ground to be tried by prayer in the enquiring mind and the seeking heart.

And when our reason is become as strong on the side of Christianity as our belief when our faith is as enlightened as it is implicit-when the growth of the one only con-er than amusement, the straightest and the firms the dominion of the other, this is such an obedience of the heart as will infallibly produce obedience in the life; an obedience which will be both the cause and the consequence ef effectual prayer.

still cheered with the thought that we are nearer home-the future supports us under the present; a little further say we-a little more fatigue, and we shall see the desire of our heart. If we are bent on security rathsafest way will determine our choice. Heaven is worth more sacrifices of pleasure and of profit than those to which a religious life may subject us; though, after all, it often calls for fewer and lighter than a worldly one imposes. But if it were as rough and thorny as those who have never tried it believe, it would be a sufficient apology for voluntarily encountering its hardships, that it is the only road to heaven.

The renewing of the soul after the image of God is not otherwise to be obtained than by true spiritual heart-searching prayer. There may be a form of unfelt petitions, a ceremonious avowal of faith, a customary profession of repentance, a general acknow- When the prosperous fool says, 'soul take ledgment of sin, uttered from the lips to God; thine ease, thou hast much goods laid up for but where is His image and superscription thee,'-the prosperous Christian says, 'soul written upon the heart? Where is the trans- tremble at thine ease--be on thy guard.--forming power of Religion in the life? Where Thou hast, indeed, much goods laid up for is the living transcript of the Divine original? thee, but it is in a future world. Lose not Where is that holiness to which the vision of a large inheritance for a paltry possession; the Lord is specifically promised? Where is forfeit not an unalienable reversion for a life the light, and life, and grace of the Redeemer interest,-a life which this very night may exhibited in the temper and conduct? Yet be required of thee.' we are assured, that if we are Christians, there must be an aim at this conformity.

Perhaps even the worldly and thoughtless man, under an occasional fit of dejection, or As for the genuine Christian, however an accidental disappointment, may be brought weak in faith, and defective in obedience, to say, When I am in heaviness, I will yet he is still seeking, though with slow and think upon God.'-Oh, think upon Him now, faultering steps, the things which are above; now, when you are in prosperity, now, when he is still striving, though with unequal pro- your fortunes are flourishing, now when gress, for the prize of his high calling; he is your hill is so strong that you think it shall still looking, though with a dim and feeble never be moved--think upon Him when the eye, for glory, honour, and immortality; He scene is the brightest, when the world courts, is still waiting, though not with a trust so flatteries mislead, and pleasures betray you; lively as to annihilate the distance,-to see think on Him while you are able to think at his eternal redemption drawing nighall, while you possess the capacity of thinkThough his aims will always be far greater ing. The time may come, when, He may than his attainments, yet he is not discoura- turn His face from you, and you will be ged; his hope is above, his heart is above, his treasure is above; no wonder then that his prayers are directed, and a large portion of his wealth sent forward thither, where he himself hopes soon to be. It is but transmitting his riches of both kinds, not only to his future, but his eternal home.

Even if prayer were as worthless, with respect to present advantages, and religion as burthensome as some suppose, it would be a sufficient vindication of both that they lead to eternal bliss. When by a distant journey, we have been long separated from our own beloved habitation, we do not call that the most desirable road back to it which abounds with the gayest objects, but that which will bring us the most safely home. If, indeed, we can amuse ourselves with the scenery, without slackening our pace. or diverging from our path, it is well. It is no offence against the law of love, if we catch in passing, such innocent and safe delights as his bounty has scattered in our path. And if our journey have so many refreshments showered down by the band of Divine beneficence, what shall be the delights of our home?

troubled. Think of God when the alluring images of pleasure and of profit would seduce you from Him. Prosperity is the season of peculiar peril. It is the bright day that brings forth the adder.' Think of God when the tempting world says, All this will I give thee.' Trust not the insolvent world, it has cheated every creditor that ever trusted it. It will cheat you.

To those who are yet halting between two opinions, or rather between an opinion and an inclination, to those who approve the right, but pursue the wrong, those who are not without convictions, but which convictions pleasure stifles, or business overrules, those who are balancing between the world and Him who made it, who resolve to reform, but make the resolution a substitute for the performance; and oh how large, and in many points how respectable, a class this is !--to these, to the doubting, and the dilatory, we would take the liberty to speak plainly.

