us reasonable, and agreeable to our natural sentiments, and desirable if true, in place of the assurances of God’s revealed Will, may correspond with the arguments of a heathen philosopher unacquainted with the truth as it is in Jesus, but cannot satisfy disciples of Him who brought life and immortality to light by his Gospel.  Such questions as these, “Is there any thing unreasonable in this?  Would not this be a welcome tenet, if true?” well became the lips of Socrates in his defence before his judges, but are in the strict sense of the word preposterous in a Christian.  With the Christian the first question is, What is the truth?  What is revealed?  What has God promised?  What has He taught man to hope for?  What has He commanded man to do?  By his own words, by the words and by the example of his inspired messengers, by the doctrine and practice of his Church, the witness and interpreter of the truth, how has He directed us to sue for his mercy and all its blessings?  On what foundation, sure and certain, can we build our hopes that “He will favourably with mercy hear our prayers?” For in this matter, a matter of spiritual life and death, we can anchor our hope on no other rock than his sure word of promise.

That sure word of promise, if I am a faithful believer, I have; but it is exclusive of any invocation by me of saint, or angel, or virgin.  The pledge of heaven is most solemnly and repeatedly given; God, who cannot lie, has, in language so plain, that he may run who readeth it, assured me that if I come to HIMSELF by HIS SON, my prayer shall not be cast out, my suit shall {397} not be denied, I shall not be sent empty away.  In every variety of form which language can assume, this assurance is ratified and confirmed.  His own revealed will directs me to pray for my fellow-creatures, and to expect a beneficial effect from the prayers of the faithful upon earth in my behalf.  To pray for them, therefore, and to seek their prayers, and to wait patiently for an answer to both, are acts of faith and of duty.  And were it also appointed by God’s will to be an act of faith and duty in a Christian to seek the prayers, and aid, and assistance, of saints and angels by supplicatingly invoking them, surely the same word of truth would have revealed that also.  Whereas the reverse shows itself under every diversified state of things, from the opening of the sacred book to its very last page.  The subtle distinction of religious worship into latria, dulia, and hyperdulia, the refined classification of prayer under the two heads of direct, absolute, final, sovereign, on the one hand, and of oblique, relative, transitory, subaltern, on the other, swell indeed many elaborate works of casuistry, but are not discoverable in the remains of primitive Christians, nor in the writings of God’s word have they any place.  I cannot find in the inspired Apostles any reference to the necessity, the duty, the lawfulness, the expediency of our seeking by prayer the good offices of the holy dead, or of