His own revealed will directs me to pray for my
fellow-creatures, and to expect a beneficial effect from the prayers of
the faithful upon earth in my behalf. To pray for them, therefore, and
to seek their prayers, and to wait patiently for an answer to both, are
acts of faith and of duty. And were it also appointed by God's will to
be an act of faith and duty in a Christian to seek the prayers, and aid,
and assistance, of saints and angels by supplicatingly invoking them,
surely the same word of truth would have revealed that also. Whereas the
reverse shows itself under every diversified state of things, from the
opening of the sacred book to its very last page. The subtle distinction
of religious worship into latria, dulia, and hyperdulia, the refined
classification of prayer under the two heads of direct, absolute, final,
sovereign, on the one hand, and of oblique, relative, transitory,
subaltern, on the other, swell indeed many elaborate works of casuistry,
but are not discoverable in the remains of primitive Christians, nor in
the writings of God's word have they any place. I cannot find in the
inspired Apostles any reference to the necessity, the duty, the
lawfulness, the expediency of our seeking by prayer the good offices of
the holy dead, or of the angels of light. In their successors the
earliest inspired teachers and pastors of Christ's fold, I seek in vain
for any precept, or example, or suggestion, or incidental allusion
looking that way.
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