archal, the Mosaic, or the Christian dispensations, the
voices too of those maintainers of our common faith in Christ, who
prayed, and taught, in the Church, before the corruptions of a
degenerate world had mingled themselves with the purity of Christian
worship, combine all, in publishing, throughout the earth, one and the
self-same principle, "Pray only to God; draw nigh to Him alone; invoke
no other; seek no other in the world of spirits, neither angel, nor
beatified saint; seek Him, and He will favourably, with mercy, hear your
prayers." To this one {394} principle, when the Gospel announced the
whole counsel of God in the salvation of man, our Lord himself, his
Apostles, and his Church, unite in adding another principle of eternal
obligation,--There is one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ
Jesus; whatsoever the faithful shall ask the Father in the name of that
Mediator, He will grant it to them: He is ever living to make
intercession for those who believe in Him: Invoke we no other
intercessor, apply we neither to saint nor angel, plead we the merits of
no other. Let us lift up our hearts to God Almighty himself, and make
our requests known to Him in the name, and through the mediation of
Christ, and He will fulfil our desires and petitions as may be most
expedient for us; He will grant to us, in this world, a knowledge of his
truth, and in the world to come life everlasting!

Watching the tide of evidence through its whole progress, we find it to
flow all in this one direction. Here and there indeed attempts have been
made to raise some mounds and barriers of human structure, in order to
arrest its progress, and turn it from its straight course, but in vain;
unchecked by any such endeavours, it rolls on in one full, steady,
strong, and resistless current. Until we have long passed the Nicene
Council, we find no one writer of the Christian Church, whose remains
tell us, that he either himself invoked saints and angels, and the
Virgin Mary, or was at all aware of any such practice prevailing in
Christendom. Suppose, for one moment, that our doctrine is right; and
then we find the whole tenour of the Old and New Testaments, and the
ancient writers, in their plain meaning, agreeably to the interpretation
of the most learned and unbiassed critics, fully coinciding in every
respect with our view of God being the sole object of invocation, {395}
and of the exclusive character of Christ's intercession, mediation