rifies love: when we pray for those with whom we have worldly intercourse, it smooths down the swellings of envy, and bids the tumults of ambition subside: when we pray for our country, it sanctifies patriotism: when we pray for those in authority, it adds a divine motive to human obedience : when we pray for our enemies, it softens the savageness of war, and mollifies hatred into sorrow. And we can best learn, nay we can only learn, the difficult duty of forgiving those who have offended us, when we bring ourselves to pray for them to Him whom we ourselves daily offend. When those who are the faithful followers of the same divine Master pray for each other, the reciprocal intercession best realizes that beautiful idea of "the Communion of Saints."

Some are for confining their intercessions only to the good, as if none but persons of merit were entitled to our prayers. Merit! who has it? Desert! who can plead it? in the sight of God, I mean. Who shall bring his own piety, or the piety of others, in the way of claim before a Being of such transcendant holiness, that "the heavens are "not clean in his sight?" And if we wait for perfect holiness as a preliminary to prayer, when shall such erring creatures pray at all to HIм who chargeth the angels "" with folly !"

In closing this little work with the subject of intercessory prayer, may the author be allowed to avail herself of the feeling it suggests to her own heart? And while she earnestly implores that Being, who can make the meanest of his creatures instrumental to his glory, to bless this humble attempt to those for whom it was written, may she, without presumption, entreat that this work of Christian charity may be reciprocal, and that those who peruse these pages, may put up a petition for her, that in the great day to which we are all hastening, she may not be found to have suggested to others what she herself did not believe, or to have recommended what she did not desire to practise? In that awful day of everlasting decision, may both the reader and the writer be pardoned and accepted, "not for any works of "righteousness which they have done," but through the merits of the GREAT INTERCESSOR.

THE END. 14 @

Samuel T. Armstrong, printer, Charlestown, Mass.