others who might be mentioned, are private exercises. Our acquaintance with this particular species of literature is not extensive; but those examples which come the nearest to our standard of taste in this matter, are a few interspersed through some portions of the works of Archbishop Leighton. There are forms of devotion which seem to have intrinsic fitness; which answer agreeably the states of all devout minds; which require no long familiarity to reconcile them to existing tastes, and no practice to adapt the motions of the pious mind to the character and order of the thoughts.

* As to stated and authorized forms of prayer, it is obvious that their value must vary with circumstances. With the proper conditions of a suitable performance, we do not hesitate to challenge for the ministry of the gospel, the liberty, the responsibility and if properly used, the great advantage of extemporaneous prayer. With correct and established views of propriety in the service, and a right judgment of its value to the people of God, a well trained and devout ministry will serve the house of God the better for the greater freedom. In no case ought the liberty of extemporaneous prayer to be taken from the minister in the pulpit. As well might preaching be confined by authority to prescribed forms of words. The discretion of the ministry may be trusted as freely in the one as the other. But if, in the solemn office of leading the united devotions of the assembly, the ministry might exercise a judgment better informed by approved examples set forth for that end, and if it might even have an election between extemporaneous prayer and a form appointed to be used at option, the standard of extemporary prayer itself would rise, and the edification of our people in public worship would be enlarged. We must not make our liberty a cloak of licentiousness. There are few of our most able and eminent ministers who come as near the true standard of pulpit prayer as they do that of the sermon. When we hear it said of such a man as Robert Hall that his prayers were felt by his hearers to be strikingly unequal to his sermons, we seem to discern in a mind keenly sensitive to the proprieties of pulpit prayer, an aversion to making prayer the work of genius, and at the same time, some lack of zeal in cultivating the peculiar talent for its just and most useful performance. But among our brethren of the lower grades of ability and industry, we not unfrequently

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observe habits in this service from which many of our sensible and pious people would gladly take refuge in a book of prayers. When we sometimes hear the intimation that the Book of Common Prayer, could it be quietly introduced, would be an improvement upon the present forms of devotion in many of our pulpits, we know this preference not to be for written prayers, in general, but as an alternative and a way of escape from peculiar and unnecessary faults in prayers with which the observers are often afflicted. We cannot assent to such a remark, but we have a deep impression of the needless imperfection of our present standard, and desire to speak that impression with emphasis. We are confident that our standard may be so raised that all would feel the transition from extemporaneous to written prayers as a descent and a defection. When, we observe the special satisfaction of thousands of devout worshippers with what appear to us the indefinite and comparatively barren forms of the English Liturgy, we see the great power of a few striking points of propriety in public prayer to engage the heart of true devotion. But the prayers of our own pulpits may yield a special satisfaction far superior to this. The capabilities of extemporary prayer, on the lips of a truly pious and rightly cultivated ministry are comparatively unlimited. By fixing deeply and cherishing sacredly an aversion to the didactic and the hortatory in public prayer, by forming a correct taste in ministers and people, a taste which rational piety will render uniform in proportion to the serious and intelligent consideration bestowed upon the subject, by the influence of good models, prepared and sanctioned by persons of high esteem and station in the churches, we may produce a degree of improvement which shall gratify all our devout people, and forward all the ends for which public prayer is maintained.

This is not a conventional question. The suitable, the agreeable, the useful, seems to us to have the same sort of absolute existence in this department of the kingdom of God, as the beautiful has in the world of sensible things. One way of praying in public is not exactly as good as another, though the people may be pleased with it as well. Though generally most pleased with forms with which we are most familiar, we are not of necessity most edified by them. We should learn to discern and approve the things which are excellent. We must not take for

granted that the things which most please us are, in themselves, best. There may be other things which, if we learn to approve and enjoy them, would be bettter for us. There are, indeed, some valuable principles of human nature which resist change, and require conformity to the present standard. But there are other principles more estimable among men, which tend to progress. These ought to rule. Under their sway taste advances with intelligence. And true advancement tends to uniformity. So long as musical culture leads none to prefer the screech of the owl to the warbling of the nightingale; so long as the study of architecture leads none to choose an Egyptian pile for an airy summer retreat and a Corinthian delicacy for a prison, so long as social culture never tends to make the dress and manners of the peasant the fashion of the court, so long may we expect the true culture of intelligent and rational piety to lead towards uniformity in what we may call the style of our public devotion.

