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owever ignorant, may justify himself in scattering stones and fire squibs by an alleged unction of the Spirit. The miracle becomes perpetual, still beginning, never ending. Now on the Church doctrine, the original miracle provides for the future recurrence to the ordinary and calculable laws of the human understanding and moral sense; instead of leaving every man a judge of his own gifts, and of his right to act publicly on that judgment. The initiative alone is supernatural; but all beginning is necessarily miraculous, that is, hath either no antecedent, or one [Greek: heterou genous], which therefore is not its, but merely an, antecedent,--or an incausative alien co-incident in time; as if, for instance, Jack's shout were followed by a flash of lightning, which should strike and precipitate the ball on St. Paul's cathedral. This would be a miracle as long as no causative 'nexus' was conceivable between the antecedent, the noise of the shout, and the consequent, the atmospheric discharge. The Epistle Dedicatory. But this will be your glory and inexpugnable, if you cleave in truth and practice to God's holy service, worship and religion: that religion and faith of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is pure and undefiled before God even the Father, which is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep yourselves unspotted from the world. James i. 27. Few mistranslations (unless indeed the word used by the translator of St. James meant differently from its present meaning), have led astray more than this rendering of [Greek: Thraeskeia.] (outward or ceremonial worship, 'cultus', divine service,) by the English 'religion'. St. James sublimely says: What the 'ceremonies' of the law were to morality, 'that' morality itself is to the faith in Christ, that is, its outward symbol, not the substance itself. Chap. I. p. 1, 2. That the Bible is the word of God (said Luther) the same I prove as followeth: All things that have been and now are in the world; also how it now goeth and standeth in the world, the same was written altogether particularly at the beginning, in the first book of Moses concerning the creation. And even as God made and created it, even so it was, even so it is, and even so doth it stand to this present day. And although King Alexander the Great, the kingdom of Egypt, the Empire of Babel, the Persian, Grecian and Roman monarchs; the Emperors J
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