It is much to be feared, that secret, unconscious infidelity lies at the bottom of the little progress you make in your spiritual attainments. If the truth, certainty, and inIf the heavens grow black with clouds, conceivable importance of eternal things and storms arise, these only serve to quicken were once rooted and grounded in the heart, our pace, and make us avoid digression. it would infallibly quicken both devotion and If sickness or accident befal us, our heart is practice. We know, but we do not act up

on the knowledge, that our great business in and eternal bliss? And what presents the this world is to determine our choice for most mournful picture to us, and is in itself eternity. This is not a bye work, which the most dreadful aggravation, is, that its may be deferred to any time at the hazard of consciousness cannot be extinguished; the its not being done at all; it is the imperious thought of what he might have been will business of the present hour, the next may magnify the misery of what he is a reflecnot be granted us. It is not an affair to be tion which will accompany and torment the kept in reserve, an affair to be postponed till inextinguishable memory through a misera. other affairs are settled, for how many souls ble eternity. Whether in the instance of the has this dilatory delusion ruined! rich man, who' in hell lift up his eyes, being in torment,' we might dare believe that some remains of human tenderness for his relatives might survive in a ruined soul; or, whether his anguish was made more bitter, from the reflection, that he had been their corruptor, and therefore dreaded that their punishment might hereafter aggravate his own, we pretend not to say. In any event, it offers a lesson pregnant with instruction. It admonishes every impenitent offender, of the dreadful addition that may be made to his own misery, by that corrupt example which has ruined others. And it will be the con

The resolution you may make at this moment, and the practical effect of this resolution may determine your fate for ever. The decision, if delayed, may never be made; the call, now given, may never be repeated. Think what you put to hazard by delay. There is not an hour in our lives on which eternal life, or eternal death may not depend. Shall we then for a single moment, make it a matter of debate what our everlasting condition shall be? If it were a decision between two temporal concerns which you were called upon to make, deliberation might be wisdom, because there might be degrees summation of his calamity that he can see of comparison between their value, and consequently a doubt as to the predominance of the object, and the prudence of your choice. But the inequalities of created things are levelled when brought into comparison with the things of eternity-the difference of inore or less, richer or poorer, prosperity or privation, no longer exists; the distinction is swallowed up when contemplated in the view of endless happiness or endless misery. Here then, if you hesitate, you have already taken your part; irresolution is decision; deliberation is destruction; you have already resolved.

nothing but justice in his condemnation.— For it is worth observing, that the man in the parable brings no accusation against the equity of his sentence. Thus shall every condemned sinner justify God in his saying, and clear him when he is judged.'

But though the anguish of an undone futurity, and the specific nature of the punishment, are exhibited with awful clearness and explicit exactness, in the gospel; how wisely has the Holy Spirit, who dictated it, avoided all particulars of that heavenly happiness which we are yet assured will be without measure and without end; whilst the Elysian groves of the Pagan, and the paradise of the Mahometan have been graphical

The hand which now holds the pen dares not denounce anathemas, but trembles as it transcribes the divinely inspired denuncia-ly represented, the former by their poets, the tion of the prophet Zephaniah. The great day of the Lord is near, it is near, it hasteth greatly; it is the voice of the day of the Lord, when the mighty man shall cry bitterly. That day is a day of wrath; a day of trouble and distress; a day of wasteness and desolation; a day of darkness and gloominess; a day of clouds and thick darkness; a day of the trumpet and alarm!'

latter in their religious code. The one describes the inhabitants reposing in gloomy bowers in cheerless indolence, with the alternative of a restless activity exercised in contemptible pursuits, and renewing on inferior objects the busy feats in which toez had delighted here below! The heroes, who during life had slaughtered men, make war on beasts! The mighty warriors, who had made the earth to tremble, condescend in heaven to tame horses! The departed Mussulmen receives his celestial rewards in scenes of revelry and banquets of voluptuousness! What gratifications for an immaterial, immortal spirit!

The awful ruins of imperial Rome, the still more defaced vestiges of learned Athens, present a deeply touching spectacle of departed glory. Still more affecting is it to contemplate in the study of history on the destruction of Carthage, of Babylon, of Memphis, whose very ruins are no longer to The whole scheme of future happiness exbe found! How affecting to meditate on hibited in these two systems, is a preposterancient Troy, whose very scite can no long-ous provision for the perishable part of man, er be determined! Yet here no wonder to the entire exclusion of the immortal prinmixes with our solemn feeling. All these ciple; both schemes stand in direct opposinoble monuments of human grandeur were made of destructible materials, they could not, from their very nature, last for ever.But, to a deeply reflecting mind, what is the ruin of temples, towers, palaces, and cities, what is the ruin of the great globe itself' compared with the destruction of one soul meant for immortality-a soul furnished by its bountiful Creator with all the means for its instruction, sanctification, redemption,

tion to the laws of infinite wisdom, and the express word of Scripture. Both intimate as if the body were the part of our nature which is to exist after death, while the soul is the portion which is to be extinguished. Of a spiritual heaven, neither the obsolete mythology, nor the existing Koran, affords the slightest intimation.

