and lively devotion, rises to God on the wings of an ever living,` and an ever vigorous thankfulness. "O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good; for his mercy endureth forever. Praise ye the Lord. I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth." Giving thanks always, for all things unto God and the Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; established in the faith and abounding therein with thanksgiving; continue in prayer and watch in the same with thanksgiving."

There are common and almost perpetual favours which address the pious with outward incitements of gratitude. The blessings of health, plenty and peace, are so seldom blotted from our list of mercies, that forms of thanksgiving which include them, may be almost unchangeable. Especially may we always be thankful for the light of the gospel and the hope of glory. We cannot over estimate the fitness of thanksgiving as one of the forms of exercising true piety, nor can we use it in excess. But reason and experience can give us valuable hints concerning its most just and useful expressions.

Let the matter of thanksgiving be intelligible to the people; free from fanciful, ingenious or highly wrought conceptions; such as most naturally falls within the reverential and grateful contemplation of the people in common. In recounting particulars, let them be the prominent sources of lively and general gratification; benefits direct, and in reality; not by elaborate. construction. It does not suit the simple offering of pious gratitude to load our thoughts with propositions of systematic theology, although beginning with the eucharistic formula. We are never able to preserve the mental posture of thankfulness while the minister gives thanks to God, not for the revelation of the things of God, but for the fact that every thing revealed is as he himself conceives it; that the truth relating to human freedom and ability is so and so; that eternal decrees stand so and so related to free agency in man; that such and such is the way in which atonement separates pardon, and imputed righteousness, justification, and the Holy Spirit, the new heart. Such turning up the subsoil of divine beneficence may, with a blessing, bring remote returns of thankfulness; but meanwhile the labourer starves. If the people are thankful at all in connexion with such offices, it is when they are done. Thankfulness like peni

tence, congeals in the intellectual zone, where the heavenly rays fall obliquely, and are scattered by endless refractions; but under the excitement of a vertical radiance, direct, as it were, upon the heart, the grateful emotions have their natural force.

We have suggested the impropriety of drawing theological discussions into public prayer at all; most of all do we recoil from interweaving them with our forms of thanksgiving. It is all the better for the devotions of the congregation when the matter of thanksgiving is that which is most familiar to all the people. That special and striking benefits to individuals should be specified for united thanksgiving by the assembly, to a reasonable extent, can never be amiss in a body thus composed of sympathizing members. The promptings of such sympathy ought not to be suppressed. But the best general incitements to gratitude are those which are most common. Their influence is the most comprehensive and abiding. Nothing can more engage the thankful devotion of the assembly than the ease and freedom of the minister in recounting with an ardent gratitude the most common and familiar gifts of heavenly beneficence. We know not that our remarks on this subject can be appreciated by any who have not sometimes felt their grateful emotions resisted by the unfruitful performance of the pulpit, and been prompted to forsake the guidance of the minister, and select expressions of thankfulness for themselves.

The chief part of prayer, in the common estimation, is supplication. It is in supplication that Christians consider themselves most sure of the immediate benefits of union.

We must here recall attention to the distinction between private and public prayer. The Christian in his private supplication, presents whatever petitions may be suggested by the state of his own mind, and his prayers may be the index of his own inward frame alone. Though not confined to his own concerns, they still relate only to matters interesting to himself. To embrace other matters were inappropriate and unnatural. And in the family, the head of the household prays with and for his household as his own; and the validity of the prayer as a family exercise, depends on his own faith, and not on the union of all the members in the spirit and the act of prayer. His supplications, therefore, in the family, may follow his private feelings; provided they relate suitably to the interests of the

family and of himself as its head. But public supplication, not being the prayer of the minister alone can hardly be submitted to the direction of his private feelings; and here occurs, what we shall soon remark upon more at large; the greatest of our practical disadvantages with extemporary prayer in public. It is the difficulty of putting off the character of the individual suppliant, and putting on the character of an organ for expressing the devotions of the assembly. To do this effectually, requires a ready and entire submission of the mind to just views of the nature of the exercise. A minister may have a lively state of the devout affections, and strong impulses to pray for particular benefits, and a strong desire for the spiritual improvement of his congregation; he may carry all his fervour into his pulpit services, and yet fail of that most important quality of public prayer which makes it properly the prayer of the congregation.

We remark then, first, of the matter of public supplication, what has been remarked of that of thanksgiving, and hardly needs to be repeated, that it should be matter in which the worshippers so far as they are sincerely devout, must be presumed to feel a common interest. It does violence to the nature of united supplication to introduce matter respecting which the assembly are either ignorant or unconcerned. There is no union in prayer where there is no agreement, no identity of thought; and no corresponding agreement of feeling.

