Page:The Works of Samuel Johnson ... A journey to the Hebrides. The vision of Theodore, the hermit of Teneriffe. The fountains. Prayers and meditations. Sermons.v. 10-11. Parliamentary debates.pdf/523

 of the Lord's supper; a quality, not only necessary to procure the favour of God, and to give efficacy to the institution, but so strictly enjoined in the words of the text, that to approach the holy table without it, is to pervert the means of salvation, and to turn prayer into sin.

The ardour and vehemence with which those are condemned who eat and drink unworthily, have filled the melancholy, the timorous, and the humble, with unnecessary terrours, which have been sometimes so much increased by the injudicious zeal of writers, erroneously pious, that they have conceived the danger of attempting to obey this precept of our Saviour more formidable than that of neglecting it, and have spent the greatest part of their lives in the omission of a duty of the highest importance; or, being equally terrified on either hand, have lived in anguish and perplexity, under a constant sense of the necessity of doing what they cannot, in their opinion, do in an acceptable manner, and which, of course, they shall either do, or omit, at the utmost hazard of eternal happiness.

Such exalted piety, such unshaken virtue, such an uniform ardour of divine affections, and such a constant practice of religious duties, have been represented as so indispensably necessary to a worthy reception of this sacrament, as few men have been able to discover in those whom they most esteem for their purity of life, and which no man's conscience will, perhaps, suffer him to find in himself; and, therefore, those who know themselves not to have arrived at such elevated excellence, who struggle with passions which they cannot wholly conquer, and bewail infirmities, which yet they perceive to adhere to them, are frighted from an act of devotion, of which they have been taught to believe, that it is so scarcely to be performed worthily by an embodied spirit that it requires the holiness of angels, and the uncontaminated raptures of paradise.

Thus it appeared, that, instead of being excited to ar