strength of grace! Not in Him, but in ourselves, are we straitened: not unto ourselves, but unto Him, be the praise of our rescue and of our redemption !

II.

PRINCIPLES OF PRAYER.

"I the Lord have spoken it, and I will do it. . . . I will yet for this be enquired of by the house of Israel, to do it for them."--EZEK. xxxvi. 36, 37.

W

E have not denied the name of Prayer to any rising of the soul of man towards the Invisible God. It is described by St Paul at Athens as the very end for which God set all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him-as men grope in the dark or in blindness after some lost or desired thing-and find also Him whom they thus feel after, and in whom, whether known or unknown, we all live and move, and have cur being. Even that feeling after God is Prayer.

If it be but the vague cry, sent forth into the infinite void by the hunger or the cold or the nakedness of a spirit created for yet ignorant of its Maker, we have not denied it the name of Prayer for Prayer is an instinct of nature, as well as a mystery of religion, and a revelation of grace.

But now, in passing on to speak, as God shall enable us, of the Principles of this divine and holy exercise, we must of necessity deal not with the Prayer of Nature, but with the Prayer of the Gospel, which is the Prayer of Faith. It would be a needless and a profitless stepping down from the standing-place which God has given us in His Word and in His Church, to settle how the man ignorant of Revelation, the man with reason only and conscience to enlighten him, should frame that first enquiry by which he is to seek and to feel after a God; what instinctive hopes may animate his search, what rules direct, or what conditions limit it. We speak now as to Christian men, who desire to walk, in this matter as in others, by the light of truth and inspiration, addressing Christ in the soul, as once His disciples said to Him upon earth, in reference to a difficult and an all-important duty

Lord teach us to pray.

1. First, then, Prayer is founded upon knowledge.

Prayer, we said, is speaking to God. Before we can speak to God, we must know God. How shall they call, an Apostle asks, on Him in whom they have not believed? Even the prayer of the heathen, so far as it is prayer, rests upon knowledge. If he speaks to an idol-if he asks aid of wood or stone, and stops there-then the nonentity of the object communicates itself to the worship: an idol is nothing in the world, and the prayer which treats it as an existence is itself a nothingness too. But if the heathen man in any degree looks through the idol to a Being conceived of as distinct from it; if he so much as recognizes one of God's real attributes, say even power, and addresses himself to that; then, in the same proportion, the lie of his idolatry becomes tinged and tinctured with a truth, and the cry, O Baal, hear us, may be the faint shadow and reflection of a better worship, because it also, even it, has this characteristic of the Prayer we speak of, that it is founded (in some one point at least) upon know

ledge. The man has an idea of God as a God of power. The prayer which knew nothing whatever of its object, or which called upon Him in no one respect as He is, would lack the first principle of all prayer, that it must have a basis of knowledge.

And are no Christian prayers-are no prayers, I mean, of Christians so called--utterly destitute of this first condition?

To how many might the remonstrance of God now be addressed, Thou thoughtest wickedly that I am even such an one as thyself; such in discernment, such in equity, such in veracity, or such in power! How many, even in prayer, never let God into their secrets; hope to elude His inspection, try to baffle His intuition! How many, even in prayer, expect of God a treatment neither just nor moral; ask of Him some compromise with evil, and a salvation not from but in their sins! How many, even in prayer, act the hypocrite and the dissembler; professing desires which they feel not, and regrets and repentances which deceive not even themselves! How many still expect to be heard for their much speaking, or to overbear the counsels of the Unchangeable by the vehemence of their importunity! All such prayers lack the first