the most candid construction of this author’s reasoning, we must necessarily call their ceremonies Jewish, or by pushing it to its full length, shall be obliged to call them devilish.
“He observes that I begin my charge with the use of incense as the most notorious proof of their Paganism, and like an artful rhetorician, place my strongest argument in the front. Yet he knows I have assigned a different reason for offering that the first; because it is the first thing that strikes the sense, and surprises a stranger upon his entrance into their churches. But it shall be my strongest proof, if he will have it so, since he has brought nothing, I am sure, to weaken the force of it. He tells us that there was an altar of incense in the temple of Jerusalem*, and is surprised, therefore, how I can call it *heathenish; yet it is evident, from the nature of that institution, that it was never designed to be perpetual, and that during its continuance, God would have never approved any other altar, either in Jerusalem or any where else. But let him answer directly to this plain question: Was there ever a temple in the world, not strictly heathenish, in which there were several altars, all smoking with incense, within our view, and at one and the same time? It is certain that he must answer in the negative; yet it is as certain that there were many such temples in Pagan Rome, and are as many in Christian Rome; and since there never was an example of it, but what was Paganish, before the time of Popery, how is it possible that it could be derived to them from any other source? or when we see so exact a resemblance in the copy, how can there be any doubt about the original?
“What he alleges, therefore, in favour of incense is nothing to the purpose: ‘That it was used in the Jewish, and is of great antiquity in the Christian churches, and that it is mentioned with honour in the Scriptures,’ which frequently compare it to prayer, and speak of its sweet odours ascending up to God, &c., which figurative expressions, he says, ‘would never have been borrowed by sacred penmen from heathenish superstition;’ as if such allusions were less proper, or the thing itself less sweet, for its being applied to the purposes of idolatry, as it constantly was in the time of the same penmen, and, according to their own accounts, on the altars of Baal, and the other heathen idols: and when Jeremiah rebukes the people of Judah for burning incense to the queen of heaven (Jer. xliv. 17), one can hardly help imagining that he is prophetically pointing out the worship paid now to the virgin, to whom they actually burn incense at this day under that very title.(96)