The Scripture views of heaven are given rather to quicken faith than to gratify curi

conceive the blessings prepared for us, until he who has prepared reveal them.

osity. There the appropriate promises to spiritual beings are purely spiritual. It is enough for believers to know that they shall If, indeed, the blessedness of the eternal be for ever with the Lord; and though it doth world could be described, new faculties must not yet appear what we shall be, yet we be given us to comprehend it. If it could be know that when he shall appear, we shall be conceived, its glories would be lowered, and like Him. In the vision of the Supreme our admiring wonder diminished. The wealth Good, there must be supreme felicity Our that can be counted has bounds; the blesscapacities of knowledge and happiness shall ings that can be calculated have limits. We be commensurate with our duration. On now rejoice in the expectation of happiness earth, part of our enjoyment; a most falla-inconceivable. To have conveyed it to our cious part; consists in framing new objects full apprehension, our conceptions of it must for our wishes; in heaven there shall remain then be taken from something with which in us no such disquieting desires, for all we are already acquainted, and we should be which can be found we shall find in God. We shall not know our Redeemer by the hearing of the ear, but we shall see him as he is; our knowledge, therefore, will be clear, because it will be intuitive.

sure to depreciate the value of things unseen, by a comparison with even the best of the things which are seen. In short, if the state of heaven were attempted to be let down to human intelligence, it would be far inferior It is a glorious part of the promised bliss, to the glorious but indistinct glimpses which that the book of prophecy shall be realized; we now catch from the oracles of God, of the book of providence displayed, every mys-joy unspeakable, and full of glory. What terious dispensation unfolded, not by conjec- Christian does not exult in that grand outture, but by vision. In the grand general line of unknown, unimagined, yet consumview of Revelation, minute description would mate bliss-In THY presence is the fulness be below our ideas; circumstantial details of joy, and at Thy right hand are pleasures would be disparaging; they would debase for evermore? what they pretend to exalt. We cannot

THE SPIRIT OF PRAYER.

SELECTED AND COMPILED BY THE AUTHOR, FROM VARIOUS PORTIONS OF HER WORKS EXCLUSIVELY ON THAT SUBJECT.

"Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle."

"I will endeavour that you may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance." 2 Peter, c. i.

PREFACE.

FROM a sick, and, in all human probability, a dying bed, the writer of these pages feels an earnest. desire to be enabled, with the blessing of God, to execute a little plan which has at different times crossed her mind, but which she never found leisure to accomplish, till the present season of incapacity. "The importunity of friends,"--that hackneyed apology for works of inferior merit, is not, in the present instance, the less true for being worn threadbare. By many partial friends she has frequently been desired to write a volume exclusively on Prayer. With this request she has always declined complying; because, among other reasons, she was aware that she had previously exhausted--not the subject itself, which is indeed inexhautible,--but the slender resources of her own mind.

In her, perhaps too numerous, printed works, written on different subjects, and at distant periods, there are very many volumes, in which not only some reference has been made, but some distinct portions assigned, to the all-important subject of Prayer.

It is now her latest and warmest wish to be permitted to collect and examine some of those portions which treat more directly of this great duty; to unite the scattered members into one compact body, and to bring each under its proper head, into one point of view. All she is herself able to do, is to hear these extracts read by kind friends, and to adopt such passages as she may think proper for selec

tion.

Perhaps the silence and solitude of her present nightly watchings may, through Divine grace, impress her own heart with a still deeper sense of the unspeakable importance and value of Prayer, and of the support and consolation which may be granted in answer to this exercise, when every other support and consolation must inevitably fail.

However small may be the use of this compilation to the reader, the writer at least is already reaping one benefit herself from what she has presumed to suggest to others,-the benefit of feeling, as she reviews these pages, how sadly she herself has fallen short in the duties she has so repeatedly recommended. In this re-examination she has sensibly felt how easy it is to be good upon paper, and how difficult in practice.

At the same time she humbly trusts that her very failures may have enabled her to touch these subjects more experimentally than she might have done had her own deficiencies been less powerfully recollected, and less acutely felt.

