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

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?

Lastly, when such strong and repeated declarations and injunctions interspersed through the entire volume of the Old Testament, unequivocally show the will of God to be, that no other object of religious worship should have place in the heart or on the tongue of his own true sons and daughters, can it become a faithful child of our Heavenly Father to be seeking for excuses and palliations, and to invent distinctions between one kind of worship and another?

God Himself includes all in one universal prohibi

tory mandate, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve." So far from according with those general rules for the interpretation of the revealed will of God, which we have already stated, and from which, in the abstract, probably few would dissent, an anxiety to force the word of God into at least an acquiescence in the invocation of saints and angels, indicates a disposition to comply with his injunctions, wherever they seem to clash with our own view, only so far as we cannot avoid compliance; and to seek how we may with any show of propriety evade the spirit of those commands. Instead of that full, free, and unstinted submission of our own inclinations and propensities to the Almighty's will wherever we can discover it, which those entertain whom the Lord seeketh to worship Him; to look for exceptions and to act upon them, bears upon it the stamp of a reserved and grudging service. After so many positive warnings, enactments, and denunciations, against seeking by prayer the aid of any other being whatever, surely a positive command would have been absolutely necessary to justify a mortal man in preferring any prayer to any being, saint, angel, or archangel, save only the Supreme Deity alone. Instead of any such command or even permission appearing, not one single word occurs, from the first syllable in the Book of Genesis to the last of the prophet Malachi, which could even by implication be brought to countenance the practice of approaching any created being in prayer.

But let us now look to the examples on this subject afforded in the Old Testament. Many, very many a prayer is recorded of holy men, of inspired men, of men, to whose holiness and integrity and acceptance

the Holy Spirit bears witness; yet among these prayers there is not found one invocation addressed to saint or angel. I will not here anticipate the observations which it will be necessary to make in consequence of the extraordinary argument which has been devised, to account for the absence of invocations to saints before the resurrection of Christ, namely, that before that event the saints were not admitted into heaven. Although pressed forward with such unhesitating confidence in its validity, that argument is so singular in its nature, and so important in its consequences, and withal so utterly groundless, as to call for a separate examination, on which we will shortly enter: meanwhile, we are now inquiring into the matter of fact.

The whole Book of Psalms is a manual of devotion, consisting alternately, or rather intermixedly, of prayers and praises, composed some by Moses, some by other inspired Israelites of less note, but the greater part by David himself; and what is the force and tendency of their example? Words are spoken in collaudation of "Moses and Aaron among the saints of the Lord," and of "Samuel among such as called upon his name;" and mention is made with becoming reverence of the holy angels; but not one word ever falls from the pen of the Psalmist, addressed, by way of invocation, to saint or angel. In the Roman Ritual supplication is made to Abel and Abraham as well as to Michael and all angels. If it is now lawful, if it is now the duty of the worshippers of the true God to seek his aid through the mediation of those holy men, can we avoid asking, Why the inspired patriarchs did not appeal to Abel for his mediation? Why did not the inspired David invoke the father of the faithful to intercede for him with God? If the departed spirits

of faithful men may be safely addressed in prayer; if those who in their lifetime have, to their fellow-mortals, (who can judge only from outward actions, and cannot penetrate the heart,) appeared accepted servants and honoured saints of our Creator, may now be invoked by an act of religious supplication either to grant us aid, or to intercede with God for aid in our behalf, why did not men whom God declared to be partakers of his Spirit of truth, offer the same supplication to those departed spirits, who, before and after their decease, had this testimony from Omniscience itself, that they pleased God? Why is no intimation given in the later books of the Old Testament that such supplications were offered to Moses, or Aaron, or Abraham, or Noah? When wrath was gone out from the presence of the Lord, and the plague was begun among the people, Aaron took a censer in his hand, and stood between the living and the dead, and the plague was stayed. If the soul of Aaron was therefore to be regarded as a spirit influential with God, one whose intercession could avail, one who ought to be approached in prayer, were it only for his intercession, could a stronger motive be conceived for suggesting that invocation, than David must have felt, when the pestilence was destroying its thousands around him, and all his glory and strength, and his very life too, were threatened by its resistless ravages? But no! neither Abel, nor Abraham, nor Moses, nor Aaron, must be petitioned to intercede with God, and to pray that God would stay his hand. To God and God alone, for his own mercy's sake, must his afflicted servant turn in supplication. We find among his prayers no "Holy Abraham, pray for us," "Holy Abel, pray for us." His own Psalm of thanksgiving describes full well the object and the nature of his