Next, the matter of supplication must be such as may occupy the attention of the people to the greatest benefit of their religious feelings. Supplication for temporal benefits in the spirit of dependence, nourishes the sense of dependence in the worshippers and a pious hope for the continued bounties of Providence. Supplication for the forgiveness of sin is the grand pervading petition in all prayer by sinners; since the reception of any favour from God implies a kind forbearance towards our sins, and is a sign of that forbearance. Prayer for any good is virtually a request that God may put away our sins from before him. This is uniformly regarded by the Christian as the only condition of blessing from God; and all proper matter of supplication will be freely interspersed with such ideas. The congregation must be supposed prepared to offer united and earnest supplication for peace with God, through Jesus Christ, and for all the blessedness which flows from it; for the increase of the spirit of devotion

in them, and divine aid in all their duties; for support under trial, and all grace necessary for every time of need; remembering that these blessings flow from the forgiving mercy of God through Jesus Christ; by whose blood we have remission of sins, This is the most natural and suitable train of thought for public supplication. All devout people so readily unite upon it; it rises so promptly from the heart of true piety; it gives so free and genial exercise to all the feelings which are properly Christian, and pours its refreshing waters so readily and copiously through all the channels of faith, humility, gratitude, love, and hope, that minister and people may look for a blessing on the prayer into which it largely enters.

That part of public supplication which consists of intercession for others, furnishes occasion for the exercise of sound discretion. First of all supplication should be made for all men; that the blessings of health, of plenty, and of social order and happiness may abound every where; and that all men may have the true knowledge of Christ, and the hope of salvation. In particular, the prayers of the congregation should be offered for persons in civil authority, that they may be preserved and guided by the goodness and wisdom of God, and be instrumental of securing the rights of all the people; that they may render due respect to the kingdom of Christ, and promote by their example and by the conduct of their administration, a general respect for religion in the community. For the afflicted, besides supplication for members of the particular community by special request, we properly pray for all the sorrowful and oppressed of mankind, as persons whose sufferings, by the blessing of God, may be sources of benefit to themselves and others. Beyond this the minute classification of men as subjects of public prayer, can seldom be indulged without risk of omitting indispensable matters, or of being tedious.

We are seldom assisted in our public devotions by prolix and minute descriptions of persons often prayed for by the minister, and classified according to some peculiarity of religious experience. Especially are we unedified, when those cases are displayed successively with precise distinctions in respect of fear, anxiety, conviction, doubt, dejection, darkness, and the like, in the terms of an experimental nomenclature, to which few conceptions of the people correspond, and which are least of all

likely to be appropriated by any hearer. The prayers offered in public by one minister for another who is present, contribute seldom to edification. Their strong tendency to suggest to the hearer, not unfrequently the idea of a fraternal compliment, and commonly a class of thoughts not readily assimilated to the spiritual frame of a devout worshipper, renders them a very delicate part of the matter of supplication. It would, we are sure, accord with the sense of propriety in most of the people, that this part of our public prayers, if considered worthy of being retained, should be conceived with wise reference to the devotional use and benefit of the assembly; should contemplate the minister in his public and ministerial relations only; and should be short.

We only add, respecting the matter of supplication, that the things specified in our requests should be definite objects of conscious and direct desire; readily and clearly apprehended as such by the congregation. Preaching in prayer is abundantly and very justly disallowed; not least, as we sometimes think, by ministers more given to it themselves than they are aware. This sort of impropriety creeps into the petitions presented for the conversion of impenitent persons; when the minister prays that they may be taught a great variety of particulars, composing in his view, the system of saving knowledge and faith; that they may be led through a course of experience which he delineates in systematic detail; and that they may thus escape from misery and be reformed from sin, which he proceeds to paint, at full length, in the theological costume; departing throughout from the proper sphere of public supplication, except as he introduces each series with the suppliant prefix, "we pray."

Nothing but a defective apprehension of the nature of public prayer can reconcile a truly devout congregation to these didactic supplications. While in form addressing God, they, in fact, address the people. The people feel the prayer, not as the expression of their own devotion to God, but as a means of persuasion to themselves. One part of the evil thus incurred is the check thrown upon the fervour of devotion in the pious mind; and another is the injury suffered by all who have become so familiar with the impropriety as not to notice it.

We have dwelt on this subject at some length. The appa