400 HENRY KIPiKE WHITE S REMAINS. 



by vociferation and importunity ? God forbid ! It is a 

 fair and a reasonable though a melancholy inference, that 

 the Lord shuts his ears against prayers like these, and 

 leaves the deluded supplicants to follow the impulse of 

 their own headstrong passions, without a guide, and des- 

 titute of every ray of his pure and holy light. 



Those mock apostles, who thus disgrace the worship of 

 the true God by their extravagance, are very fond of ap- 

 pearing to imitate the conduct of our Saviour during his 

 mortal peregrination ; but how contrary were his habits 

 to those of these deluded men ! Did he teach his disci- 

 ples to insult the ear of Heaven with noise and clamour ? 

 Were his precepts those of fanaticism and passion ? Did 

 he inflame the minds of his hearers with vehement and 

 declamatory harangues ? Did he pray wdth all this con- 

 fidence—this arrogance — this assurance? How ditfer- 

 ent was his conduct ! He divested wisdom of all its pomp 

 and parade, in order to suit it to the capacities of the 

 meanest of his auditors. He spake to them in the lowly 

 language of parable and similitude, and when he prayed, 

 did he instruct his hearers to attend to him with a loud 

 chorus of Amens ? Did he (participating as he did in 

 the Godhead), did he assume the tone of sufficiency and 

 the language of assurance ? Far from it ! he prayed, and 

 he instructed his disciples to pray, in lowliness and meek- 

 ness of spirit ; he instructed them to approach the throne 

 of Grace with fear and trembling, silently and with the 

 deepest awe and veneration ; and he evinced by his con- 

 demnation of the prayer of the self-sufficient Pharisee, 

 opposed to that of the diffident publican, the light in 

 which those were considered in the eyes of the Lord, who, 

 setting the terrors of his Godhead at defiance, and boldly 

 building on their own unworthiness, approached him with 

 confidence and pride. * * * 



There is nothing so indispensably necessary towards 

 the establishment of future earthly, as well as heavenly 

 happiness, as early impressions of piety. For as religion 



