13. The like defectiveness and disorder is in the Communion Collects
for the day.... There is no more reason why it should be appropriate
to that day than another, or rather be a common petition for all days,
&c.
I do not see how these supposed improprieties, for want of
appropriateness to the day, could be avoided without risk of the far
greater evil of too great appropriation to particular Saints and days as
in Popery. I am so far a Puritan that I think nothing would have been
lost, if Christmas day and Good Friday had been the only week days made
holy days, and Easter the only Lord's day especially distinguished. I
should also have added Whitsunday; but that it has become unmeaning
since our Clergy have, as I grieve to think, become generally Arminian,
and interpreting the descent of the Spirit as the gift of miracles and
of miraculous infallibility by inspiration have rendered it of course of
little or no application to Christians at present. Yet how can Arminians
pray our Church prayers collectively on any day? Answer. See a 'boa
constrictor' with an ox or deer. What they do swallow, proves so
astounding a dilatability of gullet, that it would be unconscionable
strictness to complain of the horns, antlers, or other indigestible
non-essentials being suffered to rot off at the confines, [Greek: herkos
hodonton]. But to write seriously on so serious a subject, it is
mournful to reflect that the influence of the systematic theology then
in fashion with the anti-Prelatic divines, whether Episcopalians or
Presbyterians, had quenched all fineness of mind, all flow of heart, all
grandeur of imagination in them; while the victorious party, the
Prelatic Arminians, enriched as they were with all learning and highly
gifted with taste and judgment, had emptied revelation of all the
doctrines that can properly be said to have been revealed, and thus
equally caused the extinction of the imagination, and quenched the life
in the light by withholding the appropriate fuel and the supporters of
the sacred flame.
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