One of Burr's favorite phrases was vital piety. It was said that he verily shone like a star in the pulpit and his faith carried over into his daily actions. A genuinely modest man, he wrote, William Foxcroft, who had congratulated him about an honor he received, I am bowed down under a sense of my insufficiency for ye important trust. Burr sent a barrel of flowers to Mrs. Foxcroft after a visit in their home. It was a gesture typical of Burr's graceful generosity, for Foxcroft was a rather lowly member of the Boston clergy hierarchy. This affable man could also use a political stiletto, as he proved in the case of Robert Morris. In 1745 and 1746, There had been riots in Elizabethtown when the East Jersey proprietors claimed land which certain settlers insisted they had previously bought from the Indians. When one of the defiant settlers was jailed for cutting timber on land he claimed was his own, his neighbors broke into the jail and released him. Burr openly sympathized with these rioters, whereupon Robert Morris, a leader of the proprietors, became Burr's opponent. In 1749, Burr learned that Morris had gone to London to wangle an appointment as governor of New Jersey. Burr quickly warned his British friend, Doddridge, Chief Justice Morris, though a man of great ingenuity, is sub rosa of most abandoned principles. pouring out his energy to put the college on its feet. Burr accepted no salary for three years while he was making long and tedious journeys, now ferrying over broad rivers, now riding through forests, now exposed to rain or snow, now splashing along muddy roads to solicit funds for the college. He was a superb teacher. As one of his faculty said, he had the most engaging methods of instruction, set the most intricate points in the clearest light. In 1752, Burr decided to go abroad to raise funds. Edwards admonished him to get a smallpox inoculation before you go. Vaccination was then a hotly debated innovation. When Burr received that letter, he paused in his packing and reflected about his life's direction. He was thirty-seven years old and the most eligible bachelor in the colony. Many hostesses had cunningly contrived to seat a niece next to Burr at a dinner party, or suggested that the daughter of the house show him the view at sunset from the grape arbor. Burr had been absorbed in the infant college, but he had remained single for more than academic reasons. The thought of Esther Edwards pursued him. When Burr had last seen her, Esther had been the same age as her mother had been when first she attracted Edwards. Not only was Esther enchanting to view, she had a peculiar smartness in her make and temper. She had qualities to be a consummate wife for a college president. She could reassure the shyest freshman, converse wittingly with an arrogant faculty intellectual, make a trustee purr. Burr had been a guest in many elegant houses, but at the Edwardses he sensed an ambiance that he coveted for his own household. A girl like Esther was worth waiting for, and now she was nineteen. Burr decided to send two deputies to Europe while he cantered up to Stockbridge on his handsome hunter Nimrod. The Edwardses were accustomed to having bows about their premises. Hopkins reported that if any gentle man desired acquaintance with his daughters, After handsomely introducing himself by properly consulting the parents, he was allowed all proper opportunity for it, a room and fire if needed. For such a beau as this one, we can be sure that the smaller children were extracted from the scene, and the visitor given every opportunity to be alone with Esther. In three days they were engaged. Because Burr was heaped with work, the Edwardses made a decision so magnanimous that it was called eccentric. In that time, weddings of the socially prominent were always held in the bride's house. Yet the Edwardses agreed to let Esther and her mother go down to Newark for the ceremony. Burr sent up one of his recent graduates to escort them, and the three set off, leaving Edwards at home to cope with the small children. First they took a trail to the Hudson River. a way so newly opened that workmen were still laying logs across squashy places and picking out stumps and stones. In the river valley were rich farmlands, dominated by Dutch barns with pitched roofs as graceful as wings. At Albany boats began the run to New York as she skimmed past the Palisades Sarah stared at the shore where her husband had gone hiking during his ministry in New York. I very frequently used to retire into a solitary place on the banks of Hudson's River at some distance from the city and had many sweet hours there. On June 29, 1752, Sarah sat alone, feeling the absence of the rest of her family. as a shining Esther was married to Aaron Burr. The students collected coins to buy the bride a silver can. These young men took a keen interest in the bride of their president. One wrote home to his parents, I think her a person of great beauty, though I must say that in my opinion she is rather young, being only twenty-one years of age for the president. The young man's next letter home shows that Esther had melted him. He wrote, I am sure, when he was in the condition of celibacy, the pleasure of his life bore no comparison to that he now possesses. I think her a woman of very good sense, of a genteel and virtuous