In today’s extract from the Homily on Good Works, we turn to consider the kind of works which have the lamentable power to ruin a church.
The Homily mentions various things such as false doctrine, hypocrisy, religious playacting, and divisive sects. Though they claim to be about “holiness” and purity, bit by bit all these things eat away at the church and rot it from the inside, when what is really needed is a good solid dose of God’s word.
Here’s how the Homily puts it…
“What person having any judgment or learning, joined with a true zeal for God, does not see and lament what has entered into Christ’s religion? Things such as false doctrine, superstition, idolatry, hypocrisy, and other enormities and abuses, so as little-by-little through the sour leaven of these things the sweet bread of God’s holy word has been much hindered and laid apart.
The Jews, even at the height of their blindness, never had so many pilgrimages to images, nor did so much kneeling, kissing, and censing of them, as has been done in our time. There were a hundred times fewer sects and feigned religions among the Jews — and they were less superstitious and ungodly — than of late days there have been among us!
These sects and religions had so many hypocritical works in their state of religion (as they arrogantly named it) that their lamps (as they said) always overflowed, able to satisfy not only for their own sins, but also for all their other benefactors, brothers, and sisters of their religion — as they, in a most ungodly and crafty way had persuaded the multitude of ignorant people. They kept in diverse places (as it were) marts or markets of merits, being full of their holy relics, images, shrines, and works of supererogation, ready to be sold. And everything they had was called holy: holy cowls, holy girdles, holy pardons, holy beads, holy shoes, holy rules, and all apparently full of holiness!”