Why offer ye so many sacrifices unto me, sayeth the LORD? I am full of the burnt offerings of weathers, and with the fatness of fed beasts. I have no pleasure in the blood of bullocks, lambs, and goats.

"And when ye pray, babble not much, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard, for their much babbling's sake.

Be not carried about with divers and strange learning. For it is a good thing that the heart be established with grace, and not with meats, which have not profited them that have had their pastime in them.

Ye are gone quite from Christ as many as are justified by the law, and are fallen from grace.

But in vain they worship me, teaching doctrines which are nothing but men's precepts.'"

Let no man make you shoot at a wrong mark, which after his own imagination walketh in the humbleness and holiness of angels, things which he never saw: causeless, puffed up with his fleshly mind, and holdeth not the head: whereof all the body by joints and couples receiveth nourishment, and is knit together, and increaseth with the increasing that cometh of God. Wherefore, if ye be dead with Christ from ordinances of the world: Why as though ye yet lived in the world, are ye led with traditions of them that sayread more.
"Touch not; Taste not; Handle not:" which all perish with the using of them, and are after the commandments, and doctrines of men:

Notwithstanding, happy are ye if ye suffer for righteousness' sake. Yea, and fear not though they seem terrible unto you, neither be troubled:

"Round with none of them, whosoever say, 'Yonder people are bound together.' Nevertheless fear them not, neither be afraid of them, but sanctify the LORD of Hosts: let him be your fear and dread.

Be thou exalted, LORD, in thine own strength; so will we sing and praise thy power.

For John came unto you, in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not. But the publicans and the harlots believed him. And yet ye, though ye saw it, were not yet moved with repentance; that ye might afterward have believed him.

For so shalt thou heap coals of fire upon his head, and the LORD shall reward thee.

Thus the priest is become like the people. Wherefore I will punish them for their wicked ways, and reward them according to their own imaginations.

O ye judges, ye give sentence for gifts; O ye priests, ye teach for lucre; O ye prophets, ye prophesy for money. Yet will they be taken as those that hold upon God, and say, "Is not the LORD among us? Tush, there can no misfortune happen us."