reckon will retire when we entertain him but with insipid formalities. What became of the Christian interest in the world, when Christians had so sensibly diverted from ⟨p. 103⟩minding the great things of Religion to little minute circumstances, about which they affected to busie themselves, or to the pursuit of worldly advantages and delights?

2. More awful to men; They who are tempted to despise the faint languid appearances of an impotent, inefficacious, spiritless Religion, discern a Majesty in that which is visibly living, powerful, and productive of suitable fruits. Who that shall consider the state of the Christian Church, and the gradual declining of Religion for that three hundred years from Constantine's time to that of Phocas, but shall see cause at once to lament the sin and folly of men, and adore the righteous severity of God? For as Christians grew gradually to be loose, wanton, sensual, and their leaders contentious, luxurious, covetous, proud, ambitious, affecters of Domination, so was the Christian Church gradually forsaken of the divine presence. Inasmuch as that at the same time when Boniface obtained from Phocas the title of universal Bishop, in defiance of the severe sentence of his Predecessor Gregory the great, sprang up the dreadful delusion of Mahomet