thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve,” is a mandate repeated in every variety of language, and under every diversity of circumstance.  In some passages, indeed, together with the most clear assurances, {19} that mankind need apply to no other dispenser of good, and can want no other as Saviour, advocate, or intercessor, that same truth is announced with such superabundance of repetition, that in the productions of any human writer the style would be chargeable with tautology.  In the Bible, this repetition only the more forces upon the mind, and fixes there, that same principle as an eternal verity never to be questioned; never to be dispensed with; never to be diluted or qualified; never to be invaded by any service, worship, prayer, invocation, or adoration of any other being whatever.  Let us take, for example, the forty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, in which the principle is most strongly and clearly illustrated.  “I am the lord, and there is none else:  there is no God beside me; I girded thee, though thou hast not known me; that they may know from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none beside me:  I am the Lord, and there is none else.  They shall be ashamed, and also confounded, all of them; they shall go to confusion together, that are makers of idols.  But Israel shall be saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation:  ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end:  I am the Lord, and there is none else.  I said not unto the seed of Jacob, Seek ye me in vain.  They have no knowledge that set up the wood of their graven image, and pray unto a god that cannot save.  There is no god beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me.  Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else.”

But it is needless to multiply these passages; and members of the Church of Rome will say, that they themselves acknowledge, as fully as members of the Anglican Church can do, that there is but one supreme {20} God and Lord, to whom alone they intend to offer the worship due to God; and that the appeals which they offer by way of invocation to saints and angels for their services and intercession, do not militate against this principle.  But here let us ask ourselves these few questions:—­

First, if it had been intended by the Almighty to forbid any religious application, such as is now professedly the invocation of saints and angels, to any other being than Himself alone, what words could have been employed more stringently prohibitory?

Secondly, had such an address to saints and angels, as the Church of Rome now confessedly makes, been contemplated by our heavenly Lawgiver as an exception to the general rule, would not some saving clause, some expressions indicative of such an intended exception, have been discovered in some page or other of his revealed will?

Thirdly, if such an appeal to the angels of heaven, or to the spirits of the just in heaven, had been sanctioned under the elder covenant, would not some example, some solitary instance, have been recorded of a faithful servant of Jehovah offering such a prayer with the Divine approbation?