Institutes 4.13.7 — OF VOWS. THE MISERABLE ENTANGLEMENTS CAUSED BY VOWING RASHLY.

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**OF VOWS. THE MISERABLE ENTANGLEMENTS CAUSED BY VOWING RASHLY.**

It is now easy to see under how much superstition the world has laboured in this respect for several ages. One vowed that he would be abstemious, as if abstinence from wine were in itself an acceptable service to God. Another bound himself to fast, another to abstain from flesh on certain days, which he had vainly imagined to be more holy than other days. Things much more boyish were vowed though not by boys. For it was accounted great wisdom to undertake votive pilgrimages to holy places, and sometimes to perform the journey on foot, or with the body half naked, that the greater merit might be acquired by the greater fatigue. These and similar things, for which the world has long bustled with incredible zeal, if tried by the rules which we formerly laid down, will be discovered to be not only empty and nugatory, but full of manifest impiety. Be the judgment of the flesh what it may, there is nothing which God more abhors than fictitious worship. To these are added pernicious and damnable notions, hypocrites, after performing such frivolities, thinking that they have acquired no ordinary righteousness, placing the substance of piety in external observances, and despising all others who appear less careful in regard to them.

Source

• source-manifest/institutes — Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, tr. Beveridge 1845 (PD)
• evidence_grade: D_doctrinal_textbook