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SECTION II.

DIRECT EVIDENCE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

THE first step in our proposed inquiry is to ascertain what evidence on the doctrine and practice of the Invocation of Saints and Angels can be fairly drawn from the revealed word of God in the Old Testament.

Now let us suppose that a person of a cultivated and enlightened mind, and of a sound and clear judgment, but hitherto a stranger to revelation, were required to study the ancient Scriptures with the single view of ascertaining what one object more than any other, subordinate to the great end of preparing the world for the advent of Messiah, seemed to be proposed by the wisdom of the Almighty in imparting to mankind that revelation; could he fix upon any other point as the one paramount and pervading principle with so much reason, as upon this, The preservation in the world of a practical belief in the perfect unity of God, and the fencing of his worship against the admixture of any other, of whatever character, or form; The announcement that the Creator and governor of the universe is the sole Giver of every temporal and spiritual blessing; the one only Being to whom his rational creatures on earth should pay any religious service whatever; the one only Being to whom mortals must seek by prayer and invocation for the supply of any of their wants? Through the entire volume the inquirer would find that the unity of God is announced in every variety of expression; and that the exclusive worship

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of HIM alone is insisted upon and guarded with the utmost jealousy by assurances, by threats, and by promises, as the God who heareth prayer, alone to be called upon, alone to be invoked, alone to be adored. So to speak, he would find that recourse was had to every expedient for the express purpose of protecting God's people from the fatal error of embracing in their worship any other being or name whatever; not reserving supreme adoration for the supreme Being, and admitting a sort of secondary honour and inferior mode of invocation to his exalted saints and servants; but banishing at once and for ever the most distant approximation towards religious honour-the veriest shadow of spiritual invocation to any other Being than Jehovah HIMSELF ALONE.

In process of time, the heathen began to deify those mortals who had conferred signal benefits on the human race, or had distinguished themselves by their power and skill above their fellow-countrymen. Male and female divinities were multiplying on every side. Together with Jupiter, the fabled father of gods and men, worshipped under different names am ong the various tribes, were associated those "gods many and lords many," which ignorance and superstition, or policy and craft had invented; and which shared some a greater, some a less portion of popular veneration and religious worship. To the people of God, the worshippers of Jehovah, it was again and again most solemnly and awfully denounced, that no such thing should be. "Thou shalt worship the Lord 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,

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