Selected quad for the lemma: world_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
world_n	pure_a	religion_n	undefiled_a	1,985	5	11.7434	5	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A30466	Some passages of the life and death of the right honourable John, Earl of Rochester who died the 26th of July, 1680 / written by his own direction on his death-bed by Gilbert Burnet ...	Burnet, Gilbert, 1643-1715.	1680 (1680)	Wing B5922; ESTC R15099	49,660	204

true ends of Worship come within another consideration which is this A man is never entirely Reformed till a new Principle governs his thoughts Nothing makes that Principle so strong as deep and frequent Meditations of God whose Nature though it be far above our Comprehension yet his Goodness and Wisdom are such Perfections as fall within our Imagination And he that thinks often of God and considers him as governing the World and as ever observing all his Actions will feel a very sensible effect of such Meditations as they grow more lively and frequent with him so the end of Religious Worship either publick or private is to make the Apprehensions of God have a deeper root and a stronger influence on us The frequent returns of these are necessary Lest if we allow of too long intervals between them these Impressions may grow feebler and other Suggestions may come in their room And the Returns of Prayer are not to be considered as Favours extorted by meer Importunity but as Rewards conferred on men so well disposed and prepared for them according to the Promises that God has made for answering our Prayers thereby to engage and nourish a devout temper in us which is the chief root of all true Holiness and Vertue It is true we cannot have suitable Notions of the Divine Essence as indeed we have no just Idea of any Essence whatsoever Since we commonly consider all things either by their outward Figure or by their Effects and from thence make Inferences what their Nature must be So though we cannot frame any perfect Image in our Minds of the Divinity Yet we may from the Discoveries God has made of Himself form such Conceptions of Him as may possess our Minds with great Reverence for Him and beget in us such a Love of those Perfections as to engage us to imitate them For when we say we love God the meaning is We love that Being that is Holy Just Good Wise and infinitely perfect And loving these Attributes in that Object will certainly carry us to desire them in our selves For what ever We love in another We naturally according to the degree of our love endeavour to resemble it In sum the Loving and Worshipping God though they are just and reasonable returns and expressions of the sense we have of his Goodness to us Yet they are exacted of us not only as a Tribute to God but as a mean to beget in us a Conformity to his Nature which is the chief end of pure and undefiled Religion If some Men have at several times found out Inventions to Corrupt this and cheat the World It is nothing but what occurs in every sort of Employment to which men betake themselves Mountebanks Corrupt Physick Petty-Foggers have entangled the matters of Property and all Professions have been vitiated by the Knaveries of a number of their Calling With all these Discourses he was not equally satisfied He seemed convinced that the Impressions of God being much in Mens minds would be a powerful means to reform the World and did not seem determined against Providence But for the next State he thought it more likely that the Soul began anew and that her sense of what she had done in this Body lying in the figures that are made in the Brain as soon as she dislodged all these perished and that the Soul went into some other State to begin a new Course But I said on this Head That this was at best a conjecture raised in him by his fancy for he could give no reason to prove it true Nor was all the remembrance our Souls had of past things seated in some material figures lodged in the Brain Though it could not be denied but a great deal of it lay in the Brain That we have many abstracted Notions and Idea's of immaterial things which depends not on bodily Figures Some Sins such as Falshood and ill Nature were seated in the Mind as Lust and Appetite were in the Body And as the whole Body was the Receptacle of the Soul and the Eyes and Ears were the Organs of Seeing and Hearing so was the Brain the Seat of Memory Yet the power and faculty of Memory as well as of Seeing and Hearing lay in the Mind and so it was no unconceivable thing that either the Soul by its own strength or by the means of some subtiler Organs which might be fitted for it in another state should still remember as well as think But indeed We know so little of the Nature of our Souls that it is a vain thing for us to raise an Hypothesis out of the conjectures We have about it or to reject one because of some difficulties that occur to us since it is as hard to understand how we remember things now as how We shall do it in another State only we are sure we do it now and so we shall be then when we do it When I pressed him with the secret Joys that a good Man felt particularly as he drew near Death and the Horrours of ill men especially at that time He was willing to ascribe it to the Impressions they had from their Education But he often confessed that whether the business of Religion was true or not he thought those who had the perswasions of it and lived so that they had quiet in their Consciences and believed God governed the World and acquiesced in his Providence and had the hope of an endless blessedness in another State the happiest men in the World And said He would give all that he was Master of to be under those Perswasions and to have the Supports and Joys that must needs flow from them I told him the main Root of all Corruptions in Mens Principles was their ill life Which as it darkened their Minds and disabled them from discerning better things so it made it necessary for them to seek out such Opinions as might give them ease from those Clamours that would otherwise have been raised within them He did not deny but that after the doing of some things he felt great and severe Challenges within himself But he said He felt not these after some others which I would perhaps call far greater Sins than those that affected him more sensibly This I said might flow from the Disorders he had cast himself into which had corrupted his judgment and vitiated his tast of things and by his long continuance in and frequent repeating of some Immoralities he had made them so familiar to him that they were become as it were natural And then it was no wonder if he had not so exact a sense of what was Good or Evil as a Feaverish man cannot judge of Tasts He did acknowledge the whole Systeme of Religion if believed was a greater foundation of quiet than any other thing whatsoever for all the quiet he had in his mind was that he could not think so good a Being as the Deity would make him miserable I asked if when by the