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ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A30428	A sermon preached before the House of Commons, on the 31st of January, 1688 being the thanksgiving-day for the deliverance of this kingdom from popery and arbitrary power, by His Highness the Prince of Orange's means / by Gilbert Burnet ...	Burnet, Gilbert, 1643-1715.	1689 (1689)	Wing B5885; ESTC R22904	17,313	44

many under-Mediators have been brought in to divert us from depending solely upon the only Mediator by whom we are taught to come to God And how have the Christian Churches been defiled with so many visible Objects of Worship and so gross a Pageantry as if the designe had been to make the Idolatry of Christians appear to be a much more scandalous thing than that of the Heathens ever was But the freeing our Temples and even our Thoughts from Idolatry is but one branch of that which is implied in this That the Jehovah or Lord is our God for this signifies that we not only do not worship him in a way unworthy of him but that we do adore him in those instances that become this Relation of his being our God and this we do when we seriously call upon him and pray to him when we do entirely depend on him and resign up our selves wholly to his conduct when we do sincerely acknowledge That all the blessings we receive come from him and when in a word we perform all those duties to him which we owe to the Author of our Being and the Giver of all the good that we enjoy But if we laugh at all that is sacred or set about the performances of it in so slight a manner as shew how little we believe that which we profess if it is plain that Prayers and Thanksgivings Worship and Sacraments are only Words or Rites of form and if the whole frame of our Lives and the disposition of our Hearts shews that these things are only masks and disguises put on to deceive those that have some regard to them Then it is plain That the Lord is not our God. And if he is not our God in this first sense we have no reason to expect that he should be our God long in the second sense of these words that is That he will protect and defend us He is a sun and a shield and will give both grace and glory but this blessedness comes only on those that trust in him It is certain That according to the Phrase in the Psalms the shields of the earth that is The defence of the Land belong unto God. And how unworthy soever those that have made him their God may have become of that relation yet till their sins grow up to that height that he will throw them off he will continue to watch over them with so distinguishing a Providence That all the World shall see that his eyes are upon those that fear him and that hope in his mercy he can and will when he thinks fit defeat the councils of the wise and make the diviners mad He taketh the crafty in the snare which they themselves had laid And as we do all with joy feel and acknowledge this day he can raise up deliverances for his people even when they seemed to be as sheep appointed for the slaughter he can raise up an Instrument even the man whom he has made strong for himself and so animate direct and conduct him that he with a small Force in opposition to a great and powerful Army should yet find no Enemy but overturn a mighty Empire and that with so little confusion and disorder not to say so little blood and destruction that instead of Scenes of horrour all was Welcome and Acclamation and this God has carried on so far that we are now upon the point of seeing all end in an entire Settlement Thus tho' God knows We I mean all ranks and conditions of Men or to enumerate them in Daniels words our Kings our Princes and our Fathers and all the people of the Land had sinned and done wickedly and rebelled against him so that we had reason to have looked for some heavy Curse to be poured out upon us and that because we had rejected the Lord from being our God therefore he should have cast us off from being his people yet he in the midst of all this wrath that we had stirred up against our selves has remembred mercy And he has given us such a Pledge and all the World such a proof that he is our God that if this does not soften us first into Repentance and then into acknowledgments and to the performance of those Vows that we made to him in our Distresses We may fear that we shall fall under that Curse of the Tree which continued Barren after the last essay of cultivation was made upon it Cut it down why should it cumber the Ground any longer 4. I come now in the last place to propose to you those things by which you can secure to your selves and the Nation this great blessing of the Lords being our God I doubt not but you have all the former part of my Text enough upon your minds It is indeed your Duty and you ought to do it but even in order to the securing our Temporal happiness you may all now see how necessary it is to take care that God be always on our side for the best laid and most prospering designs are soon blasted when they are crost by him You see such revolutions and such disappointments in all humane Councils and in the fairest probabilities that I hope this will make you for ever consider of what importance the blessing of God is to the success of every undertaking and to lay this before you in instances that are fresh and speaking you saw several Assemblies of Parliament from which the Nation did expect a happy Settlement and yet all were disappointed After that you saw another from which you expected every thing that was fatal and yet God made that the means of maintaining our Laws and our Religion You saw a mighty Army and a vast Revenue fortified by a formidable Ally but you could never have hoped that this Army which gave you so much Terrour should have have had so great a share in the Glory of your Deliverance and no Man could have thought that the Councils of our enemies should have done more for us than all the Projects of our Friends could ever have done you who saw the state of things three Months ago could never have thought that so total a revolution could have been brought about so easily as if it had been only the shifting of Scenes These are speaking Instances to let you see of what consequenee it is to a Nation to have the Lord for its God. We have seen it hitherto in so eminent a manner that we are forced to conclude that we are under a special influence of Heaven and since in God there is no variableness nor shadow of turning We must confess that if there comes any change in Gods Methods towards us that it arises only out of our ingratitude and unworthiness If we will go on in our Atheism and Immoralities in our contempt of God and Religion and in all those disorders that have cried so long for vengeance upon us then we may justly apprehend that this short reviving will be

