the strength of the Comforter; and by storms which buffeted your ship without, should realize the rest of the haven within. But it is not only in regard to the intensity of the desire that the Spirit helps; but in regard to the thing we should pray for. "We know not what we should pray for as we ought." 66 "What we should pray for one day," says the venerable Charles of Bala, I may not be what we ought to pray for another. Our wants change as our situations and circumstances change. We know not the present state of our hearts without Divine light, nor what temptations may be before us for which we ought to be prepared. What trials, what difficulties may be in the womb of futurity, are to us utterly unknown. How can we know therefore what to ask, to prepare us to meet them? We may indeed pray for something, but it may be what we ought not to pray for. How tender and how gracious is our heavenly Father! Our ignorant babblings He calls by no harsher terms than our infirmities! However foolish they may be, yet if they proceed from a humble heart, He is not displeased to hear them, but graciously pities them, and sends His Spirit to help the infirmities of His poor ignorant children, and to teach them better." Are there none here that have never knelt down, just to spread a letter, like Hezekiah, before the Lord : unable to say anything or ask anything; but just drawing nigh to God; waiting there, in the spirit of the prophet: "I will hear what God the Lord will speak ;"* and the straitened path has been broadened, and the clouds have lifted; and the perplexed, tangled thicket has had a pathway made through it; and you have *Ps. lxxxv. 8. felt how true it is, "They looked unto Him, and were lightened; and their faces were not ashamed."* Or you have prayed for very small things-your expectations have been meagre and narrow; and as you have prayed on, the promises of God have seemed to open to you in breadth and fulness, and you have been secretly helped and encouraged to open your mouth wide. Or you have knelt to ask about some worldly thing; and have had instead of it some spiritual desire awakened, some glow of divine love kindled you have been drawn out of your own little narrow self into some large thoughts about the church of God, or some near to you, friends or neighbours; and the prayer has ended very differently from its beginning -was not this of the Spirit? No doubt He does this most often by taking the spirit of the Lord's Prayer, and moulding our rebel spirits into harmony with it. You have a near and dear friend in extremity of peril or sickness: your whole happiness you believe to depend on that friend's being spared; you feel as if you could not part with that friend: you are agitated and full of anguish, of rebellion perhaps; but would it not have a most calming, quieting influence if He could bring you to say, "Hallowed be Thy name: Thy kingdom come: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven"? You have a great plan, which, if it succeed, may largely enrich you: you watch its development with the utmost anxiety; you are restless, full of fretful impatience, lose zest of interest in most things, especially in the work of God: what if He bring you to feel the force of that great lesson of patient content* Ps. xxxiv. 5. ment which is contained in the words, "Give us this day our daily bread"? Thus you have been in fact taught the lesson to be satisfied with to-day's provision. So in great questions which affect the church, as well as those which affect our homes and ourselves, we are often perplexed as to what we should ask then the text leads us to feel that by being more in the Spirit, and leaning upon His promised aid, we shall be brought gradually into unison of heart and will with Him, and shall be able to say, "Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory." Thus it is clear that in prayer, as well as in the reading of the blessed Word of God, we need to fall back on the present help of God the Holy Ghost; and the passage distinctly assures us that every child of God may confidently reckon upon it. It is a part of the liberty which he enjoys as God's child. It is one of the many currents and channels into which that river of water is distributed and flows into the believer's soul, from the throne of God and of the Lamb. It is one of the ways in which God works in man. It is not as one of the poor helps our fellowmen and ourselves render each other. It is God's help, promised help. Let us not doubt it; let us not limit and straiten it; let us realize the truth that this Spirit of help belongs to the holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity; and being settled in this belief, see you not at what a high pitch we should set our expectation? How should we rebuke our weakness of faith! how should we bewail the meanness and poverty of our prayers, when by beseeching His promised help we might so fill and enlarge them! I might say much of the exceeding value and blessedness of prayer; but it is not this we want: it is the simple question put by each to his or her heart: Do I pray? Do I pray more than I did—pray with my Bible open before me-pray looking for the Spirit of God? Let this Whit-Sunday lead you to feel your need of it, and to rejoice in the promise of it. Say to your souls, each one, "I have heard to-day of the droppings of this fiery shower of the Holy Spirit, and it is this that I want for my cold, icy heart. I cannot live any longer in this dull, dead state, when for so many hundreds of years the promise was repeated by holy men of old, and for so many hundreds of years since the promise has been fulfilling. I will ask for myself, that my heart may lie open to His saving, cleansing, quickening influences; that there may be life and growth. "Lord, I hear that showers of blessing Even me!" X. The Belieber's Infirmities helped by the Spirit in Prayer. ROM. viii. 26, 27. "Likewise the Spirit helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because He maketh intercession for the saints, according to the will of God." I WAS speaking last Sunday of some of the ways in which the Holy Spirit helps our inability, and instructs our ignorance, in prayer: not helping those who do not pray, but those that do, or try to do; in the very act of their prayer bringing His seasonable reinforcements, and helping them to lift the burden that was bowing them down, perhaps to the very dust. But it is necessary that we enter into a more particular and minute investigation of the latter part of the text, especially as it is Trinity Sunday, and the text seems to supply us with some little illustration of that doctrine. I know that questions of theology are very distasteful to some. But I cannot think-experience forbids us to think that they are so to those who are best taught of God; the ripest and most solid in judgment; the holiest of the saints, the greatest proficients in the Holy Spirit's school. St. Paul's mind in this matter was clearly this, that the comforts of the Gospel are, as a rule, most richly experienced by those how are best established in its doctrinal grounds, who |