My dear brethren, value ordinances greatly, but rest not, I charge you, in them. Boast not that you are Anglo-Catholics; that your ministers have an Apostolic succession; that you were regenerated in baptism; that you are regular communicants and worshippers at the daily service. These are, indeed, great privileges; but connected with them are great responsibilities. Is your pure faith illustrated by a pure life? Do you make the best use of an Apostolic ministry? Are you growing in the spirit of which you were born again? Do you feel and sustain the communicated presence of Christ within you? When you go down from the sanctuary, does your life shine, as Moses’s face did, with the reflected glory of GOD? If not, talk not of your high privileges—your case would be better without them. When GOD ceased to wink at the errors and ungodliness of mankind, He began by punishing, and with much severity, the errors and ungodliness of the privileged Jews. Yes, and whenever He takes account, and passes judgment, it is on the principle that to whom much has been given, of him shall much be required. “You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” “To him that knoweth, to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.” The second thought which the fact of our text suggests, is one of great comfort to the benevolent heart. It is, that GOD will make a way through a bad system, to the disciple of that system who has been trying to reach Him. When one reflects on the grave and blinding errors of modern Romanism; on the awful denial of our blessed LORD’S Divinity by the Unitarians; on the capricious choice, what to believe, what to deny, which each Protestant sect ventures to make and maintain; on the disuse of a ministry, the ignoring of sacraments, and other holy ordinances by the Society of Friends, what a comfort is there in our text, “And he was a Samaritan;” in feeling that GOD condescends to get through all this, to the yearning, would-be faithful heart; ay, that He even accepts the purblind visions and stammering utterances of such an one as _faith_. “Thy faith hath made thee whole”! Most of us know some members of such sects with whom we should wish to dwell together in heaven, for whom our heart is rejoiced to feel that there are such prospects, in whose sanctified lives we have the present proof, that (however _originators_ of heresy and schism may be regarded) in every nation and every sect, he that heareth GOD, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him.