pride; using the creatures contrary to the end God hath appointed. This is to dishonour God; and it is diabolical. Man would make himself the end of God. In loving God because of some self-pleasing benefits distributed by him; in abstinence from some sins, because they are against the interest of some other beloved corruption; in performing duties merely for a selfish interest, which is evident in unwieldiness in religious duties where self is not concerned; in calling upon God only in a time of neccessity; in begging his assistance to our own projects, after we have by our own craft laid the plot; in impatience upon a refusal of our desires; in selfish aims we have in our duties. This is a vilifying God, a dethroning him. In unworthy imaginations of God, universal in man by nature. Hence springs idolatry, superstition, presumption, the common diseases of the world. This is a vilifying God; worse than idolatry, worse than absolute atheism. Natural desires to be distant from him. No desires for the remembrance of him. No desires of converse with him. No desires of a thorough return to him. No desire of any close imitation of him.

DISCOURSE III.

ON GOD'S BEING A SPIRIT.

JOHN iv. 24. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

THE words are part of the dialogue between our Saviour and the Samaritan woman. Christ intending to return from Judea to Galilee, passed through the country of Samaria, a place inhabited not by Jews, but a mixed company of several nations, and some remainders of the posterity of Israel, who escaped the captivity, and were returned from Assyria;1 and being weary with his journey, arrived about the sixth hour, or noon, (according to the Jews' reckoning the time of the day,) at the well that Jacob had digged, which was of great account among the inhabitants for the antiquity of it, as well as the usefulness of it in supplying their necessities. He being thirsty, and having none to furnish him wherewith to draw water, at last comes a woman from the city, whom he desires to give him some water to drink. The woman perceiving him by his language or habit to be a Jew, wonders at the question, since the hatred the Jews bore the Samaritans was so great that they

Amyraut. Paraph. sur Jean.

would not vouchsafe to have any commerce with them, not only in religious but civil affairs, and common offices belonging to mankind. Hence our Saviour takes occasion to publish to her the doctrine of the gospel, and excuses her rude answer by her ignorance of him; and tells her, that if she had asked him a greater matter, even that which concerned her eternal salvation, he would readily have granted it, notwithstanding the rooted hatred between the Jews and Samaritans; and bestowed a water of a greater virtue, the water of life, ver. 10. The woman is no less astonished at his reply, than she was at his first demand. It was strange to hear a man speak of giving living water, to one of whom he had begged the water of that spring, and had no vessel to draw any to quench his own thirst. She therefore demands whence he could have this water that he speaks of, ver. 11, since she conceived him not greater than Jacob, who had digged that well and drunk of it. Our Saviour, desirous to make a progress in that work he had begun, extols the water he spake of above this of the well, from its particular virtue, fully to refresh those that drank of it, and be as a cooling and comforting fountain within them, of more efficacy than that without, ver. 13, 14. The woman conceiving a good opinion of our Saviour, desires to partake of this water to save her pains in coming daily to the well, not apprehending the spirituality of Christ's discourse to her, ver. 15. Christ finding her to take some pleasure in his discourse, partly to bring her to a sense of her sin, before he did communicate the excellency of his grace, bids her return back to the city and bring her husband with her to him, ver. 16. She freely acknowledges that she had no husband, whether having some check of conscience at present for the unclean life she led, or loth to lose so much time in the gaining this water so much desired by her, ver. 17. Our Saviour takes an occasion from this to lay open her sin before her, and to make her sensible of her own wicked life, and the prophetic excellency of himself; and tells her she had had five husbands to whom she had been false, and by whom she was divorced, and the person she now dwelt with was not her lawful husband, and in living with him she violated the rights of marriage, and increased guilt upon her conscience, ver. 18. The woman being affected with this discourse, and knowing him to be a stranger, that could not be certified of those things but in an extraordinary way, begins to have a high esteem of him as a prophet, ver. 19. And upon this opinion she esteems him able to decide a question which had been canvassed between them and the Jews about the place of worship, ver. 20. Their fathers' worshipping in that mountain, and the Jews affirming Jerusalem to be a place of worship, she pleads the antiquity of the worship in this place; Abraham, too, having built an altar there, Gen. xii. 7; and Jacob, upon his return from Syria. And surely had the place been capable of an exception, such persons as they, and so well acquainted with the will of God, would not have pitched upon that place to celebrate their worship.

Antiquity has too, too often bewitched the minds of men, and drawn them from the revealed will of God. Men are more willing to imitate the outward actions of their famous ancestors than conform themselves to the revealed will of their Creator. The Samaritans would imitate the patriarchs in the place of worship, but not in the faith of the worshippers.