education, amiable in her person, of great affability, very excellent economist. Burr commissioned the painter to do twin portraits of himself and his bride. The paintings have quite a history. They vanished after some deaths in the family. Then Judge Ogden Edwards, Timothy's son, heard that they had been given to a servant named Keezer. Strolling one day on Pearl Street in New York, Judge Edwards heard a storekeeper shout, Keizer, come here with your cart and take these boxes." The judge nabbed the drayman as he drove up and learned that the paintings were with the man's older sister. She turned out to be living in a bedraggled shack in Millburn, New Jersey. The portraits were in the attic, stuffing a hole in the roof through which sleet and wind had poured. The judge bought the paintings. They were exhibited in a Philadelphia museum to general acclaim, but now have disappeared again. Many curators would like to know where they are, because there is a strong possibility that the painter was John Singleton Copley. After the departure of its most vivid member, the Edwards house in Stockbridge was a paler place. But there were two pleasant diversions for Sarah that year. On May 29, Sarah Parsons had a little girl whom she named Esther. In Northampton on May 14, Mary Dwight had produced a son. These two babies were the reasons why Esther's sisters had been unable to share in her wedding. Mary's son was a prodigy. By the time he was eight years old, he was already prepared to go to college. By the time he finally went down to Yale, at the venerable age of thirteen, he had covered the first two years of college work, studying at home with his mother. People felt about young Timothy Dwight as vehemently as they had toward Edwards. He was so scintillating as a tutor at Yale that friends pushed him as a candidate for the college presidency when he was only twenty-six. Ezra Stiles was chosen that time, but after Stiles' death in 1795, Dwight was elected president of Yale and gave the college a vibrant time until 1817. He introduced a new subject, Bellatry. started the Divinity School and the Medical School and a chemistry department. In 1796, he preached a series of chapel sermons that blasted New England into another awakening. By 1802, a third of the boys at Yale claimed to be converted. Dwight also managed to be an expert in church music and to spark the founding of the foreign mission enterprise in this country as one of the first commissioners of the Congregational Board for Foreign Missions. One of the clues to his energy is in his phrase which Mary Lyon loved to quote to her girls at Mount Holyoke One hour's sleep before midnight is worth two after." Ezra Stiles actively disliked Dwight. He snorted that Dwight meditates great things, and nothing but great things will serve him. Stiles went through all his papers, fiercely erasing the places that mentioned Dwight, when later Stiles' daughter came into Dwight's office. She was indignant to find her father's papers stuffed into a cabinet with a broken hinge. A man of vast vitality, Dwight was a puzzling paradox who had the courage to oppose slavery, yet strained for public approval. He confessed once, particularly I have coveted reputation and influence to a degree which I am unable to justify." By December 1753, Sarah Parsons had another baby, a boy called Eli Hugh, and Sarah Edwards had a new career as a grandmother presiding over the arrival of babies. Edwards muttered about how often she took off to help on these occasions. When Mary became pregnant again, Lucy wrote, Who shall come, mother or I? My father will not be willing if she stays a great while." Edwards still needed his wife. He was wrestling now with the book that was to appear in 1758 as the great Christian doctrine of original sin defended. When Edwards wasn't at work on his book, he wrote letters. Often he made duplicate copies, in case one letter should be lost in ocean travel. To Erskine, August 3, 1757, he explained, Looking on these letters as of special importance, I send duplicates, lest one copy should fail. The packet in which I enclose these I cover to Mr. Gillies, and send to Boston. I have reserved a copy of this letter, and also of my other to you, dated July 25, intending to send them to Mr. Burr, to be by him conveyed by way of New York or Philadelphia. These were long, intricate letters, and the mind glazes at the thought of the work it meant to copy them twice in long hand. As the quiet Stockbridge years ticked on, Sarah continued to be a hostess. John Wright, a young Scot who had been a favorite student of Burr's at Princeton, came for a long visit before he departed for England. Many young men continued to appreciate Sarah Edwards as a superlative hostess, though she was now in the process of accepting the fact of aging. For a woman who has been a sprightly bell to past the irrevocable 45th birthday is as drastic a time as adolescence is. As girls moving into their teens must get used to their unfamiliar height, their odd glandular impulses, their emerging features and gifts, so a woman as she shades into middle age has to accept a new self. She finds she has a changed level of energy and is no longer eager to take chilly swims after sunset or whirl through three sets in a square dance. She finds ways to conserve her depleted resources. Sarah, who was