such a number will, in the course of a year, be attacked by death, disease, or accident; that of so many houses, such a proportion will become a prey to the flames; that of so many vessels, such an amount will perish amid the rage of the elements. "How then can we dream," they exultingly demand, "that our lives or interests are of such importance as that God should, for them, suspend the march of His creation? How dare we pray to be freed from our allotted share of those evils, which, if they do not fall on us, must necessarily be laid as an additional burden on some of our fellow-creatures ?"

It is not only the plausibility of these opinions, or their apparent inconsistency with the doctrine implied in my text, which makes me anxious to shew their inherent fallacy. They conduct to so much practical as well as speculative evil, to consequences so impious in themselves, and productive of so much present and future misery to those who adopt them, that this, in itself, may induce a suspicion that the doctrine cannot be true, which, when carried to its full extent, will land us in such conclusions. Of the consequences which result from the denial of a particular Providence, the most evident as well as the most obnoxious, and that which, as we have seen, its supporters are least anxious to conceal, is one, nevertheless, extremely offensive to Christian ears, and extremely contrary to the general tenour of the Gospel. It is, that all prayer for earthly blessings is nothing else than an idle ceremony. It is but in vain that they would make a

distinction between prayer for general and for particular blessings, as if the former could be reasonable subjects of entreaty to the throne of grace, while the latter were vain and impious. A general blessing means, if it means any thing, the aggregate of many particulars; and it is the same thing in effect, since the one is only an abridgment of the other, whether we ask for God's favour and protection simply, or whether we specify in our prayer all the different circumstances in which His favour is exhibited. The advantages or disadvantages of either method of devotion are found in their effect on our own hearts only. It may be wise to exercise ourselves to a sense of our own ignorance and weakness by leaving the detail of our wants to God's allseeing care, content with such general applications for His help as may ensure to us that help in whatever instance it is most expedient for us. It may be wiser still, and I believe it to be most conformable to the nature of man, and the course recommended in Scripture, to quicken our tardy zeal, and warm our languid piety, by the enumeration of all those things which we most desire or dread at God's hands, submitting ourselves, in each particular, to His Almighty will and wisdom. But, however our prayers may be worded, our desires, if we pray earnestly, must always dwell on those precise instances of blessing or deliverance which are the nearest, for the time, to our hearts. Even in a wish, we cannot separate the general idea of happiness from those component parts for which happiness is only a com

prehensive term; and it matters not to Him "who knoweth what is in the mind of the spirit," whether our aspirations approach Him in the "groanings which cannot be uttered1" of St. Paul, or in the various supplications and deprecations of the longest litany.

It is plain, then, both that a petition merely general is in effect a species of prayer which, however it may have been uttered by the lips, never yet was conceived by the heart of man; and also that, even if it were offered up, it could only be fulfilled by the gift from God of those particular blessings, or the major part of them, which together make up the complex idea of protection or of happiness. If God will not interfere to give us the items, it is certain that He will not interfere to give us the sum; and if prayer for the particular interposition of Providence is vain and superstitious, we can pass no other censure on the most general application for His favour.

"But prayer may still be well-pleasing to God, as expressive of our dependence on Him." Now here, in the first place, it is not easy to perceive how any unprofitable and unmeaning action can be acceptable to an all-wise and perfect Being. But, secondly, what is meant by our dependence on a Being whom we can neither provoke to our further misery, nor conciliate to our further happiness; who has already, by an irrevocable fiat, stamped the character of our lot in life, and put it beyond His

Romans x. 26.

power to alter our position in the world, except, which it would be impious to look for, at the expense of His own consistency? Dependence involves in itself the notion of contingency. Whatever is determined, is, in a certain sense, already past, and the past may be the subject of gratitude or sorrow, but is placed beyond the reach of hope or anxiety.

But it is not for earthly blessings alone that prayer is rendered vain by the doctrine which I am now considering. It is not a temporal fatalism only which follows from denying that the events of this life are influenced by a particular Providence.

In this span of earthly being we might endure to take our chance of happiness or misery, content to bear our allotted burthen without a murmur or a prayer, if the world to come were free from the inexorable rule of destiny, and if it depended on ourselves so to pass through the present valley of tears, as to secure the hope of future and eternal felicity. But how (if our worldly and physical visitations be regarded as the result of an unalterable chain of causes and consequences) how can the human will or the moral actions or habits of mankind be exempted from the same necessity? Are not they links in the same chain? Are not our moral characters frequently influenced by external occurrences? Do they not often produce, in their turn, an effect on the external circumstances of ourselves, and of those around us? Of those casualties of which the regular and computed recurrence has been advanced as an argument to show their fatality, can we for

get that a great, perhaps the greatest, proportion have their origin in some voluntary action or habit of individuals? It is not the fire of Heaven, it is not the rage of elements, which our houses or our ships have only to apprehend, but the carelessness of intoxication, the malice of the incendiary, the armed violence of the pirate or mutineer. Of deaths, too, (and out of every number of deaths which the calculation of the ensurer anticipates, how many may be named which do not proceed from the decay or diseases of nature, or from the natural, though mortal dangers which hover in every breeze and lurk in every thicket?) how many are there which may be traced to guilty violence, or to equally guilty indulgence, to the actions of our enemies, our progenitors, or ourselves, actions for which they or we are one day to render a most strict account, and for which, according to their atrocity, or to the repentance and faith with which they have been followed, the Judge of men and angels will exact a less or greater punishment? But if the circumstances of life by which the moral habits of man. are formed, if the accidents of life to which these moral habits give occasion, if these are the results of a blind and capricious fate, or of a pre-determined and inevitable arrangement, is it not certain that the intervening link must also be fixed in the chain; that there must be a certain and necessary amount of moral guilt and virtue among mankind, which cannot be increased or diminished by us, and that it is as vain in man to

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