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but by faith in the Lord Jesus, and prayer in His all-prevailing name as our Advocate with God.

It is a picture of the dreadful conflict of a mind "plunged in deeps," as Cowper thought, "unvisited by any other human soul;" a child of God, harassed with the belief that for a special and peculiar reason God would not hear his own prayers, and sometimes forbade him to pray, turning for help and hope to the intercessions of a fellow-Christian, acquainted with that conflict, and filled with sympathising grief on account of it, and to whom Cowper believed, and had reason to believe, that God granted daily enjoyment in prayer, daily and sweet access. to the throne of grace. Now, in all this Cowper certainly had both apostolic examples and injunctions to guide him, and the instructions of Divine Inspiration to sanction his course. Paul never intimates that it is egregious conceit and vanity in any common Christian to imagine that God will answer his prayers, but he does earnestly beg all common Christians (common or uncommon) to pray for him, and he does say that he fully expects particular blessings through their prayers. And the Apostle James says indeed nothing about getting relief to a burdened heart by drinking tea without sugar, but he does say, confess your sins one to another, and pray one for another ; and he does not intimate that the prayers of a literary man and a poet are of any greater efficacy before God than those of a poor schoolmaster; he does not intimate that a man must be learned and refined before he can dare presume that God will hear his prayers; neither does he intimate that prayers from the prayer-book will be heard, while extempore prayers from the Christian's own heart,

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if offered in the confidence that God will hear them, are only fanaticism and presumption.

Furthermore, the sorrows, terrors, and burdens of the soul are the very evils of all others, in which God would have Christians seek the aid of one another's prayers; and to rely on sincere prayer, in such a case, is not to rely on man, but God. The affectionate turning of Cowper's despairing heart to Mr Teedon's prayers for spiritual sympathy and comfort, is a most striking proof of the prevalence of faith and Christian fellowship even above despair. Cowper felt a confidence in Mr Teedon's Christian character from long acquaintance with him; and the failings of tediousness and verboseness in conversation, with some foibles of vanity even, were little things in comparison with the possession of an honest, grateful, and sympathising heart. Cowper was not a man easily to be deceived or imposed upon, but he had very great discernment of character, and was never in the habit of concealing or denying his impressions. For example, in one of his letters to Newton, in the year 1784, he thus speaks of a man whom they had both known, and whose professions of religious experience, it would seem, had been somewhat large: "He says much about the Lord and His dealings with him; but I have long considered James as a sort of peddler and hawker in these matters, rather than as a creditable and substantial merchant."

Mr Teedon, Cowper knew to be a very different person, sincere and fervent in his Christian emotions, and irreproachable in his Christian life. As he had known much of Cowper's trials, and for a long space of time, it was very natural that both Cowper and Mrs Unwin should not turn

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away from a Christian sympathy expressed by him in notes as well as in conversation, but should somewhat freely, and with kindness, answer his inquiries. Hence the communications that sprang up between them; earnest desires for prayer and help on the one side, and assurances of prayer and encouragements to hope that it would be answered on the other. The Christian circles at Olney and at Weston did not despise Mr Teedon for his poverty, nor for the fact of his gaining an humble subsistence in the capacity of village schoolmaster; nor did they regard it as a mark of egregious vanity and conceit in him to suppose that God might possibly answer his prayers, any more than in Newton himself, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, praying on the Lord's-day out of the prayer-book.

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CHAPTER XXVI.

Lord Mahon's accusation against Wesley-The immediate efficacy of prayer-Danger of delusion in a religion established by the StateConsistency of Cowper with Scripture in asking an interest in others' prayers-Letters to Newton and Hayley.

LORD MAHON, in his History of England, in the chapter on Methodism, says that a "solemn accusation might have been brought against Wesley for the presumption with which he sometimes ascribed immediate efficacy to his prayers." He also says, among other evils of his career enumerated, "that very many persons have been tormented with dreadful agonies and pangs;" besides the great evil of the Church being weakened by so large a separation from it as the formation of the Methodist churches occasioned.

The agonies and pangs were simply those that Paul himself experienced when he found himself slain by the Law; those that Bunyan and Luther experienced in a conflict protracted beneath the burden and the sense of guilt, much longer than Paul's was, before they would learn the lesson which the Law, as our schoolmaster, was appointed to teach in bringing us to Christ; and those that Cowper also experienced; but which Southey, and others with him, regarded as a dangerous delusion, result

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ing from an exaggerated idea of human depravity. If it is an evil that very many persons should be thus tormented, would ignorance of sin, and insensibility to its guilt and danger, be the smaller evil, or the preferable way? Or is there any way into the kingdom of Heaven without some experience of such pangs and agonies? There is, indeed, a way into the Church, smooth, easy, inoffensive; but that is not necessarily Heaven, nor does belonging to the Church necessarily include the knowledge or experience of religion. Yet such would seem to be Lord Mahon's and Southey's idea of piety, or a main element in it, and security of it; a religion established by the State; a Church, the membership of which is to be accepted as salvation. And to compel people to come into the Church by pangs and agonies, when they ought to be members of it in their own right by law, by simple baptism and morality, is a great injury and oppression !

The historian's idea of religion must be curious, indeed, judging from such complaints. Then, again, it is asserted to be presumption, an element of fanaticism and vanity, such as Southey says Mr Teedon was inspired with, for an individual Christian to suppose that God will hear and at once answer his prayers; for the immediate efficacy of prayer can be only in the way of such answer, and that is what the accusation means. A proper and respectable religion, therefore, such as is embodied in the Established Church of England, must, in the view of many, eschew and reject such an element. Prayer can be efficacious only by virtue of the Church, and can be answered only in a churchly way, but not for any individual soul by itself! Is it possible that a man of intelligence and learn