27.
On the whole, since Scripture places the principal part of worship
in the invocation of God (this being the office of piety which he requires of us
in preference to all sacrifices), it is manifest sacrilege to offer prayer to
others. Hence it is said in the psalm: "If we have forgotten the name of our
God, or stretched out our hands to a strange god, shall not God search this
out?" (Ps. 44:20, 21). Again, since it is only in faith that God desires to be
invoked, and he distinctly enjoins us to frame our prayers according to the rule
of his word: in fine, since faith is founded on the word, and is the parent of
right prayer, the moment we decline from the word, our prayers are impure. But
we have already shown, that if we consult the whole volume of Scripture, we
shall find that God claims this honour to himself alone. In regard to the office
of intercession, we have also seen that it is peculiar to Christ, and that no
prayer is agreeable to God which he as Mediator does not sanctify. And though
believers mutually offer up prayers to God in behalf of their brethren, we have
shown that this derogates in no respect from the sole intercession of Christ,
because all trust to that intercession in commending themselves as well as
others to God. Moreover, we have shown that this is ignorantly transferred to
the dead, of whom we nowhere read that they were commanded to pray for us. The
Scripture often exhorts us to offer up mutual prayers; but says not one syllable
concerning the dead; nay, James tacitly excludes the dead when he combines the
two things, to "confess our sins one to another, and to pray one for another"
(James 5:16). Hence it is sufficient to condemn this error, that the beginning
of right prayer springs from faith, and that faith comes by the hearing of the
word of God, in which there is no mention of fictitious intercession,
superstition having rashly adopted intercessors who have not been divinely
appointed. While the Scripture abounds in various forms of prayer, we find no
example of this intercession, without which Papists think there is no prayer.
Moreover, it is evident that this superstition is the result of distrust,
because they are either not contented with Christ as an intercessor, or have
altogether robbed him of this honour. This last is easily proved by their
effrontery in maintaining, as the strongest of all their arguments for the
intercession of the saints, that we are unworthy of familiar access to God.
This, indeed, we acknowledge to be most true, but we thence infer that they
leave nothing to Christ, because they consider his intercession as nothing,
unless it is supplemented by that of George and Hypolyte, and similar phantoms.
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