atonement should encourage even the guiltiest of you all to draw nigh in faith-for there is no guilt beyond the reach of that atonement. But remember that you also draw nigh with full purpose of heart after the new obedience of the gospel. Coming thus, you are warranted to sit down at the table of the sacrament; and the prayers of a heart desirous of a present holiness as of a future heaven, will most surely meet with acceptance, and as surely be answered with power. Your prayer to be saved from the punishment of sin, lifted while the emblems of the Redeemer's sacrifice are before you, will most certainly prevail. Your prayer to be saved from the power of sin, lifted in the presence of Him who is Master of the assembly and to whom the dispensation of the Spirit has been committed, will as certainly prevail; and your joining in this ordinance will contribute to save, just in as far as it contributes to sanctify you.

But I have all along spoken as if this were a direct prayer for the object of one's own personal salvation. Whereas it is an intercessory prayer, and suggests what we ought to do for the salvation of those who are dear to us. Paul had made many a vain effort for the salvation of his countryIn every city where he found them, he began with the Jews ere he addressed the overtures of the gospel to the Gentiles. His obligation to them was the first obligation of which he acquitted himself. In the discharge of it he incurred many a hazard; and brought upon himself the hatred of those who

men.

had been formerly his friends; and made prodigious exertion in the way of travelling, and preaching, and doing all the labours of the apostolical office, in behalf of these his kinsmen according to the flesh; and not till compelled by the hostility of a whole nation either to flee from place to place, or turn him to the Gentiles, did he desist from the strenuousness of his efforts to secure the immortal well-being of those in his own family or in his own land. And even after every effort failed, still he had recourse to prayer. The desire of his heart was not extinguished by the disappointment he met with upon earth; but when baffled and thrown back upon him there, it took an upward direction to heaven-when obstructed on all sides by the resistance of man, it ascended without obstruction to the throne of God. Even in the busiest period of his work and his warfare for the conversion of these obstinate Israelites, he mixed with his activities his prayers--but after that the activities were repressed, the prayers continued to arise. He was forced to desist from the labours of the hand-but the love in his heart still abode unquenched and unquenchable; and when he could do no more, he prayed for them. This survived the longest and the last of all the other expedients; and long after he had found it was vain to labour, he did not think it was vain to pray.

This might serve as admonition to those whose hearts are set on the eternity of relatives or friends -to the mother who has watched and laboured for years that the good seed might have fixture in the

hearts of her children, but does not find that this precious deposit has yet settled or had occupation there to the sister whose gentle yet earnest remonstrances have been wholly unable to control a brother's waywardness-to that one member perhaps of a family whom the grace of the Spirit hath selected, and who now strives and supplicates in the midst of an alienated household, that all may be arrested in their way and turned unto God-to that holy and heaven-born disciple, whom the pollutions of the world have touched not; but who standing alone in a companionship of scorners, mourns over the profaneness and the profligacy that hitherto have marked all his solemn warnings, all his friendly but ineffectual protestations. All these may, like other zealous missionaries, have had but a hard experience. They may have long been in contact and collision with the power of sin and unbelief in the hearts of others, and had much to discourage them. Their fidelity may have given offence-their affectionate counsels may have been spurned-their ́moral earnestness may have been laughed at—all their expedients to impress or to convince may have vanished into impotency-their very speech may at length become a signal for the attitude of suspicion and of prompt resistance on the part of their fellows -And so their every argument might only strengthen, might only confirm, the impenitency which it was meant to soften or do away. In these, and in many other ways, might they receive most palpable intimation that they are doing no good; and even per

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haps but fixing more inveterately than before the distaste of children or of friends for God and godliness. And so might they be tempted to desist, even as the apostles desisted, from their countrymen. Yet let them never forget, that what has heretofore been impracticable to performance may not be im

practicable to prayer. With man it may be impos

sible; but with God all things are possible.

That cause which has so oft been defeated and is now hopeless on the field of exertion, may on the field of prayer and of faith be triumphant. Never cease then your supplications to the sanctuary above, for that power to turn the unregenerate and subdue them-which all your experience has told you does not reside unless it be given, in the earthen vessels that are below. Let those anxieties for the Christianity either of your household or of your acquaintanceship, which have hitherto been so unproductive of good-let them still continue to be unbosomed as before in the ear of your Father in heaven. He willeth intercessions to be made for all men, and He willeth all men to be saved. These declarations place you on firm and high vantage-ground in praying for human souls; and never, we may bə well assured, never can any intercession be lifted with greater acceptance than that of a Christian parent, when he asks in behalf of those children who now gladden his home upon earth—that they shall be preserved and permitted to spend with Him their eternity in heaven.

It must not be disguised however, that this is a

matter on which parents may delude themselves— that in their disinclination to spiritual things, and their indolence together, they may be glad to stand exonerated from the fatigues of performance, and take refuge in the formalities of prayer-that under the semblance of doing homage to the omnipotence of grace, they may omit the doing of those things which it is the office of grace to make effectual for the conversion of the human spirit—that in contemplating the part of the Holy Ghost as the agent, they may forget their own part as the instruments of this mighty operation: And therefore would we warn them lest they turn the orthodoxy of their creed, into a justification for the laxity and remissness of their conduct. That prayer never can avail which is not the prayer of honesty; and it is not the prayer of honesty, if, even though you pray to the uttermost for the religion of others, you do not also perform to the uttermost. Could we only purge the prayers of men of all their hypocrisy, then should we behold the promises of the Bible nobly accredited by the verifications of experience; and the interchange of petitions and their responses between heaven and earth would demonstrate to the eye of observation, that there was indeed a living reality in the gospel. Even as it is, though we cannot just say that Christianity always runs in families, yet frequent enough are the instances of a transmitted faith and a transmitted holiness from parents unto children-to assure us that did the former but acquit themselves in all