ly an hour of their happy days can pass over them without leaving—were their hearts open—some evidence written there that they have "left undone the things that they ought to have done," and giving them bitterer and heavier cause to cry and cry again—for ever, in the pure words of their Master's prayer, "Dimitte nobis debita nostra."39

In connection with the more accurate translation of "debts," rather than "trespasses," it would surely be well to keep constantly in the mind of complacent and inoffensive congregations, that in Christ's own prophecy of the manner of the last judgment, the condemnation is pronounced only on the sins of omission: "I was hungry, and ye gave Me no meat."

But, whatever the manner of sin, by offence or defect, which the preacher fears in his people, surely he has of late been wholly remiss in compelling their definite recognition of it, in its several and personal particulars. Nothing in the various inconsistency of human nature is more grotesque than its willingness to be taxed with any quantity of sins in the gross, and its resentment at the insinuation of having committed the smallest parcel of them in detail. And40 the English Liturgy, evidently drawn up with the amiable intention of making religion as pleasant as possible to a people desirous of saving their souls with no great degree of personal inconvenience, is perhaps in no point more unwholesomely lenient than in its concession to the popular conviction that we may obtain the present advantage, and escape the future punishment, of any sort of iniquity, by dexterously concealing the manner of it from man, and triumphantly confessing the quantity of it to God.

Finally, whatever the advantages and decencies of a form of prayer, and how wide soever the scope