It has been observed of the warring Turks, that often they used this notable deceit - to send a lying rumor and a vain tumult of war to one place, but, in the meanwhile, to address their true forces to another place, that so they might surprise those who have been unwarily led by pernicious credulity. So have we manifest (alas! too, too manifest) reasons to make us conceive, that whilst the chief urgers of the course of conformity are skirmishing with us about the trifling ceremonies (as some men count them), they are but laboring to hold our thoughts so bent and intent upon those smaller quarrels, that we may forget to distinguish between evils immanent and evils imminent, and that we be not too much awake to espy their secret slight in compassing further aims.
All your winning or losing of a good conscience, is in your first buying; for such is the deceitfulness of sin, and the cunning conveyance of that old serpent, that if his head be once entering in, his whole body will easily follow after; and if he make you handsomely to swallow gnats at first, he will make you swallow camels ere all be done. Oh, happy they who dash the little ones of Babylon against the stones (Ps. 137:9)!
here is nothing which any way pertains to the the worship of God left to the determination of human laws, besides the mere circumstances, which neither have any holiness in them, forasmuch as they have no other use and praise in sacred than which have in civil things, nor yet were particularly determinable in Scripture.
The apostle only commands that each action and ceremony of God's worship be decently and orderly performed, but gives us no leave to excogitate [contrive] or devise new ceremonies, which have not been instituted before. He has spoken in that chapter of assembling in the church, prophesying and preaching, praying and praising there. Now let all these things, and every other action of God's worship, ceremonies and all, be done decently and in order.