still more so. In public worship, the heart, being sanctified by humility, is drawn out towards our fellow-worshipers, as well as to the Lord, and not merely under the influence of the love of truth, as the common bond of union, but also, and chiefly, under the influence of the love of good, which their assembling together implies they are unitedly engaged in seeking. There is then effected a hallowed communion between the love of the Lord and the love of the neighbour, or between piety and charity. Besides, the benefits of public worship to the human race at large are so great and so universally acknowledged, that to abstain from giving our devout and regular countenance to public worship, is to shew a sad indifference to the well-being of our fellowcreatures, a condition of mind very difficult to reconcile with a state of real and enlightened charity.

But above all, we have the Lord's own example in the world: he attended the public religious assemblies then in use; and therefore we cannot doubt that it is his holy will that we should do the same. Our own growth in goodness, by growing in meekness and lowliness of heart; our regard to the good of the church to which we belong, and to the well-being of our fellow-creatures generally; and our positive duty to follow the Lord's example, and the apostolic practice and injunctions; all call upon us not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together for worship, either from a preference for private worship, social discussions, or outward gratifications. "There is a time for all things," and there is no occasion or reasonable ground for doing a thing at the time when we ought to be doing something else, and something which our interest, as well as our duty, requires should not be neglected..

But now let us return to the course which the wise and humble Christian will pursue in spending his Sunday.

He attends worship; he takes care to be in good time, being deeply impressed that a late coming in, after the service is begun, is neither consistent with religious reverence to the Great Object of worship, or with decent respect and proper feeling towards the minister and his fellow worshipers. He knows that the too common fallacy of "I could not get ready in time," may almost always be avoided by good management, forethought, and an orderly arrangement, so as to make all duties fall within the proper time for their performance. He cannot but know that there are not a few who never can be ready in time for worship; but always can get ready in time for the starting of a railway train, when either pleasure or business invites. In these cases they are never too late-never behind time. And such a consideration painfully, as well as practically, affects the reflecting Christian. While

engaged in worship he earnestly cultivates a sense of the divine presence. He prays that he may feel himself as nothing before the Most High, and that his heart may be drawn out in love to his fellow worshipers. He listens with calm serenity to the public instruction, guarding against a critical spirit, and desiring that he may realize all possible benefit from that which he hears. His manner, and the sphere of influence surrounding him, animate and inspire his fellow worshipers, and what a sweet and holy sphere would fill our houses of prayer, if all the worshipers were of this single-hearted and single-minded character.

He departs from the service full of thankfulness; humbled, and at the same time exalted, not with any thing of self-exaltation, but realizing the fulfilment of the divine saying, "He that humbleth himself shall be exalted." It is an exalted state to feel that of ourselves we are nothing, for in consequence of this conviction, it is given to us to feel that the Lord is every thing, and that he has begun to fill us with good out of his own infinite fulness, and thereby to exalt us to the honour of being conjoined with Himself by the reception of good from Him.

During the remainder of the day, not occupied with other duties, the devout Christian applies himself to reading, or to social conversation, always encouraging a leaning to edification, and to that which may "minister grace unto the hearer."

Such is the well-spent Sunday with the Christian who is enlightened enough to perceive, that eternal things are better than temporal things; that a sense of God's favour is better than self-complacency; and that the pleasures of the soul are better than the gratifications of the senses. Of the accuracy of this perception he is now con firmed by actual experience; and under the influence of this blessed experience, he returns to his worldly duties on the Monday, a far happier and better man than he would have been if he had spent the previous day in the most successful pursuit of self-indulgence, sensual gratifications, or even theological and moral disquisitions.

AMICUS.

ON SINGING WITH THE UNDERSTANDING.

THE two acts of divine worship commonly denominated prayer and praise, appear, from all we can gather respecting them from the sacred records, to be of equal importance as aets of worship, both demanding the most devout effusion of the affections of the heart towards the Lord as

the source of all that man stands in need of for time and for eternity, and for the bestowment of which he will ascribe to Him thanksgiving and praise for ever and ever.

It will readily be admitted by all reasonable men, that when we invoke the Lord in prayer, we ought not to use words without knowledge; to do so is, doubtless, the highest mental impropriety of which man can be guilty, with the exception of direct blasphemy,—and if praise be equally with prayer an act of devotion, the devotion perishes where the understanding is absent. The apostle Paul, in the first epistle to the Corinthians (chap. xiv), lays great stress on this point, and declares that for his own part, he would rather confine his speech in the church to five words uttered with the understanding, than extend it to ten thousand spoken in an unknown tongue, and that, too, for the most cogent of all reasons, viz., edification, being the grand end to be kept in view by every one who considers himself called on either to sing or say any thing in a public assembly.