Christ answers her, that this question would quickly be resolved by a new state of the church which was near at hand; and neither Jerusalem, which had not the precedency, nor that mountain, should be of any more value in that concern than any other place in the world, ver. 21. But yet to make her sensible of her sin, and that of her countrymen, tells her that their worship in that mountain was not according to the will of God, he having, long after the altars built in this place, fixed Jerusalem as the place of sacrifices; besides, they had not the knowledge of that God who ought to be worshipped by them, but the Jews had the true object of worship and the true manner of worship, according to the declaration God had made of himself to them, ver. 22. But all that service shall vanish, the veil of the temple shall be rent in twain, and that carnal worship give place to one more spiritual; shadows shall fly before substance, and truth advance itself above figures, and the worship of God shall be with the strength of the Spirit; such a worship and such worshippers does the Father seek, ver. 23; for "God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." The design of our Saviour is to declare, that God is not taken with external worship invented by men, no, nor commanded by himself; and that upon this reason, because he is a spiritual essence, infinitely above gross and corporeal matter, and is not taken with that pomp which is a pleasure to our earthly imaginations.

Πνεῦμα ὁ Θεὸς. Some translate it just as the words lie-Spirit is God: but it is not unusual both in the Old and New Testament languages, to put the predicate before the subject, as Psal. v. 9, "Their throat is an open sepulchre;" in the Hebrew, "A sepulchre open, their throat." So Psal. cxi. 3, "His work is honourable and glorious; in the Hebrew, "Honour and glory his work." And there wants not one example in the same evangelist, John i. 1. "And the word was God; in the Greek, "And God was the Word." In all, the predicate, or what is ascribed, is put before the subject to which it is ascribed.

One tells us, and he a head of a party that has made a disturbance in the church of God, that this place is not aptly brought to prove God to be a Spirit: and that the reason of Christ runs not thus, God is of a spiritual essence, and therefore must be worshipped with a spiritual worship; for the essence of God is not the foundation of his worship, but his will; for then we were not to worship him with a corporeal worship, because he is not a body: but with an invisible and eternal worship, because he is invisible and eternal.

But the nature of God is the foundation of worship, the will of God is the rule of worship; the matter and manner is to be performed according to the will of God. But is the nature of the object of worship to be excluded? No, as the object is, so ought our devotion to be spiritual, as he is spiritual. God in his commands for worship respected the discovery of his own nature; in the law he respected the discovery of his mercy and justice, and therefore commanded a worship by sacrifices. A spiritual worship without those institutions would not have declared those attributes, which was God's end to display to the world in Christ. And though the nature of God is to be respected in worship, yet the obligations of the creature are also to be considered. God is a Spirit, therefore must have a spiritual worship: the creature has a body as well as a soul, and both from God; and therefore ought to worship God with the one as well as the other, since one as well as the other is freely bestowed upon him.

The spirituality of God was the foundation of the change from the Judaical carnal worship to a more spiritual and evangelical.

"God is a Spirit." That is, he hath nothing corporeal, no mixture of matter, not a visible substance, a bodily form. He is a Spirit, not a bare spiritual substance; but an understanding, willing, Spirit, holy, wise, good, and just. Before Christ spake of the Father, verse 23, the first person in the Trinity: now he speaks of God essentially. The word Father is personal, the word God essential. So that our Saviour would render a reason, not from any one person in the blessed Trinity, but from the Divine nature, why we should worship in Spirit, and therefore makes use of the word God, the being a Spirit being common to the other persons with the Father.

This is the reason of the proposition, verse 23. "Of a spiritual worship." Every nature delights in that which is like it, and distastes that which is most different from it. If God were corporeal, he might be pleased with the victims of beasts, and the beautiful magnificence of temples, and the noise of music. But being a Spirit, he cannot be gratified with carnal things: he demands something better and greater than all those, that soul which he made, that soul which he hath endowed, a spirit of a frame suitable to his nature. He, indeed, appointed sacrifices and a temple, as shadows of those things which were to be most acceptable to him in the Messiah, but they were imposed only till the time of reformation, Heb. ix. 10.

"Must worship him." Not, they may, or it would be more agreeable to God to have such a manner of worship; but they must. It is not exclusive of bodily worship; for this were to exclude all public worship in societies, which cannot be performed without reverential postures of the body. The gestures of the body are helps to worship and declarations of spiritual acts. We can scarcely worship God with our spirits, without some tincture upon the outward man. But he excludes all acts merely corporeal, all resting upon an external service and devotion, which was the crime of the Pharisees, and the general persuasion of the Jews as well as heathens, who used the outward ceremonies, not as signs of better things, but as if they did of themselves please God, and render the worshippers accepted with him, without any suitable frame of the inward man. It is as if he had said, now you must separate yourselves from all carnal modes to which the service of God is now tied, and render a worship chiefly consisting in the affectionate motions of the heart, and accommodated more exactly to the condition of the object, who is a Spirit.2

"In spirit and truth." The evangelical service now required, has the advantage of the former; that was a shadow and figure, this the body and truth. Spirit, say some, is here opposed to the legal ceremonies; truth, to hypocritical services; or rather truth is opposed to shadows, and an opinion of worth in the outward action; it is principally opposed to external rites, because our Saviour saith, "The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him," verse 23. Had it been opposed to hypocrisy, Christ had said no new thing: for God always required truth in the inward parts, and all true worshippers had served him with a sincere conscience and single heart. The old patriarchs did worship God in spirit and truth, as taken for sincerity: such a worship was always, and is perpetually due to God; because he always was, and eternally will be a Spirit. And it is said, "the Father seeks such to worship him;"" not, shall seek: he always sought it; it always was performed to him by one or other in the