not refuse to clasp your knees and supplicate you830 in this behalf. What softness is it! What luxury, what wantonness! This is not luxury, but wantonness. What senselessness is it! What madness! So many poor stand around the Church; and though the Church has so many children, and so wealthy, she is unable to give relief to even one poor person; “but one is hungry, and another is drunken” (1 Cor. xi. 21.); one voideth his excrement even into silver, another has not so much as bread! What madness! what brutishness so great as this? May we never come to the proof, whether we will prosecute the disobedient, nor to the indignation which allowing831 these practices would cause us; but that willingly and with patience we may avoid all this, that we may live to God’s glory, and be delivered from the punishment in the other world, and may obtain the good things promised to those who love Him, through the grace and love toward man, &c. 830 ἱκετηρίαν θεῖναι. He alludes to the ancient custom of formally supplicating for defense or relief, as by sitting on the hearth. Sophocl. Œd. Tyr. 1, &c. 831 ἐπιτρέψαι. Perhaps ἐπιτρῖψαι, “aggravating,” as Ben. t. i. p. 24. B, and p. 225. A. 518 Colossians 2:16-19