totally feminine, had to meet all these implications of growing older, but Edwards gives no hint that he ever saw anything but the radiant girl he had married in 1727. Their parallel roles, his to write, hers to sew and listen to him, are mirrored in a letter Edwards sent on August 27, 1753, to a Mr. John Ely of Springfield, Massachusetts. Please to send us, by Deacon Brown, five or six yards of toe cloth, and also five or six yards of check, that which is good and serviceable and reasonable. And if you have any good paper, send me a couple of quire. P.S. Please also to send three sets of knitting needles of the common size. The tranquil days in Stockbridge were rumpled by a passing ruckus in 1753, when Edwards's moral plumb-line got him into another feud. A fire in the Indian boy's dormitory made him uneasy, for it hinted of arson. This set Edwards to scrutinizing the affairs of the school, and it became clear to him that peculiar things were going on in his administration. He had become skittish about controversy, and at first determined to stay out of this matter. But he could see that the widow of the excellent missionary John Sargent had not continued with the integrity of her husband. She had remarried. and along with her second husband was buttering an estate with funds that had been donated for work among the Indians. A conspicuously pretty girl, Abigail Sargent had infatuated Ezra Stiles when he had visited Stockbridge in 1750. Edwards might have been scared away from his plan to move there if he had ever seen a letter Mrs. Sargent had written to Stiles on November 6, 1750. Our worthy deacon is going forth with to push Mr. Edwards immediately into the mission, although he has been entreated sufficiently to forbear. My father, Captain Kellogg, Mr. Jones, and company are very bitterly against it. From the start, though Edwards unfortunately did not know it, he was unwelcome to the most prosperous white settler in the community and to his daughter. She had been raised near Boston and kept her city tastes, so she refused to live among Indians. on the main street. Sergeant had built a house for her on a hill above town. Still preserved, and now moved back nearer the center of the village, it is a handsome building, more substantial than a missionary might be expected to have. It has an elegant doorway, indoor paneling of burnished pine, and a bright, cheerful interior. Abigail saw that she was Well, he quit. The unworldly Edwards was no match for a woman as wily as she. Brainerd had not taken to her at all. He reported of a visit in her home that it was spent in company and conversation which were unprofitable. The idealistic Timothy Woodbridge, the schoolmaster and the deacon who had gone to try to persuade Edwards to come, had always mistrusted Abigail, but every one had admired Sargent and put up with Abigail for his sake until he died in 1747. Edwards had no appetite for another fracas. But he finally decided to challenge the misuse of funds. Abigail had charge of the boarding school for female Indians, and her new spouse had the concession to supply all the equipment for the schools from his shop. Their personal servants were paid out of mission funds. Another member of the family was employed as an usher. About four of their children had a free education there. A new building was to be placed on Abigail's land, and she was to be well paid for that. A New York merchant had received money for two years for clothes for Indian boys, yet no Indian children appeared to be wearing these clothes. At last Edwards sent Timothy to Boston. On September 15, 1755, with a letter to Thomas Prince asking to bring the attention of the sponsors to this see-me situation, Edwards wrote that he couldn't go along with Timothy because two of my children are ill. Abigail's father was furious. He tried lobbying with the board of sponsors and Edwards wrote Captain Ephraim Williams is in Concord, constantly busy with the representatives with his lime juice, punch, and wine. The committee was unimpressed by the lobbying and chose to take the word of Edwards. The Indians also confirmed Edwards' testimony. Once again the convivial Sarah had to face being snubbed in a small town by a lady who flounced off in the other direction when she saw an Edwards coming. Even Esther, safely married and out of it, wrote of her dismay at the rupture. It is not easy to be married to a man whose conscience leads him into sticky issues. Edwards wrote to Erskine that the business of the Indian Mission, since I have been here, has been attended with strange embarrassments, such as I never could have expected. Aside from the local problem, 1753 was so torpid a year that fifteen towns were fined for failing to send a representative to the state assembly. There had been no issues alive enough to stir a town to send delegates to their meetings, which granted lands, appointed officials, and made state laws. However, that year Edwards felt stirred to make his will because, as he put it, there was much to make me sensible of the great uncertainty of my life. So in March, he drew up two and one-half pages of close writing, which left Sarah his estate, as well as responsibility for deciding whether the boy should be brought up to learning or to some trade. Each boy was allotted 638 ounces of silver, which Sarah was authorized