The beatitudes

2. Uncharitableness sours your good duties; you pray and come to Church, but refuse to be tied in a knot of amity; what profit is there of all your seeming devotion? we are bid to lift up pure hands without wrath, 1 Tim, 2.8. The uncharitable person doth not lift up pure hands in prayer, but leprous hands, bloody hands: 1 Joh. 3.16. Whosoever hates his brother is a murderer. Prayer saith Chrysostom, may be compared to a fine Garland; the hands that make a Garland had need be clean: So the heart that makes a prayer had need be clean: wrath and anger do sully a Christians prayers, and will the Holy God touch them? the uncharitable man poisons his own prayers, and will the Lord accept of a poisoned sacrifice?

2. Uncharitableness sowres your good duties; you pray and come to Church, but refuse to be tyed in a knot of amity; what profit is there of all your seeming devotion? we are bid to lift up pure hands without wrath, 1 Tim, 2.8. The uncharitable person doth not lift up pure hands in prayer, but leprous hands, bloody hands: 1 Joh. 3.16. Whosoever hates his brother is a murderer. Prayer saith Chrysostom, may be compared to a fine Garland; the hands that make a Garland had need be clean: So the heart that makes a prayer had need be clean: wrath and anger do sully a Christians prayers, and will the Holy God touch them? the uncharitable man poisons his own prayers, and will the Lord accept of a poisoned sacrifice?

Oh that all this might at last persuade to cordial and fervent love; let us turn all our censuring into praying; let us pray to God that he would quench the fire of contention, and increase the fire of fraternal love among us: let us pray that the Lord would heal our Schisms, repair our breaches, that he would make us like the Cherubims with our faces looking one upon another; let us pray that God will make good that promise, that we shall serve him with one consent, or^*