The Author ventures to hope that her valued friends, to whom this selection is more especially dedicated, will consider it as the Fast bequest of one, who, about to quit this transitory scene, and feel

ing the deepest interest in their spiritual prosperity, as also for that of all her fellow Christians, is desirous, by this her final act, to testify at least her affectionate anxiety for their eternal happiness. The present weak state of the Author must apologise for inaccuracies and repetitions. Barley-Wood.

CHAP. I.

THE SPIRIT OF PRAYER.

The necessity of Prayer founded on the corruption of human nature.

which even the holiest men were not exempt.

Had the Holy Scriptures kept back from man the faithful delineations of the illustr ous characters to which we have referred, THE subject of man's apostacy is so near- the truth of the doctrine in question, though ly connected with the subject of Prayer, be- occasionally felt, and, in spite of his resist ing indeed that which constitutes the neces-ance, forced upon him, would not have been sity of this duty, that some mention of the one believed; or, if believed, would not have ought to precede any discussion of the other. been acknowledged. Let, then, the conviction that we have fallen from our original state, and that this lapse presents the most powerful incentive to prayer, furnish an apology for making a few preliminary remarks on this great article of our

faith.

The doctrine is not the less a fundamental doctrine, because it has been abused to the worst purposes; some having erroneously considered it as leaving us without hope, and others as lending an excuse to unresisted sin. -It is a doctrine which meets us in one unbroken series throughout the whole sacred volume; we find it from the third of Genesis, which records the event of man's apostacy, carried on through the history of its fatal consequences in all the subsequent instances of sin, individual and national, and running in one continued stream from the first sad tale of woe, to the close of the sacred canon in the Apocalyptic Vision.

that God is, and that he is the rewarder of Christianity hangs on a few plain truths; all that seek him;' that man has apostatised from his original character, and by it has forfeited his original destination: that Christ to expiate sin, and to save sinners; that af came into this world and died upon the cross ter his ascension into Heaven, he did not leave his work imperfect. He sent his Holy Spirit, who performed his first office by giving to the Apostles miraculous powers. His offices did not cease there; he has indeed withdrawn his miraculous gifts, but he still continues his silent but powerful operations, and that in their due order;-first, that of convincing of sin, and of changing the heart of the sinner, before he assumes the gracions character of the Comforter. then, of heresies to perplex doctrines, ar of philosophy to entangle, or of will-wor shippers to multiply them?

What need,

And, to remove the groundless hope, that We do not deny that there are, in Christhis quality of inherent corruption belonged tianity, high and holy mysteries; but these only to the profligate and abandoned, the Di-secret things,' though they belong to God,' vine Inspirer of the sacred writers, took especial care, that they should not confine themselves to relate the sins of these alone.

Why are the errors, the weaknesses, and even the crimes of the best men recorded with equal fidelity? Why are we told of the twice repeated deceit of the father of the faithful? Why of the single instance of vanity in Hezekiah? Why of the too impetuous zeal of Elijah? Why of the error of the almost perfect Moses? Why of the insincerity of Jacob ? Why of the far darker crimes of the otherwise holy David? Why of the departure of the wisest of men from that piety displayed with sublimity unparalleled in the dedication of the Temple? Why seems it to have been invariably studied, to record with more minute detail the vices and errors of these eminent men, than even those of the successive impious kings of Israel, and of Judah; while these last are generally dismissed with the brief, but mel ancholy sentence, that they did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord; followed only by too frequent an intimation that they made way for a successor worse than them selves? The answer is, that the truth of our universal lapse could only be proved by transmitting the record of those vices, from

have their practical uses for us; they teach us humility, the prime Christian grace; they send us to prayer, and they exercise faith, the parent attribute of all other graces.

This religion of facts, then, the poorest listeners in the aisles of our churches understand sufficiently, to be made by it wise unto salvation. They are saved by a practical belief of a few simple but inestimable truths.

By these same simple truths, martyrs and confessors, our persecuted saints, and our blessed reformers were saved. By these few simple truths, Locke, and Boyle, and Newton, were saved; not because they saw their religion through the glass of their philosophy, but because theirs was not a philosophy, falsely so called; nor their science, a science of opposition;' but a science and a philosophy which were made subservi ent to Christianity, and because their deep humility sanctified their astonishing powers of mind. These wonderful men, at whose feet the learned world is still satisfied to sit, sat themselves at the feet of Jesus.. Had there been any other way but the cross by which sinners could be saved, they, perhaps of all men, were best qualified to have found it.