to dole out according to a schedule, depending on whether they were in college or apprenticed to a physician, a tradesman, or a lawyer. Edwards also provided for the possibility that they or any or either of them should be sent abroad. To the child who earned a first degree at college, he dangled his library as prize. The girls each received a half-portion of silver, except for the delicate Elizabeth, who still carried the mark of the anxiety Sarah had felt during that pregnancy at the time of Jerusha's death. Elizabeth, he feared, might have medical expenses, or not be able to marry, so he willed her a son's share. Edwards entrusted his most precious legacy and his life's achievement, all his manuscripts. In April, Timothy departed to study with Burr, though he was only fourteen. This was not an unusual age for a boy to go to college then. He could be admitted if he could pass an oral examination in Latin and Greek. Then he had to write out a copy of the college laws. The president signed it, and that served as his official permission to enter college. On the way down, Timothy was exposed to smallpox and stopped in New York with a violent fever. It was a tense period for his parents, but he recovered. When he joined Esther, she was delighted to have a brother near. She wrote Lucy, You don't know how smart Timothy looks with his new coat. I think there is not one in college who looks so smart and genteel. Soon Timothy decided he wanted to prove himself on his own instead of being tagged as the president's relative. So he moved into the dormitory to Esther's mortification. He had said nothing about it to me, but only in general. When Mr. Burr was gone, what if he should? What should I think of it? Should I be displeased? And so on. I promised my mother when she was here I would not oppose it. She said she thought it best. I should not. But only think of it. No brother. I expect it will set all the town a-talking. Tis a pity. Again, Sarah had her own way of handling a child. Though it embarrassed his sister, Timothy needed a chance to make his way on his own merits, and Sarah arranged for him to be free to make his own mistakes. Timothy, having had this chance to cut loose, ended by becoming a sedate citizen. In 1754, the dozing colonies were jolted by the French and Indian War. France claimed the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, which her voyagers and priests had probed first. if France controlled the Midwest, the British coastal colonies might strangle. However, the British conducted this significant contest with stunning ineptitude. Lord Loudon, Commander-in-Chief, wined and dined in New York City while Fort William Henry fell, and the Mohawk Valley, not far from Stockett Bridge, sizzled. William Livingston explained that there appears an universal languor and stupidity diffused through the plantations and we sit supine and inactive with the enemy at our very doors. the coast was shredded by inter-colony rivalries and by fights between governors and legislative bodies, though a few men, like Livingston, urged a unified war effort. Moreover, England had no notion of how to fight a guerrilla war, which was the French strategy. They used Indian tricks, ambush, deployment of scouts, conservation of ammunition, a form of war suited to the forest, whereas the British posted a few camps of mercenary soldiers along the borders and made gifts to the Indians, hoping to keep the Six Nations on their side. In 1756, General Braddock pushed out to what is now Pittsburgh and met a disaster. Even Gideon Hawley, who had been an expert woodman, had found it grim to travel in the frontier wilderness. He once told of being exceeding wet, and not having any dry clothes, was obliged to lay down wet, as I was in an old dirty wigwam Indians had left and had but little quiet rest. The next day we met with showers again, so we were obliged to ride with wet clothes all day. The clumsy British soldiers, used to the open fields of England, found it hard going, and for a time it appeared that the French would succeed in their plan to establish a series of forts connecting the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi rivers. This ugly little war came close to Stockbridge in September 1755, when there was a battle at Lake George with heavy losses, and again in 1758, when General James Abercrombie met his disaster at Fort Ticonderoga. their friends all worried about the Edwardses. Joseph Bellamy, down in the safety of Bethlehem, Connecticut, urged the whole family to come and stay with him until the war was over. On December 3, 1755, Burr wrote his friend William Hogg in England, I have lately had a letter from Stockbridge. Mr. Edwards and his family are in usual health, except his daughter Betty, who is never well, and I believe not long for this world. Their situation is yet distressing through fear of the enemy. soldiers swarmed through Stockbridge, and four were billeted with Sarah. They ate so enthusiastically that she submitted a bill to their commanding officer for eight hundred meals and seven gallons of rum. Finally, Edwards wrote a plea that no more such uninvited guests be tucked into their house. Sarah had all she could manage to do, nursing Edwards for six months from June 1754 until the following January. He had a disagreeable illness which made him shake so