The cure of church-divisions, or, Directions for weak Christians to keep them from being…

The same all along I may say about the Relicts of Martyrs, and pilgrimages to their shrines, which the Religious sort begun at first, and loathe at last.

So also those forms of Liturgy which now are most distasted, were brought in by the most zealous religious people at the first: The many short invocations, versicles and responses which the people use, were brought in when the souls of the faithful did abound with zeal, and in holy fervours break out into such expressions, and could not well endure to be bare auditors, and not vocally ⟨p. 281⟩to bear their part in the praises of God, and prayers of the Church. And in time those very words which signified their raptures, were used by formal hypocrites without their zeal who first expressed them; and so being mortified, and made dead Images and used but by rote, in a senseless canting among the Papists, and also forced upon others; it is now become a point of zeal to avoid them, and take them as unlawful, and it is a great reason, because they are in the Mass-book: when the Mass-book received them from the predecessors of many of those men that now refuse them: But though indeed the highest expressions of zeal and rapture, are most loathsome when they are counterfeited and turned into a mere lifeless form: Yet it is the privation of life which is the fault of the Image, and not the thing as in it self. Restore the same spirit to those words, and they will be as good as they were at the beginning.

So also those forms of Liturgy which now are most distasted, were brought in by the most zealous religious people at the first: The many short invocations, versicles and responses which the people use, were brought in when the souls of the faithful did abound with zeal, and in holy servours break out into such expressions, and could not well endure to be bare auditors, and not vocally ⟨p. 281⟩to bear their part in the praises of God, and prayers of the Church. And in time those very words which signified their raptures, were used by formal hypocrites without their zeal who first exprest them; and so being mortified, and made dead Images and used but by rote, in a senseless canting among the Papists, and also forced upon others; it is now become a point of zeal to avoid them, and take them as unlawful, and it is a great reason, because they are in the Mass-book: when the Mass-book received them from the predecessors of many of those men that now refuse them: But though indeed the highest expressions of zeal and rapture, are most lothsome when they are counterfeited and turned into a meer lifeless form: Yet it is the privation of life which is the fault of the Image, and not the thing as in it self. Restore the same spirit to those words, and they will be as good as they were at the beginning.