To return, then, to the particular doctrine under consideration-Let us believe man is corrupt, because the Bible tells us he is so. Let us believe that all were so by nature, even the best, since we learn it from Divine authority. Let us, from the same authority, trace the disorder to its source from a fallen parent, its seat in a corrupt heart, its extent through the whole man, its universality over the entire race.

All are willing to allow that we are subject to frailties, to imperfections, to infirmities; facts compel us to confess a propensity to crimes, but worldly men confine the commission of them to the vulgar. But to rest here would lead us to a very false estimate of the doctrine in question, contrary to the decisive language of Scripture; it would establish corruption to be an accident, and not a root. It would, by a division of offenders into two classes, deny that all offences are derived from one common principle.

If, then, men would examine their own bosoms as closely as they censure the faults of others loudly, we should all find there the incipient stirrings of many a sin, which, when brought into action by circumstances, produce consequences the most appalling. Let us then bless God, not that we are better than other men, but that we are placed by Providence out of the reach of being goaded by that temptation, stimulated by that poverty, which, had they been our lot, might have led to the same termination.

wander. His guidance is not only perfect freedom, but perfect safety. Our greatest danger begins from the moment we imagine we are able to go alone.

The self-sufficiency of man arising from his imaginary dignity, is a favorite doctrine with the nominal Christian. He feeds his pride with this pernicious aliment. And, as we hear much, so we hear falsely, of the dignity of human nature. Prayer, founded on the true principles of Scripture, alone teaches us wherein our true dignity consists. The dignity of a fallen creature is a perfect anomaly. True dignity, contrary to the common opinion, that it is an inherent excellence, is actually a sense of the want of it; it consists not in our valuing ourselves, but in a continual feeling of our dependence upon God, and an unceasing aim at conformity to his image.

Nothing but a humbling sense of the sinfulness of our nature, of our practised offences, of our utter helplessness, and constant dependence, can bring us to fervent and persevering prayer. How did the faith of the saints of old flourish under a darker dispensation, through all the clouds and ignorance which obscured their views of God! They looked unto Him, and were enlightened !' How do their slender means and high attainments reproach us!

David found that the strength and spirit of nature which had enabled him to resist the lion and the bear, did not enable him to reLet, then, the fear of God, the knowledge sist his outward temptations, nor to conquer of His Word, and the knowledge of ourselves, his inward corruptions. He therefore prayteach us that there is not, by nature, so wide ed, not only for deliverance from blooda difference between ourselves and others as guiltiness,' for a grievously remembered sin, we fondly imagine; that there is not, by na- he prayed for the principle of piety, for the ture, a great gulf fixed, that they who are on fountain of holiness, for the creation of a this side might not pass over to the other. clean heart,' for the renewing of a right Let us not look to any superior virtue, to any spirit,' for truth in the inward parts,' that native strength of our own, but let us look the comfort of God's help might be granted with a lively gratitude to that mercy of God him.' This uniform avowal of the secret which has preserved us from the temptations to which they have yielded. But, above all, let us look to that preventing and restraining grace which is withheld from none who ask it: without this all-powerful grace, Latimer might have led Bonner to the stake; with it, Bonner might have ascended the scaffold, a One of our best poets,-himself an unsucmartyr to true religion. Without this grace, cessful courtier, from a personal experiLuther might have fattened on the sale of in-ence of the mortifying feelings of abject solidulgencies; and with it, Leo the Tenth citation, has said, that if there were the man might have accomplished the blessed work in the world whom he was at liberty to hate, of Reformation.

CHAP. II.

workings of sin, this uniform dependence on the mercy of God to pardon, and the grace of God to assist, render his precatory addresses, though they are those of a sovereign and a warrior, so universally applicable to the case of every private Christian.

he would wish him no greater punishment than attendance and dependence. But he applies the heavy penalty of this wish to the dependents on mortal greatness.

Now, attendance and dependence are the very essence both of the safety and happi

The duty of Prayer inferred from the help-ness of a Christian. Dependence on God is

lessness of man.

his only true liberty, as attendance on Him is his only true consolation. The suitor for MAN is not only a sinful, he is also a help- human favour is liable to continual disapJess, and therefore a dependent being pointment; if he knock at the door of his This offers new and powerful motives for the patron, there is probably a general order necessity of prayer, the necessity of looking not to admit him. In the higher case, there continually to a higher power, to a better is a special promise, that to him that knocks strength than our own. If that Power sus- it shall be opened.' The humau patron tain us not, we fall; if he direct us not, we hates importunity; the Heavenly Patron in