:

forms. Look into the history of your private li and the dispensations of Providence; to what daily happening within you, and about you, an your own heart will be the best prayer book i the world. If you attend to its wishes, its breath ings and its wants, you can never want language or if you should, God is ever present and will ac cept the naked wishes of your soul. A beggar in great distress is always eloquent. His sigh

and tears speak; he feels what he wants, and he needs no artificial arrangement of words. Still babes must be nourished with milk. There is a period in the christian, as well as the natural life when leading strings are necessary to the infant.

have known people fall into a total disuse of private devotion, solely from a fancied poverty of words. This is a very dangerous error. Prayers drawn from books, are surely preferable to no prayers at all. Artificial exercise is better than total inaction. But prayer of the heart is that superior glow, which arises from motion in the open air, and exhilerates us with a view of all the charming pictures and productions of nature.

As a public 'system of devotion, that of our church is excellent. How simple and energetic is the language! How rich and beautifully varied, are the collects! How universal the prayers, extending to all conditions of men, situations of life, and comprizing every wish and sorrow of the heart. If other forms do not please your taste, you may contrive to adapt some portion of this to your private occasions.

Two capital traits will strike

you

in your

litur

gy; the great stress, laid upon Jesus Christ, and the continual intercession for the blessings of the holy spirit. These are, indeed, the grand lesson in to be learned from it, as well as from the scriptires. They are the pillars of the church; the life and blood of the christian system.

Without the atonement of Christ, criminals as we are, there never could have been any hope of mercy; without the assistance and graces of the spirit, we could not have been purified for the mansions of glory. If Christ has been called the sun of righteousness, the holy spirit is the air, which purifies and invigorates the whole moral world, and preserves it from stagnation and putre offaction.

Meditate frequently on these sufferings of Christ, till you abhor every sin, that produced nothem; and in order to be enriched with all graces and blessings, pray daily and fervently for his holy spirit. The good Bishop Kenn has a few words, in one of his hymns, which wonderfully Epitomize our petitions and our wants:

Direct, control, suggest this day,

All I design, or do, or say,

That all my pow'rs, with all their might,
In thy sole giory may unite.

LETTER XII.

1V DEAR LUCY,

YOUR sacred reading needs not to be wholly confined to the scriptures. A few other serious

books will assist your piety, as well as serve to illustrate and confirm the scriptures themselves.

I cannot, in this respect, so much recommend modern sermons, as some little practical treati ses of piety. English discourses in general, by a strange, scholastic mismanagement, are not sufficiently addressed to the heart. Either they are learned disquisitions, or some speculative controverted subject, more calculated to display abilities, than to edify; or they are spruce, moral essays with little more of christianity in them, than might be gleaned from the works of Plato or Epictetus. They want that simplicity, fire, energy, animation, that boldness of images, appeal to the conscience, and that picturesque display of heaven and hell, which give such an unction to the writings of St. Paul, and of the fathers. They do not thunder and lighten at the sinner; they do not carry us by a whirlwind, into heaven, and shew us thrones and sceptres; they convince, but they do not animate; they glitter but they do not warm.

66

Ancient divines have more fire and matter. They studied the scriptures, more than human systems. They were filled with the spirit:" they were men of watchfulness and prayers. A profane spirit of criticism or of philosophy false ly so called, makes us cold and languid. In pervading many learned or splendid pages the heart is often left devoid of one, pious emotion.

Many sermons, no doubt are to be excepted

from this censure.

Those of Archbishop Secker contain a fund of solid matter, piety and instruction but the style is rather singular and uncouth. The marble is rich, but it is unpolished. There is such a thing, as an elegant simplicity. Secker had a simplicity without this elegance.

Few prelates, however, have deserved so well from the church, or posterity. The Metropolitan, though placed in the bosom of a court, had neither pride, indolence, nor adulation. His vigilance, was extraordinary; his labours unremitting, and his crosier but an imperfect emblem of the real pastoral zeal, "which eat up his soul." The present bishop of London has all the simplicity of his illustrious patron, tissued with that elegance, which the archbishop wanted. His sermons have been universally read; they are written on a truly evangelical plan: And their object is not merely to amuse, but to instruct and edify.

LETTER XIII.

EVERY person should read the discourses of Sherlock, who wishes to see the grand doctrines of christianity properly illustrated, and inforced with equal energy of argument and language. Sherlock is one of the few original writers of sermons. He is the Locke of divinity, who anatomizes the whole system, and displays its compo nent parts.

Many authors glean all their matter from other

D

books. He borrowed his from the scriptures, and reflection. He thought many hours, for writing one. If all men did the same, the press would not groan with such continual abortions.

Ogden's Sermons have very great, original merit. Perhaps I miscalled them; they are, more properly, sketches on sacred subjects; on the fundamental articles of the christian faith. There is more vigour, and energy and conviction in one page of this writer, than in whole volumes of some others, who have received a much more general applause.

There

The doctor seems particularly to have studied conciseness, and his miniature plan sometimes leaves the features of his pieces indistinct. is a singular abruptness in his transitions, and the mind is frequently obliged to pause, in order to discover the invisible connection, and unite the seemingly, broken chain of ideas. These discources were probably, in their original state, much more diffuse. He retrenched by degrees, and, as an ingenious French writer once said, “had leisure to be concise."

LETTER XIV.

THERE is more popular eloquence, argument and pathos in Archbishop (illotson, than in almost any ancient writer of sermons, that I recol lect. But his works are much incumbered with the scholastic divinity of his age, and strangely per