Selected quad for the lemma: england_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
england_n	aaron_n	moses_n	religion_n	18	3	4.5831	4	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A61626	Sermons preached on several occasions to which a discourse is annexed concerning the true reason of the sufferings of Christ : wherein Crellius his answer to Grotius is considered / by Edward Stillingfleet ...; Sermons. Selections	Stillingfleet, Edward, 1635-1699.	1673 (1673)	Wing S5666; ESTC R14142	389,972	404

as fabulous impostures they would allow no difference of sacred and prophane for they would drink the wine of the sacrifices promiscuously and anoint their heads commonly with the sacred oyl in a word they owned no distinction of good and evil but thought the greatest wickedness to be good to them To say there is such a Generation of men among us is to foretel our ruine more certainly than Comets and the most dreadful presages do For this is a sort of madness which seldom seizes upon a people but when they are past cure and therefore are near their end 4. Spiritual pride This was very remarkable in the people of the Jews in a time when they had as little reason for it as any people in the world They still looked on themselves as Gods chosen and peculiar people his darlings and his delight and thought that Gods honour and interest in the world were mightily concerned in their preservation If they should be destroyed they could not imagine what God would do for a people to serve him for all but themselves they looked on with a very scornful pity and thought that God hated them because they did They had the purity of his ordinances in his house of prayer and the society of the faithful among themselves whereas all others they thought served God only with their own inventions or placed their Religion in dull morality They were the people who maintained his cause and ventured their lives and estates for it and therefore God was bound in faithfulness to defend them and he must deny himself if he did destroy them It seems strange to us that a people rejected by God for their horrible Hypocrisie should claim such an interest in him when they were marked out for destruction by him but such is the bewitching nature of spiritual pride and Hypocrisie that it infatuates the minds of men to their ruin and flatters them with their interest in the Promises till God makes good his threatenings and destroys them Never any people thought they had a richer stock of promises to live on than they ancient promises to Abraham Isaac and Iacob full promises of favour protection and deliverance from enemies particular promises made to them and to no other people in the world Besides these they had mighty experiences of Gods kindness towards them undoubted experiences not depending on the deceitful workings of fancy but seen in very strange and wonderful deliverances frequent experiences throughout the whole History of their nation and peculiar experiences being such vouchsafements to them which God communicated to none but his chosen people Add to these that they had at this time a wonderful zeal for the true worship of God as they thought they regarded no persecution or opposition but thought it their glory and honour to sacrifice themselves for the cause of God and his people And yet all this while God was the greatest enemy they had and all their pretences signified nothing to him who saw their unsusserable pride and loathsome Hypocrisie through those thin vails they had drawn over them to deceive the less observing sort of men by Other sins that are open and publick God preserves the Authority of his Laws by punishing of them but these spiritual sins of pride and Hypocrisie he not only vindicates his Authority over the consciences of men but the infiniteness of his wisdom and knowledge in their discovery and his love to Integrity and inward holiness in the punishment of them And therefore these sins are more especially odious to God as incroaching upon his highest and most peculiar attributes thence he is said to resist the proud as though he made an attempt upon God himself and he loaths the Hypocrite in heart as one that mocks God as well as deceives men The first tendency to the destruction of this nation of the Jews was the prevalency of the Pharisaical temper among them which was a compound of pride and Hypocrisie and when the field was over-run with these tares it was then time for God to put in his sickle and cut them down God forbid that our Church and the Protestant Religion in it should be in danger of destruction for that would be a judgement beyond fire and sword and plague and any thing we have yet smarted by that would be the taking away the Kingdom of God from us and setting up the Kingdom of darkness that would be not only a punishment to our own Age but the heaviest curse next to renouncing Christianity we could entail upon posterity But however though God in mercy may design better things for us we cannot be sufficiently apprehensive of our danger not so much from the business of our enemies as those bad Symptoms we find among our selves When there is such monstrous pride and ingratitude among many who pretend to a purer worship of God than is established by Law as though there were little or no difference between the Government of Moses and Aaron and the bondage of Egypt O England England what will the Pride and unthankfulness of those who profess Religion bring thee to Will men still prefer their own reputation or the interest of a small party of Zealots before the common concernments of our faith and Religion O that we did know at least in this our day the things that belong to our peace but let it never be said that they are hid from our eyes But if our common enemy should enter in at the breaches we have made among our selves then men may wish they had sooner known the difference between the reasonable commands of our own Church and the intolerable Tyranny of a forrain and usurped power between the soft and gentle hands of a mother and the Iron sinews of an Executioner between the utmost rigour of our Laws and the least of an Inquisition If ingratitude were all yet that were a sin high enough to provoke God to make our condition worse than it is but to what a strange height of spiritual pride are those arrived who ingross all true god iness to themselves as though it were not possible among us to go to heaven and to Church together As though Christ had no Church for 1500. years and more wherein not one person can be named who thought it unlawful to pray by a prescribed form As though men could not love God and pray sincerely to him that valued the peace and order of the Church above the heats and conceptions of their own brains Where differences proceed meerly from ignorance and weakness they are less dangerous to themselves or others but where there is so much impatience of reproof such contempt of superiours such uncharitable censures of other men such invincible prejudices and stiffeness of humour such scorn and reproach cast upon the publick worship among us What can such things spring from but a root of bitterness and spiritual pride I speak not these things