he couldn't write, a form of torture calculated to make such a man a restless patient. To add to Edwards' discomfiture, Sarah had to go help with the arrival of another grandchild Esther came up from Princeton to stay with her father. She did not enjoy the jitters of war she felt all around her, and wrote to a friend, I am not willing to be butchered by a barbarous enemy, nor can't make myself willing. Though Sarah and Jonathan stayed on in Stockbridge, they did concede to the war to the extent of shipping away the youngest children. Jonathan, a small, dark, plain nine-year-old, took off to study the Indian language with Gideon Hawley. Pinty and Betty went to Mary Dwight in Northampton. There, one afternoon, Betty was trying to amuse her lively nephew, four-year-old Timothy. She casually told him the alphabet, and he seemed to enjoy it, so the next day she sat down with him, planning to review the letters. To her astonishment, The small boy recited the whole alphabet off to her. By the time he was five, he had raced through the Bible. He went off at six to the Northampton school, where, when the bigger boys weren't using their Latin books, he would sneak a peek at them. By age seven, he had taught himself Latin. In another year, he had siphoned up everything the local schools could teach him, but Mary felt that Eight was really too young for Yale. So she made a schoolroom in the nursery at home, fitting it up with desks and mats, and taught him herself, with stress on geography, history, and music. One way she kept him busy was by having him practice penmanship. He experimented with various makes of pens, grades of paper, and types of ink until he became a model of fine handwriting. Everything he could learn he blotted up. Training a character to go with her son's phenomenal brain proved to be more of a problem for Mary. They told in Northampton how he once stole some pears from a neighbor's orchard and gleefully presented them to his mother as a gift. Mary made him return the fruit. The generous neighbor not only would not take the pears back, but the next day sent a bowl full over for the family table. Timothy was unable to eat them, for he was feeling stricken by his discovery of the lesson of the Eighth Commandment. Back on the frontier, the war poked along. Two wayfarers killed an Indian in the woods near Stockbridge, and four people right in the town were killed by Canadian Indians. The fighting continued as a rumble in the background, and the war was not really resolved until the mighty battle in Montreal, when both generals, Wolfe and Montcalm, were killed. The Edwards family, who feared God more than man, continued to carry on their domestic life, feeling less fear than their friends felt for them. It took a tragic twist of personal events, which came along next, to jolt them into an unforeseen change. Chapter 13 Two Presidencies at Princeton Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings? T.S. Eliot Though Esther Burr was lyric about her husband, and though many trips away from home had prepared her for absence from her family, she was surprised how much she missed them. You can't write too often, nor too long," she assured them. She missed the Stockbridge scenery, but enjoyed an attractive two-story stone-and-frame parsonage, where two brooks chuckled over rocky beds in the wide garden and pasture. Her husband encouraged her to pick up the study of Latin again, and the couple read Cicero together with the help of a Latin textbook that Burr had written. Burr knew that the happiest diversion he could arrange for his bride was a visit from her father, so he set up an invitation for Edwards to address the combined Synod of New York and New Jersey. Esther was so much like her father that their two strong personalities had sometimes adjusted, but she was devoted to him. Hers wasn't the only misty eye when the schooner swooping down from the north docked at Newark in September 1752. Edwards paid for his trip with a long, tightly reasoned sermon on true grace, distinguished from the experience of devils. As on so many Sundays of her girlhood, Esther looked up at the tall figure, made even taller than its mortal six feet one inch, by the exalted words of the prayer oration. And as it shines out in conversation before men, it tends to induce others to glorify God. When Esther had a baby, Sarah, the child had a crooked neck. Struggling with her rebellion at this, Esther said, perhaps God foresaw that we should be too proud of her. A letter she wrote home in 1754 gives a vivid view of the young mother. The writing is vigorous, so vivaciously underlined that it gives an effect as animated as conversation. You will not wonder if you see many blunders, for I write rocking the cradle. Many blotches and crossed-out words confirm that she was being distracted. Evidently, Mary Dwight was pregnant again, for Esther goes on to say to Lucy, I am very glad you are with Sister Dwight at this time. As soon as she is abed, contrive I should know it, for I feel much concerned about it. I hope Mother will be with her. I have no news to tell you, I think. Oh yes, I have. Mrs. Sargent. is like to have a child. Pray, what do you think of this? I know you will laugh." Esther's spelling was as atrocious as her mother's. This is probably a reference to the wife of Jonathan Sargent, college