creatures thou haft formed and fupporteft, world without end. So be it.

All our prayers which are addressed with humility, piety, and true faith, to the throne of grace, may be confidered as tending to the honor and glory of God; as we then fulfil his commands, and manifest our entire dependance upon, and confidence in, the mercy, wisdom, goodness, and power of our Maker; who, though King of kings and Lord of lords, the creator and preferver of all worlds, condescends to the humble fupplications of his creatures, thereby affording a most convincing proof that he does not overlook the least of all his works, but constantly guards and protects them by his good providence. This must naturally excite in us the utmost love, admiration, and gratitude, and make us add thanksgiving and praises to our prayers. So delightful is this employment to the grateful mind, that, we learn from Scripture, it forms a confiderable part of the felicity

of those bleffed fpirits who are inhabitants of those regions of immortality at which we all hope to arrive.

That these hopes may be realized to us all, may God, of his infinite mercy, grant, through the merits of Jesus Christ, our Lord! Amen; So be it.

CHAPTER

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND.

ST. JOHN, CHAP. XVIII.

WE

E are now come to the account of those unparalleled cruelties and sufferings, ending in a most painful and ignominious death, to which the Lord of life fubmitted for loft mankind. Here let us pause awhile, and collect our scattered thoughts, that we may enter upon the confideration of the awful fubject with that deliberation and reverence which it has a right to claim.

Let us confider, in the first place, what was the cause of this direful tragedy; and, whilft we indulge the feelings of indignation and horror at the authors of it, 4F 2

let

let us examine how far we are ourselves partakers of their guilt.

Was it not fin, that dire and baneful enemy of the whole human race, which, by depriving man of the favor of his Maker and banishing him from his prefence, rendered an atonement neceffary, before he could be again admitted as an object of that happiness which his beneficent Creator intended for him? Sin, then, being the primary cause, he only who is free from fin can claim an exemption from being an accomplice in those acts which we cannot even think of without indignation: and, partial as we are to our own failings, (I conceive) no man will be so presumptuous as to declare himself free from the common lot of humanity. Let him put the question to his unbiaffed confcience, and it will reply to him, as the prophet Nathan did to David, Thou art the man: nay, ftill more guilty is the Chriftian, who, with the example of the Jews before his eyes, commits wilful and prefumptuous fins; fince he may be con

fidered

fidered as crucifying his Lord afresh. Let, therefore, the difmal fcene on which we are now about to enter, produce a useful effect upon our hearts, by turning our anger from the cruel Jews, who were the immediate actors in it, against ourselves, for our own tranfgreffions: let it excite in us fuch an abhorrence of those fins, which coft our bleffed Lord fo dear, that, through the grace of God on our honest endeavors, we may forfake them, and, in their ftead, feek after and cherish every Christian grace and virtue which can adorn our profeffion; then every tear we shed for the sufferings of our Redeemer will be a pearl, of great price. But let us not deceive ourselves: the grief we may feel at the relation of them, except with a reference to ourselves, and which we should equally feel at any other scene of distress, is nothing worth; it does not proceed from religion, but from the natural impulfe of every mind not rendered totally callous by vice. Our Lord himself, in the way to his crucifixion, (as related by

St.