_Sect._ 9. As for the examples alleged by our opposites out of Scripture for justifying their significant ceremonies, they have been our propugners of evangelical simplicity so often and so fully answered, that here I need do no more but point at them. Of the days of Purim and feast of dedication I am to speak afterward. In the meanwhile, our opposites cannot, by these examples, strengthen themselves in this present argument, except they could prove that the feast of dedication was lawfully instituted, and that the days of Purim were appointed for a religious festivity, and that upon no such extraordinary warrant as the church hath not ever and always. The rite which Abraham commanded his servant to use when he sware to him, namely, the putting of his hand under his thigh, Gen. xxiv. 2, maketh them as little help; for it was but a moral sign of that civil subjection, reverence and fidelity which inferiors owe unto superiors, according to the judgment of Calvin, Junius, Pareus, and Tremellius, all upon that place. That altar which was built by the Reubenites, Gadites, and half tribe of Manasseh, Josh. xxii., had (as some think) not a religious, but a moral use, and was not a sacred, but a civil sign, to witness that those two tribes and the half were of the stock and lineage of Israel; which, if it were once called in question, then their fear (deducing the connection of causes and consequents) led them in the end to forecast this issue: “In time to come your children might speak unto our children, saying, What have you to do with the Lord God of Israel? for the Lord hath made Jordan a border betwixt us and you,” &c. Therefore, to prevent all apparent occasions of such doleful events, they erected the pattern of the Lord’s altar, _ut vinculum sit fraternæ conjunctionis._(812)