Five disputations of church-government and worship

Reas. 2. The constant use of Forms of Prayer depriveth people of their Ministers gifts, and potently tendeth to work the people into a dull formality, and to a mere outside heartless kind of service, Which is as great an enemy to serious Devotion, and consequently to mens salvation, as almost any thing that's to be found among professed Christians in the Church. How dangerously and obstinately do such delude themselves, and think that they are as uprightly religious as the best? and so refuse all the humbling convincing light that should bring them to a change, and blindly misapply the promises to themselves, and go on in mere presumption to the last: and all because they thus draw near to God with their lips, and say over a form of words, when their hearts are far from him, and they know not, or observe not what they say.

Reas. 2. The constant use of Forms of Prayer depriveth people of their Ministers gifts, and potently tendeth to work the people into a dull formality, and to a meer outside heartless k•nd of service, Which is as great an enemy to serious Devotion, and consequently to mens salvation, as almost any thing thats to be found among professed Christians in the Church. How dangerously and obstinately do such delude themselves, and think that they are as uprightly religious as the best? and so refuse all the humbling convincing light that should bring them to a change, and blindly misapply the promises to themselves, and go on in meer presumption to the last: and all because they thus draw neer to God with their lips, and say over a form of words, when their hearts are far from him, and they know not, or observe not what they say.

And that constancy in Forms doth potently tend to this dead formality, we need no other proof then experience. How hard doth the best man find it to keep up life and seriousness in the constant hearing or speaking of the same words? If you say that it is our fault▪ I grant it: but it is an uncurable fault while we are in the flesh: or at least its few that ever are very much cured of it, and non wholly. There's much also in nature it self to cause this. A man that delighteth in Music is weary of it, if he have constantly the same instrument and tune: or at least cannot possibly have that delight that Variety would afford him. So is it in recreations, and oft in diet, and other things. Novelty affecteth: Variety pleaseth: Commonness dulleth us. And though we must not therefore have a New God, or a New Christ, or a New Gospel (the fullness of these affordeth the soul a daily variety: and also their perfect