cry day and night unto Him? I tell you He will avenge them speedily."

The cheerless thought of stern machinelike divinity gives way to the warm bright picture of personal and almighty rule. Fixity and permanence, indeed, is there, but not that of cold necessity, but of providential appointment, based on, and ever observant of, the eternal law of righteousness. This law He stands up to defend, and will avenge every breach of it,―rooting out ungodliness, and answering the cry of His pleading people, who, through myriad doubts and fears, have clung to Him.

The lesson Christ enforces is one-men ought always to pray. Let the times be unfavourable, the current of public thought against it, and the scientific conceptions of the day seemingly at variance with the very idea of it, still let them pray. The answer of prayer will be the reconciliation of all conflicting opinions, and the harmonizing of all difficulties; and even though the prayer be

long unheeded, and the tumult of those that trouble us increase ever more and more, yet this itself may be God's way of mercy, closing up every door, and hedging about all avenues, that we may be compelled to go forward to the gate of His love, and knock in the confessed hopelessness of grief, and the strength of utter helplessness, till He opens the gate, and draws us in. Go and take your struggling prayers, like fragrant blossoms, wet with your tears, and plant them at His threshold

"That if they can they there may bloom;
Or dying, there at least may die.'

But even dying there they will not be lostperchance, it is even in thus dying they may find a higher life and truer answer. The prayer which loses its life, like the truehearted Christian who breathes it, may find it. The precious seed will be met with after many days; no longer a parched and decaying thing, but a bright, and strong, and golden sheaf in the wheat-fields of God's

glorious harvest yet to come. “Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. Be patient therefore, brethren; stablish your hearts for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh" (James v. 7, 8).

III.

Heart-work in Prayer.

"OUR remedies oft in ourselves do lie,

Which we ascribe to Heaven: the fated sky Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull."

LORD, we beseech Thee mercifully to hear us;

and grant that we, to whom Thou hast given an hearty desire to pray, may, by Thy mighty aid, be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.