fanatic when he thus braved the wrath of his

royal master by disobeying the edict which prohibited worship? Shall one who admires the courage ridicule the enthusiasm ? Shall we praise the conscientiousness which faced martyrdom at the call of fancied duty, and condemn the infatuation which saw a duty in devotion?

Brethren! these are questions asked openly in the world, in the Church, of this day; and they are questions which unsettle, where they overthrow not, the faith of many; and they are questions which cannot, like most questions, wait for their answer, inasmuch as they are fundamental, crucial, vital, touching the very spring of being, and coming (so to say) between the man and his God.

We shrink, and perhaps ought to shrink, from a topic so momentous; feeling how much the comfort and well-being of souls may be jeoparded by its wrong or unskilful handling. We have thought to turn aside from it into provinces less perilous and less responsible. But everything seems to beckon us this way, and to make every other subject insignificant by comparison. Pray then, we and you, that we may touch it, however feebly, however partially, at least with reverence and with sympathy; guided by the God 'who heareth prayer' to that which shall quicken and not hinder the prayers of His people.

There might seem indeed to be an impropriety, almost an indelicacy, in dealing in any manner with this most intimate, most secret in

tercourse between God and the soul. Praying is the object of preaching: but can it be its subject? Most of all, in the form of an enquiry into the reality, the lawfulness, the possibility, of praying? A deep awe should indeed rest in all such questionings, upon the ear that hears and the tongue that speaks. Far, far from this meditation be the lightness and the smartness and the asperity of worldly controversialists, of the strife of wrangling tongues! Put off the shoe from the foot, thou who wouldest discuss the mystery of mysteries, man's access to and converse with his Maker! Is it nothing to you, O ye that pass by,' if all the generations of God's Church, from the Creation to the Advent, shall have lived and died on a faith which was delusion? Here at least, inside the Church, with memories

dear and sacred of lives and deaths, near and far off, of which prayer was the soul; with an ancestry, more than of family, knitting us to saints and heroes of whom the world was not worthy; we need not fear levity or coldness or indifference in the listening. That which we could not bear to discuss with persons uninterested, we will ponder together here on the knees of the soul.

It is wonderful how full Scripture is, when we read it in this aspect, of the word and of the

fact of Prayer. This one day, how full is everything of it! And what wonder? The very

life of religion is prayer. Unlike in all else, all God's saints have been men of prayer. It has been their life. Explain it as you may, here is a fact of which philosophy, of which candour,

of which common sense, of which common justice must take notice. Here is a phenomenon as plain, as certain, as striking, as sunrising or sunset. The antiquity of prayer-its existence, as a habit, as a custom, in the remotest age of which we have one record; the universality of prayer, as a primary duty of every man who has imagined himself to have so much as one spark or one echo of a revelation; the importance attached to prayer, in the mind and in the life of all religious men; the prevalence of prayer, in proportion to the emergency of circumstance and the vehemence of feeling, in the best and noblest and truest of men; the power of prayer, judged but by its results in moulding character and affecting action and even transforming life; the benefit of prayer, its enemies themselves