Our object in this discussion thus becomes apparent. We do not disparage any forms of worship in the view of those who use them to edification. When Christians, in the free exercise of their best judgment, are content with their usages, we would not disturb their satisfaction. But we would bring their best judgment into exercise. We would tempt review, and re-judgment, as it is well, at times, to do with every thing which tends to the fixedness of habit. Stir thought again, and observe where it settles. Not projecting revolutions, total and sudden, in anything except the vices of the heart; not proposing substitutes for existing usages, to be at once adopted by formal act; but keeping the eye of right reason in search of whatsoever things are true, lovely and of good report, and forbidding irrational practices to take deep root, we are free to advance in the way we should go. If on each revision, we reach the same conclusion, it is with increased confidence that we are right. If our conclusions vary, still give them due weight in practice. Should occasional violence be suffered to a prejudice it will not be the worse. Prejudice is not piety. It does not ordinarily favour pure religion. However it interweave itself with the instincts of a pious mind, it is still only evil; and when it has gained such ascendancy as to make prudent men afraid to disturb it, it is high time it were disturbed.

It will not be thought amiss that brethren be invited to speak

together on the subject of improvement in pulpit prayer. We hold the influence of fraternal suggestions in such a matter in high esteem. It would be one of the most useful subjects for presbyterial deliberation. An occasional report of a committee, presenting, not resolutions for laws, but suggestions for thought, would not be ineffectual, and would promote one of the important ends contemplated by an apostolic Presbytery.

We look for improvement in the devotional forms of the Christian assembly in the direction of the primitive simplicity. We do not mean by simplicity, the absence of any legitimate signs of true culture. We mean a simplicity which is the fruit of the highest culture; which rejects superfluity, yields the outward exercises to the refined and regulated impulse of the inward, and follows the Spirit of the Lord as it moves in well trained and furnished understandings and pure hearts. The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. As the prophet approaches the stature of a perfect man in Christ Jesus, and learns the reciprocal subjection of the divine to the human, and of the human to the divine, we shall witness most of the genuine beauty of holiness in the most extemporaneous outgoings of the pious heart.

Such simplicity is a noble part of the liberty wherewith Christ makes his people free. The church will learn to stand fast in it. She cannot, in a pure state, be subject to ordinances. Her nature requires that ordinances be subject to her. Whatever is lovely in her ordinances must be the immediate outshining of her inward virtue. The rigid and cumbrous incrustation of forms which grew out upon her in the middle ages, from the impurity of her blood, will disappear, and disclose her natural complexion fair as the sun. With the present imperfection of Christians, while they fit so ill together, carry so little of beauty and grace in their spontaneous movements, they must constrain mutual intercourse with rules imposed on the affections by reason; they must study attitudes, and submit to laws of mutual accommodation enforced by external authority; that so the strong help the infirmities of the weak, that no weak conscience suffer from the liberty of the stronger, and that no weak brother perish for whom Christ died. But does not true progress look towards freedom, the freedom of simplicity, the freedom of inward rectitude and vigour; when the pure and rational piety of the church

shall be a law unto itself: when the outward forms of godliness will not be required as supports of the inward virtue; when the body of Christ shall feel the energy of its proper life, and enter into the joy of an inward, unincumbered, unrestrained activity, walking and leaping and praising God.

ART. V.-Lettres de M. Botta, sur ses découvertes a Khorsabad, près de Ninive, publiées par M. J. Mohl, Membre de l'Institut. Paris. Imprimerie Royale. 1845.

It would not be difficult to make a long and interesting article on the subject suggested by this work, if we were able to reproduce its extraordinary illustrations, of which the letterpress is merely descriptive. Of these plates there are no less than fifty-five, in the highest style of lithographic exactness, some of them unfolding to large dimensions. Our remarks, however, must labour under the disadvantage of having no such visible and striking aids. Yet the subject is one of commanding interest, and opens a field of investigation, which promises the richest results for ethnography and apologetical theology. In what follows, we shall employ the language of the author, wherever it is most convenient, but shall generally make some abridgement.

M. Botta went to Mosul in 1843, with the purpose of employing such leisure as might be allowed amidst his duties as Consul, in making excavations at Nineveh, from the supposed ruins of which Mosul is divided only by the Tigris. He caused works to be undertaken, for some time, at that spot on the river, which has long passed for the rampart of the city of Nineveh, but which is now supposed to have contained only the palace of the Assyrian kings. It is so near Mosul, that it has long since become as common as a highway; and the labours of M. Botta resulted in nothing further than a few inscriptions on brick and stone. During this time, the inhabitants of the environs, seeing the Consul of France busied thus, brought him from different directions, bricks with inscriptions, and other remains of antiquity, and M. Botta, hopeless of any great results here, transferred his