the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you.......Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh? Have ye suffered so many things in vain?......After that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days and months, and times and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain......Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Behold, I Paul say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing......Christ is become of no effect unto you, whoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace." These are strong expressions. Such again are those in the Epistle to the Colossians. "Let no man, therefore, judge you in meat or in drink, or in respect of an holiday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath

days, which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ. Let no man be

guile you of your reward in a voluntary humility.......Wherefore, if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances: (touch not; taste not; handle not: which all are to perish with the using ;) after the commandments and doctrine of men ?" According to the same purport, he prophetically forewarns the Thessalonians, in his 2d Epistle (ii. 6-11), and also Timothy, in his 1st Epistle (iii. and iv.), of the corruptions which the superstitions of future ages, and the spirit of Popery, shall one day introduce into the Church1.

Nothing then, according to St. Paul's view of the subject, can be more alien to the genius of Christianity, than that tendency to deviate from the simple spirit of the Gospel, so natural to timid minds, by the introduction

1 See also the two last chapters of Sir Isaac Newton's remarks on the prophecy of Daniel, with reference to the growth of superstition in the Christian Church.

of new and uncalled-for modes of serving God, beyond those which the obvious decencies of public worship and the deference due to the established and legitimate authorities of the Church require. Mere ceremonies, it is true, as such, are among the things indifferent, neither good nor bad. So thought Paul, and so taught Paul, when he declared that "neither circumcision availeth any thing nor uncircumcision ;" when in conformity with a vow he shaved his head, and when, to avoid giving unnecessary offence to the Jews, he circumcised Timothy. But when these things come to be elaborately and ostentatiously set up as conditions of salvation; when the attention is forcibly called away from the inward service of the heart to the mere "modus operandi," the outward service of the body, then assuredly the spiritual worshipper of Christ should begin to be upon his guard, that he attach not to these supplementary accidents of religion that scrupulous deference which is due only to the fundamental principles of faith. Few errors are so truly seductive as

this, because few are at once so natural and at the same time so well intentioned. But long experience, the experience of eighteen centuries, has shown that few errors eat more deeply into the very essence of religion, and that rarely, if ever, servility and vitality of devotion can be found together. During a moment of artificial excitement they may serve to enhance, but, like all other stimulants, they will ultimately deaden the feelings which they are intended to encourage. The history of superstition, from its first buddings in the innocent conceits of a sensitive mind, through all the gradual accumulations of successive generations, until it finally settled in the establishment of Popery, affords a humiliating and instructive lesson to the Christian student. It informs him how much serious harm he may ultimately be doing to the cause of true religion when, in yielding to an excited imagination, he finds himself preferring strong sensations to sound reason, and setting up human inventions in rivalry with the injunctions of Scripture. Compare Paul the tent-maker,

contentedly working at his humble occupation, in order that he might be enabled to preach gratuitously the Gospel of Christ, with Simeon upon his pillar, or Anthony in the deserts of the Thebaid. What a transition does the view present from the sober fervour of enlightened Christianity to the ravings of a benighted fanaticism! And yet towards the production of this latter stage every member of the early church had contributed his share, who in the course of the three first centuries had lent his aid in encumbering anew his religion with that tissue of slavish observances from which Christ had made him free. "Let no man beguile you of your reward, in a voluntary humility." These words of St. Paul, already quoted, afford a sound and wholesome lesson. Nothing is so entirely becoming to our nature as that submission of the heart and soul to the divine will which the Gospel prescribes. But how different is this from the abject degradation of both mind and body, which superstition, whether Pagan or selfstyled Christian, would inculcate ! We hear