Ib. D. E. p. 70. A. These paragraphs exhibit a noble instance of giving importance to the single words of a text, each word by itself a pregnant text. Here, too, lies the excellence, the imitable, but alas! unimitated, excellence of our divines from Elizabeth to William III. Ib. D. O, that our clergy did but know and see that their tithes and glebes belong to them as officers and functionaries of the nationalty,--as clerks, and not exclusively as theologians, and not at all as ministers of the Gospel;--but that they are likewise ministers of the Church of Christ, and that their claims and the powers of that Church are no more alienated or affected by their being at the same time the established clergy, than they are by the common coincidence of being justices of the peace, or heirs to an estate, or stockholders! [6] The Romish divines placed the Church above the Scriptures; our present divines give it no place at all. But Donne and his great contemporaries had not yet learnt to be afraid of announcing and enforcing the claims of the Church, distinct from, and coordinate with, the Scriptures. This is one evil consequence, though most un-necessarily so, of the union of the Church of Christ with the national Church, and of the claims of the Christian pastor and preacher with the legal and constitutional rights and revenues of the officers of the national clerisy. Our clergymen in thinking of their legal rights, forget those rights of theirs which depend on no human law at all. Ib. p. 71. A. This is the difference between God's mercy and his judgments, that sometimes his judgments may he plural, complicated, enwrapped in one another; but his mercies are always so, and cannot be otherwise. A just sentiment beautifully expressed. Ib. C. Whereas the Christian religion is, as Gregory Nazianzen says, 'simplex et nuda, nisi prave in artem difficillimam converteretur': it is a plain, an easy, a perspicuous truth. A religion of ideas, spiritual truths, or truth-powers,--not of notions and conceptions, the manufacture of the understanding,--is therefore 'simplex et nuda', that is, immediate; like the clear blue heaven of Italy, deep and transparent, an ocean unfathomable in its depth, and yet ground all the way. Still as meditation soars upwards, it meets the arched firmament with all its suspended lamps of light. O, let not the 'simplex et nuda' of Gregory be perverted to the Socinian, 'plain and easy for the meanest understandings!' The truth in Christ, like the peace of Christ, passeth all understanding. If ever there was a mischievous misuse of words, the confusion of the terms, 'reason' and 'understanding,' 'ideas' and 'notions,' or 'conceptions,' is most mischievous; a Surinam toad with a swarm of toadlings sprouting out of its back and sides. Serm. VIII. Mat. v. 16. p. 77. Ib. C.