the Church in all its relations, persecuted,
victorious, backsliding, penitent. N.B. I do not find David charged with
any vices, though with heavy crimes. So it is with the Church. Vices
destroy its essence.

Ib.

The same was a strange kind of offence (said Luther) that the world
was offended at him who raised the dead, who made the blind to see,
and the deaf to hear, &c.

Our Lord alluded to the verse that immediately follows and completes his
quotations from Isaiah. [6] I, Jehovah, will come and do this. That he
implicitly declared himself the Jehovah, the Word,--this was the
offence.

Chap. XLIX. p. 443.

God wills, may one say, that we should serve him freewillingly, but he
that serveth God out of fear of punishment of hell, or out of a hope
and love of recompence, the same serveth and honoreth God not freely;
therefore such a one serveth God not uprightly nor truly.

_Answer_. This argument (said Luther) is Stoical, &c.

A truly wise paragraph. Pity it was not expounded. God will accept our
imperfections, where their face is turned toward him, on the road to the
glorious liberty of the Gospel.

Chap. L. p. 446.

It is the highest grace and gift of God to have an honest, a
God-fearing, housewifely consort, &c. But God thrusteth many into the
state of matrimony before they be aware and rightly bethink
themselves.

The state of matrimony (said Luther) is the chiefest state in the
world after religion, &c.

Alas! alas! this is the misery of it, that so many wed and so few are
Christianly married! But even in this the analogy of matrimony to the
religion of Christ holds good: for even such is the proportion of
nominal to actual Christians;--all _christened_, how few baptized! But
in true matrimony it is beautiful to consider, how peculiarly the
marriage state harmonizes with the doctrine of justification by free
grace through faith alone. The little quarrels, the imperfections on
both sides, the occasional frailties, yield to the one thought,--there
is love at the bottom. If sickness or other sorer calamity visit me, how
would the love then blaze forth! The faults are there, but they are not
imprinted. The prickles, the acrid rind, the bitterness or sourness, are
transformed into the ripe fruit, and the foreknowledge of this gives the
name and virtue of the ripe fruit to the fruit yet green on the bough.

Ib. p. 447.

The causers and founders of matrimony are chie