to perish It is not to be supposed that so generous a Nation as this is can bring upon it self so foul a blot as ever to forget so vast a service Their very name ought to be to us to speak in a phrase of Scripture Poetry as ointment poured forth We were their Neighbours and Friends and their Brethren before but now upon this heightning of our Relation and Obligations to them if we cannot find out terms of greater tenderness yet at least we must study to feel somewhat and ever to carry it in our hearts towards them that cannot be expressed in words When we have thus secured our selves from Cries and Allarms the next care must be to see Justice and Peace so to flourish at home and Rewards to be so equally dispensed with as little punishment as can possibly consist with publick safety that there may be little occasion given to Complaint The exact conduct of Publick Justice and the avoiding every Invasion upon the Freedom of Conscience which is the first and the most Sacred of all a Man's Rights are the surest ways to prevent all just cause of Complaint To speak the truth and to work righteousness to relieve the oppressed without respect of persons to plead the cause of the Widow and the Fatherless and the not ruling over the Consciences of any with force or cruelty but the leaving Men within the limits of a just discretion as to the manner of it the entire freedom of serving God in the sincerity of their hearts will put an end to many heavy and just Complaints which have been poured out before God in the bitterness of many Mens Spirits whose lives have been made a burden to them only because they could not act contrary to those persuasions which they were not able to change or overcome But the removing the just occasions of complaint is not enough to take away all complainings from us unless we can deliver our selves from an impatient and jealous temper which forms complaints out of nothing which creates imaginary Dangers and suggests groundless Jealousies This temper having once sowred our minds will give an ill taste to every thing every humour disagreeing to ours or way of behaviour that we do not like will be so swelled up to us by a disturbed imagination that we will be often in the state of those that were in great fear where no fear was We must put on a meek and gentle a humble and good-natured temper which thinks no evil and believeth and hopeth all things 3. And thus I have gone through the first half of my Text Happy is the people that is in such a case But to speak in S. Paul's words I go now to shew you a more excellent way For how much soever all these Blessings may affect you here is one of another sort to which they all put together cannot be compared Happy is the people whose God is the Lord. When Idolatry had spread it self over the World every Nation City and Family had its peculiar Object of Adoration which was called its God that was worshipped by it and to which the people fled and on which they depended in all their Distresses This being the Corruption under which mankind had fallen When God inspired Moses to deliver to the Iews a Religion by which he intended to wean them from Idolatry in such a way as their Capacities and Inclinations could bear He proposed himself to them under that simple Idea of being the Iohovah that is he who truly and necessarily is that by the simplicity of this Notion they might be kept in and might not let their minds run out into gross imaginations concerning him for when Images of God are once formed in peoples minds they will be easily led to represent him to their senses in some visible and gross Shape But as God was presented in so simple and such an unbodied Idea to them so he entred into a Covenant with that Nation by which they on the one hand were engaged to worship him only and to do it in a way suitable to his Nature and to those precepts which he had set before them so he on his part promised to them Protection and Acceptance And this is the full meaning of those Words so often repeated in the Old Testament I am the Lord thy God which are sometimes a remembrance to the people of their Duty towards him and at other times an assurance to them of that Protection which they might expect from God so that the happiness of a people whose God is the Lord amounts to these two things the one is that they serve and worship God sincerely being delivered from the Corruptions and Defilements of Idolatry and the other is that they came under the special Care and Protection of God. To make the true Jehovah our God imports first that we adore and acknowledge him and worship him in Spirit and Truth and that we free our minds from every thought that leads to Idolatry and our Worship from every Object that may tempt us to it The two extreams relating to Religion seem to be Atheism and Idolatry and yet they come nearer one another than can be imagined for as the one worships no God so the other makes that which is worshipped to be no God. When we bring God down in our minds to somewhat that is like our selves or only a very little better the Impression that such a Religion can make on us will be but feeble and it working only on our fears may subdue us into a blind compliance to some contrivances that way prove of advantage to those who have invented them but will never purifie nor exalt our natures which certainly is the true design of Religion In a word Atheism denies God and Idolatry degrades him It depresses our Idea's of him and debases all our Notions of Religion The pomp and solemnity of it will perhaps affect the Vulgar but they being satisfied with the expence and trouble that their Religion puts them to grow upon that dissolute and immoral severe and cruel so that nothing defaces all the Impressions of Religion nor destroys all the Seeds of Morality that are born with us more than Idolatry And as the Heathens departing from the Idea of the great Gods being the sole Object of Worship their mixing with him an Infinity of Inferiour Deities and their representing the Divinity by some visible Objects to their Senses was the Idolatry practised all the World over and into which the Iews did frequently relapse during the time that the Old Testament was written in opposition to which the true Jehovah was the God of Israel So another not unlike this in all its main Characters was introduced among Christians The notion of a single Mediator was as much pressed in the New Testament as that of one God is in the Old and the Worship was reduced to a plainness and simplicity far different from the Pomp that was allowed by Moses and yet how