treasurer. Here there are several blotches on the paper and she explains them. Now I write with Sally in my arms, for I am resolved to write. I am exceeding glad to hear that Pinty, Pierpont, and Betty are at Northampton. I hope they will not go to Stockbridge till the danger is quite over. I wish I had some of them here with me. Give my very kind love to them. Tell them I think a great deal about them and long to see them. a deal of love to yourself. Probably Esther has had some tart comments to make on the frequencies of Mary's pregnancies, for she adds the admonition, I tell you not to show my letters to Mr. Dwight, and you must tell me, yet you will not. Then she impulsively inserts a scrap of extra paper with a post-scrap. I had six sorts of flowers in the garden. and in two days more should have pinks blown the second time. The biggest part of people go to meeting without their cloaks yet. On February 6, 1756, while her husband was out of town, Esther was unexpectedly delivered of a son. She had, fortunately, a very quick, good time, though three weeks later she had a mild setback. The baby was a puzzle from his first day. Esther wrote that he was a little dirty, noisy boy, very sly and mischievous, has more sprightliness than Sally, handsomer but not so good-tempered, very resolute, and requires a good governor to bring him to terms. This baby was to be the clan's most infamous product. a complex character who seemed to carry the family traits in some sort of satanic reverse. Colonel B. by Constance Carrier Eight lines of clergymen converged to meet in Aaron Burr, Edwardses, Tuthills, Pierponts, each a blood and thunderer whose brimstone fire and sulfur smell transfixed the listener. Eight lines of clergymen converged, as I have said, in Burr, but Aaron was Beelzebub in mocking miniature, who cast religion forth and had no further truck with her. so flatly contradictory the parts of Aaron were, not all of us can damn him quite without some faint, demure, rascal and profligate indeed scholar and sophister. That fox's profile sharp and small, the suave practitioner of his own ethic Arnold's man, a brilliant officer. Untrustworthy, said Washington, unable to concur. A Catiline to whom young men would eagerly defer. Corrupter of the innocent, condemned a murderer. Chevalier, if not sans reproche, past any doubt sans poor. His daughter's idol and his wife's, the pictures blend and blur. At eighty, unregenerate, he died in character. God's pardon, on that subject I am coy, said Aaron Burr. Copyright 1955, The New Yorker Magazine Incorporated. Because 1756 was a strenuous year for Esther, Burr arranged for her to have extra help. He bought from John Livingston of New York brother of his friend William Livingston, a negro man named Caesar, for eighty pounds. But he was unsuccessful in an attempt to give her the best present of all, the nearness of her parents. In 1755 he had hinted to William Hogue, we hope by the help of some generous benefactor, to support a professor of divinity. The trustees have their eyes upon Mr. Edwards, and want nothing but ability to give him an immediate call to that office. Though Mr. Hogue was a stout admirer of Edwards, he evidently did not take this hint, for the professorship was not donated. This Reformation audio track is a production of Stillwater's Revival Books. SWRB makes thousands of classic Reformation resources available, free and for sale in audio, video, and printed formats. Our many free resources, as well as our complete mail-order catalog containing thousands of classic and contemporary Puritan and Reform books, tapes, and videos at great discounts, is on the web at www.swrb.com. We can also be reached by email by phone at 780-450-3730 by fax at 780-468-1096 or by mail at 4710-37A Edmonton Alberta, abbreviated capital A, capital B, Canada, T6L3T5. You may also request a free printed catalog. And remember that John Kelvin, in defending the Reformation's regulative principle of worship, or what is sometimes called the scriptural law of worship, commenting on the words of God, which I commanded them not, neither came into my heart. From his commentary on Jeremiah 731, writes, God here cuts off from men every occasion for making evasions, since He condemns by this one phrase, I have not commanded them, whatever the Jews devised. There is then no other argument needed to condemn superstitions than that they are not commanded by God. For when men allow themselves to worship God according to their own fancies, and attend not to His commands, they pervert true religion. And if this principle was adopted by the Papists, all those fictitious modes of worship in which they absurdly exercise themselves would fall to the ground. It is indeed a horrible thing for the Papists to seek to discharge their duties towards God by performing their own superstitions. There is an immense number of them, as it is well known, and as it manifestly appears. Were they to admit this principle, that we cannot rightly worship God except by obeying His word, they would be delivered from their deep abyss of error. The Prophet's words, then, are very important, when he says that God had commanded no such thing, and that it never came to his mind, as though he had said that men assume too much wisdom when they devise what he never required, nay, what he never knew.