th a pure Church
and a free Gospel, and the Holy Bible if he wills, in the hands of the
poorest child. Unless prayer be a dream, and there be no God in heaven
worth calling a God--then did God answer the prayers of our forefathers
three hundred years ago, when they cried unto Him as one nation in their
utter need.

But some will say--this may be all very true and very fine, but we are in
no such utter need now. Why should we use those prayers?

My dear friends, let me say, if you are not now in utter need, in terror,
anxiety, danger, if you have no need to cry to Christ, "Graciously look
upon our afflictions; pitifully behold the sorrows of our hearts," how do
you know that there is not some one in any and every congregation who is?
And you and I, if we have said the Litany in spirit and in truth, have
been praying for them. The Litany bids us speak as members of a Church,
as citizens of a nation, bound together by the ties of blood and of laws,
as well as self-interest. The Litany bids us say, not selfishly and
apart, Graciously look on _my_ afflictions, but on _our_ afflictions--the
afflictions of every English man, and woman, and child, who is in
trouble, or ever will be in trouble _hereafter_. Oh, remember this last
word. Generations long since dead and buried have prayed for you, and
God has heard their prayers; and now you have been praying for your
children, and your children's children, and generations yet unborn, that,
if ever a dark day should come over England, a time of want and danger
and perplexity and misery, God would deliver them in their turn out of
their distress. And more; you have been teaching your children, that
they may teach their children in turn, and pray and cry to God in their
trouble; and thus this grand old Litany is to us, and to those we shall
leave behind us a precious National heir-loom, teaching us and them the
lesson of the 107th Psalm--that there is a Lord in heaven who hears the
prayers of men, the sinful as well as the sorrowful, that when they cry
unto the Lord in their trouble, He delivers them out of their distress,
and that men should therefore praise the Lord for His goodness, and
declare the wonders which He doeth for the children of men.

XII. WILD TIMES, OR DAVID'S FAITH IN A LIVING GOD.

"David therefore departed thence, and escaped to the cave Adullam: and
when his brethren and all his father's house heard it, they went down
thither to him. A