He spake personally, and he spake aloud, in the declaration of miracles; but quis credidit auditui Filii? Who believed even his report? Did they not call his preaching sedition, and call his miracles conjuring? Therefore, we have a clearer, that is, a nearer light than the written Gospel, that is, the Church.
True; yet he who should now venture to assert this truth, or even contend for a co-ordinateness of the Church and the Written Word, must bear to be thought a semi-Papist, an
ultra
high-Churchman. Still the truth is the truth.
Serm. VII. John x. 10. p. 62.
Since the Revolution in 1688 our Church has been chilled and starved too generally by preachers and reasoners Stoic or Epicurean; — first, a sort of pagan morality was substituted for the righteousness by faith, and latterly, prudence or Paleyanism has been substituted even for morality. A Christian preacher ought to preach Christ alone, and all things in him and by him. If he find a dearth in this, if it seem to him a circumscription, he does not know Christ, as the
pleroma
, the fullness. It is not possible that there should be aught true, or seemly, or beautiful, in thought, will, or deed, speculative or practical, which may not, and which ought not to, be evolved out of Christ and the faith in Christ; — no folly, no error, no evil to be exposed, or warred against, which may not, and should not, be convicted and denounced from its contrariancy and enmity to Christ. To the Christian preacher Christ should be in all things, and all things in Christ: he should abjure every argument that is not a link in the chain, of which Christ is the staple and staple ring.
Ib.
p. 64.