-mortals, (who can judge only from outward
actions, and cannot penetrate the heart,) appeared accepted servants and
honoured saints of our Creator, may now be invoked by an act of
religious supplication either to grant us aid, or to intercede with God
for aid in our behalf, why did not men whom God declared to be partakers
of his Spirit of truth, offer the same supplication to those departed
spirits, who, before and after their decease, had this testimony from
Omniscience itself, that they pleased God? Why is no intimation given in
the later books of the Old Testament that such supplications were
offered to Moses, or Aaron, or Abraham, or Noah? When wrath was gone out
from the presence of the Lord, and the plague was begun among the
people, Aaron took a censer in his hand, and stood between the living
and the dead, and the plague was stayed. If the soul of Aaron was
therefore to be regarded as a spirit influential with God, one whose
intercession could avail, one who ought to be approached in prayer, were
it only for his intercession, could a stronger motive be conceived for
suggesting that invocation, than David must have felt, when the
pestilence was destroying its thousands around him, and all his glory
and strength, and his very life too, were threatened by its resistless
ravages? But no! neither Abel, nor Abraham, nor Moses, nor Aaron, must
be petitioned to intercede with God, and to pray that God would stay his
hand. To God and God alone, for his own mercy's sake, must his afflicted
servant turn in supplication. We find among his prayers no "Holy
Abraham, pray for us,"--"Holy Abel, pray for us." His own Psalm of
thanksgiving describes full well the object and the nature of his {24}
prayer: "When the waves of death compassed me, the floods of ungodly men
made me afraid, the sorrows of hell compassed me about, the snares of
death prevented me; in my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried to
my God; and He did hear my voice out of his temple, and my cry did enter
into his ears." [2 Sam. (2 Kings Vulg.) xxii. 5. or Ps. xviii.] Abraham,
when on earth, prayed God to spare the offending-people; but he invoked
neither Noah, nor Abel, nor any of the faithful departed, to join their
intercessions with his own. Isaac prayed to God for his son Jacob, but
he did not ask the mediation of his father Abraham in his behalf; and
when Jacob in his turn supplicated an especial blessing upon his
grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh, thoug