Often has it occurred to us that too little attention is paid by Christians in general to those very remarkable words of the Lord recorded in the gospel by Matthew (xii. 36, 37.): "But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." What the Lord here means by idle words, may perhaps be best seen from the use made of the same term by the apostles Peter and Paul in their epistles. The radical meaning of the word is inactive, sluggish, useless, and wherever we find it used in Scripture it seems directly opposed to what our Lord calls bringing forth fruit, or what the apostle James calls shewing ones faith by one's works. In this sense it is used by Peter (2 Ep. chap. i. 8.), where he exhorts those to whom he wrote to add to their faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness, and charity, and assigns as the reason of his urging these things as objects of the most diligent pursuit,-that, if such things were in them, and on the increase, they would evince them to be neither barren (apyovs, argous) nor unfruitful in the knowledge of the Lord; but on the contrary, if they lacked these things, how much so ever they might boast in their knowledge, they were blind, and could not see afar off. Again. Paul in his epistle to Titus (chap. i.), when instructing him how to deal with the unruly, the vain talkers, the deceivers, who professed to know God, while in works they denied him, being, indeed, to every good work reprobate, reminds him of the necessity of stopping the mouths of such persons, and of rebuking them sharply, that they might be sound in the

faith. Paul found it necessary to use great sharpness in dealing with those who made false pretensions to Christianity, but this he did according to the power which the Lord had given him for edification, and not for destruction, and he exhorts Titus to do the same. Now, the characters with whom Titus had more immediately to deal were those of the inhabitants of the island of Crete, who had embraced Christianity as a religious profession, but whose general conduct was a disgrace to that profession. They were notorious liars; hence came the proverb,—“ He speaks like a Cretan." Covetousness was another distinguishing feature in their character; Polybius, the historian, says they were the only people in the world who found nothing sordid in gold, in what way soever it was obtained; and Paul informs us, doubtless from what he had seen and experienced among them, that the testimony of one of themselves, a prophet of their own, (Epimenides it is believed), is TRUE, namely, that the Cretans were always liars, evil bearers, slow bellies, (yaσrepes apyai, gasteres argai), that is, we presume, men who said one thing and meant another; men of a brutish and ferocious disposition; slothful and gluttonous; men sunk in sensuality; wholly selfish; idle, in every sense of the word, and, therefore, altogether unprofitable, unproductive of any one good thing.

These remarks may possibly appear to some as irrelevant to the subject; but let it be remembered that they are here offered merely to illustrate the important and indispensable truth taught by the Lord and his apostles, viz., that in every act of devotion the understanding should be fruitful in good effects, "fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God;" thus blending the operations of the will with those of the intellect, which constitutes true wisdom.

But, as the title of these remarks indicates, our attention must be limited to that act of devotion called SINGING; and it may be most directly to our purpose to illustrate our views of that (certainly delightful) act by one example chosen out of many from which we feel at full liberty to make our selection, and we fix on it for a reason that shall appear in the sequel.

Suppose, then, that the official leader of the singing department should announce in an assembly of Christian worshipers that the 148th hymn of the second book of Watts' Hymns is to be sung "to the praise and glory of God," and that the minister has previously prayed, that, in singing the praises of the Lord, the assembly may "sing with the spiri and with the understanding," which is a very common prayer, and certainly no less common than proper; nothing, indeed, could be more befitting an assembly desirous of worshiping "in spirit and in

truth." The hymn is read by the leader,-the devotion of the assembly is (or ought to be) aroused,-the singer has (or ought to have) called his understanding into the most vigorous activity, lest, in singing, he should utter words without knowledge, which would be neither to the praise nor the glory of God; the understanding would be unfruitful. The singer proceeds to sing:

"Dearest of all the names above,

My Jesus, and my God."

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Here is at once, so far as words go, an acknowledgment of the supreme divinity of Jesus Christ. Aye, and with a comparison too; there are other names above, two other names, both dear, but the name of Jesus stands in the superlative degree;-but is this really meant? Let us see. We must here abide by the grammatical construction of the sentence, and carefully avoid doing the author of the hymn the slightest injustice; no advantage whatever must be taken of him; he must be allowed to speak for himself, and his meaning must be gathered from the context. Proceeding on this principle, which all must allow to be fair and correct, we find that the names above" are three; no one needs to be informed what they are, but it must be particularly noted that the writer of the hymn denominates them "The holy, just, and sacred three," nor, surely, can we suppose that he meant for one moment to insinuate that either of the three was less holy, less just, or sacred than the others; and yet we have a comparison introduced, how is this? Without some difference there can be no room for comparison. How comes it, then, that one of the "sacred three " should be the dearest of all? And how comes it, also, that this one, from being an object of "terror," equally so with the other two, should, without change, become an object of delight?

Probably it will be said, in reply to such questions as these, that the matter is all very plain, very consistent, very satisfactory, and easily comprehensible by the humble-minded believer, and is even explained by the poet himself in the words, "Till God in human flesh I see." &c. But this only more perplexes the question by inducing fresh difficulties; for, by the term God we surely are not to understand one of the holy, just, and sacred three, to the exclusion of the other two. When, therefore, "Immanuel's face appears," that is, we presume, when God is manifested in "human flesh," the whole three are seen together, and each as distinctly as the other, or, as Paul expresses it, the fulness of the God-head dwelling bodily in one person, even in the man Christ Jesus. If, then, we are to consider the circumstance of the incarnation as changing one of the objects of terror into an object of love and