Occasional Lectures Author:William Kelly Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: at this time to that which may, by God's grace, preserve souls from religious infidelity, giving them divine grounds to judge and reject Ritualism in all its fru... more »its as well as its roots. Thanks be to God, the remedy is not far off; it is nigh us in our mouth, and in our heart. "The truth of the gospel is the best guard, not against Rationalism alone, but also against Ritualism. It is impossible for a soul that really understands the gospel—I do not mean one that is merely born again, but that intelligently knows by grace the word of truth, the gospel of salvation—to be dragged into either. There may be persons, as already said, drawn away for a time into anything; but it is impossible for a person who understands the gospel simply, and who carries its truth really before his soul, and, above all, who has Christ Himself as the object revealed to his heart in love by that gospel, to be left under the snare of either, if indeed to be drawn aside into it at all. I shall show therefore that, if Christians hold fast what God has given them in the Lord Jesus, and also in that mighty work which Christ has accomplished, and which He now reveals by the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, as made known to us more particularly in the New Testament, there is a divine preservative which no power of the enemy can break through. You will have noticed that in the verses just read we have the Spirit of God showing us the relation of the truth and facts of Christianity to what was really a ritual system—the only ritual that God ever acknowledged. In Israel there was a system of religious shadows, furnished by God Himself. Undoubtedlytherefore, if this were all the revelation of God, we ought eery one of us to be ritualists. For the believer there can be no quesfion either that God set it up, or ...« less