Neither offering nor Covenant does avail anything without it; also no going to church, neither singing nor devout showing does attain it. Nothing else at all does it but only the hungry, desiring faith through the alone offering in the blood and death of Christ, where the desire does wholly die to its selfhood in the death of Christ, and arise in Christ's resurrection with a true faith and Christianity, not in a specious show of holiness, but in essence, in words and works.
46. For he is yet far from a Christian, who merely calls himself a Christian [or is only so termed], but he is one who is born in the offering of his humanity in him. Neither Covenant nor laws avail anything before God, but a new creature. No cathedral, stone church, meeting-house or hypocrisy, or whatsoever it be called, can inherit God's kingdom, but only and alone the true living offering of the new regeneration, arising from the Covenant of Promise in Paradise, through the quickening Word in the offering of Christ.
47. It only and alone is the temple of the holy Spirit, where God's word is taught and taken; without that, is Cain, with his glistering stone church, full of pride and stinking ambition, the great building of Babylon, where the language of God's word, viz. of the written word, is confounded and divided into manifold contentions and languages, where there is nothing but wrangling, jangling and snarling about the letters, and no true, real, living, effectual and powerful knowledge.
48. Now where the living knowledge of Christ is, there is the altar of God in all places, where the hungry soul may offer the true acceptable holy offering, in prayer; there it may introduce the prayer in the Word, in its hunger, into a substantial faith.
49. Not that we would hereby wholly abolish and raze down the stone churches; but we teach the Temple of Christ, which ought to be brought along [in the heart] into the stone church, or else the whole business of the stone church is only a hypocritical antichristian whoredom, a Cain's offering, both of the preacher and the hearer: so that one is not a whit better than another, unless he enter through the true door, Christ, in spirit and power in the Temple of Christ, into the stone church, or at least resolve to fix, betake and fasten himself there into such an earnest desire [that he will take and hold fast only that which is good for the amendment of his life] . Else Cain goes to church to offer, and comes out again a killer of his brother.
50. As it of ten appears, that when men in the stone churches have taken and amassed [to their minds a deal of] revilings, reproaches and censures [that have fallen from the false smoky Cain-like fury and pretended zeal of the preachers], then they forthwith come withal and murder Abel, and Christ's members: as this spirit has many hundred times found by experience; and that, only for the sake of the Temple of Christ.
51. Now if we would rightly consider of the offering of Cain, then we must look into the very essence of his will and desire, for he also would offer and be acceptable to God. But he loved only his ownhood and self-full self; his aim and endeavour was not to be or become a
Neither offering nor Covenant does avail anything without it; also no going to church, neither singing nor devout showing does attain it. Nothing else at all does it but only the hungry, desiring faith through the alone offering in the blood and death of Christ, where the desire does wholly die to its selfhood in the death of Christ, and arise in Christ's resurrection with a true faith and Christianity, not in a specious show of holiness, but in essence, in words and works.
46. For he is yet far from a Christian, who merely calls himself a Christian [or is only so termed], but he is one who is born in the offering of his humanity in him. Neither Covenant nor laws avail anything before God, but a new creature. No cathedral, stone church, meeting-house or hypocrisy, or whatsoever it be called, can inherit God's kingdom, but only and alone the true living offering of the new regeneration, arising from the Covenant of Promise in Paradise, through the quickening Word in the offering of Christ.
47. It only and alone is the temple of the holy Spirit, where God's word is taught and taken; without that, is Cain, with his glistering stone church, full of pride and stinking ambition, the great building of Babylon, where the language of God's word, viz. of the written word, is confounded and divided into manifold contentions and languages, where there is nothing but wrangling, jangling and snarling about the letters, and no true, real, living, effectual and powerful knowledge.
48. Now where the living knowledge of Christ is, there is the altar of God in all places, where the hungry soul may offer the true acceptable holy offering, in prayer; there it may introduce the prayer in the Word, in its hunger, into a substantial faith.
49. Not that we would hereby wholly abolish and raze down the stone churches; but we teach the Temple of Christ, which ought to be brought along [in the heart] into the stone church, or else the whole business of the stone church is only a hypocritical antichristian whoredom, a Cain's offering, both of the preacher and the hearer: so that one is not a whit better than another, unless he enter through the true door, Christ, in spirit and power in the Temple of Christ, into the stone church, or at least resolve to fix, betake and fasten himself there into such an earnest desire [that he will take and hold fast only that which is good for the amendment of his life] . Else Cain goes to church to offer, and comes out again a killer of his brother.
50. As it of ten appears, that when men in the stone churches have taken and amassed [to their minds a deal of] revilings, reproaches and censures [that have fallen from the false smoky Cain-like fury and pretended zeal of the preachers], then they forthwith come withal and murder Abel, and Christ's members: as this spirit has many hundred times found by experience; and that, only for the sake of the Temple of Christ.
51. Now if we would rightly consider of the offering of Cain, then we must look into the very essence of his will and desire, for he also would offer and be acceptable to God. But he loved only his ownhood and self-full self; his aim and endeavour was not to be or become a
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