the gardener, who was not a little miserly, had always been as hard upon his brother's family as upon his other debtors. After a minute's thought respecting the wisest way of proceeding, Mr. Scarsgill determined to say nothing about the rent, but to give his friend Mabel the means of raising it by providing her with sewingwork from his own family, and from those of his acquaintance in the neighbourhood; or, if that plan failed, to furnish what was wanting from his own purse; taking care that Adam should not be in the secret; for the old man was a strange mixture of pride and meanness. This point being settled in his own mind, he said something to Brand on the hardship of removing the poor widow in her present state, but reminded him more largely of the inconvenience which must fall on himself from having in his house a bedridden woman, who would, of necessity, call for the constant attendance of her daughter. Adam Brand was a man that delighted not in many words, except when he engaged in religious disputes: he replied to Mr. Scarsgill only by fixing upon him his cold shrewd eyes with a suspicious look that plainly said, “I should like to find out what interest you have in the matter." Then he got up suddenly from his seat, and took several of his short angry turns on the floor,-his usual way of working up and sharpening his obstinacy. It so happened that, just as this exercise had prepared him to give a surly and uncivil refusal to the clergyman's request, his last turn brought him up to the window. There he stopped short: the sun was shining softly upon his balsams, so lately drooping, now refreshed and pointing strongly upwards their finger-like leaves of delicate green. They say all men have their weak points; few there are, surely, but have their good and tender point, if one only knows where to touch it. At any rate, a kind action, be it never so small, is seldom altogether thrown away. Adam looked at his balsams, cast one short glance over his shoulder,-a glance of relenting rudeness, mingled with a dash of shame, and, saying hastily, "Let it be as you will, sir; let it be as you will," he snatched his hat from its peg, and shuffled from the room. Mr. Scarsgill knew the man he had to deal with, and was quite aware that he did not mean to show himself again: he therefore departed without further ceremony, well pleased with having such comfortable news to carry back to poor Mabel. It is astonishing how any persons can read the burial-service of the Church without confessing that, while it contains nothing to mislead an attentive and unprejudiced hearer, its scriptural prayers and touching solemnity, are above all things calculated to leave a wholesome and devout impression upon those who attend friends or relatives to their last home. There was, at least, one person in the parish whose soul had been the better for hearing the burial-service of the Church. To that service, under divine grace, William Howitt owed his happy conversion to a life of true religion. He it was whose groans had been heard in the Church and at the grave at poor Cuthbert's funeral. For some weeks after, he was observed to be out of spirits and restless, shunning all his former companions, and sometimes wandering about in lonely places, like one out of his mind. At last he was taken dangerously ill. He then begged earnestly that Mr. Scarsgill would come and pray with him. That good clergyman blessed heaven for such a happy change, and hastened to his bedside. To him Howitt confessed, that, while he condemned himself as the wicked cause of Cuthbert's death, the solemn service of the Church, and the awful truths he then heard, had struck him to the heart. He was full of horror for the sins of his past life; but could not believe it possible that he should ever find pardon. We need not relate what rich stores of instruction, of peace, and comfort, the minister of Christ unfolded to the poor penitent from the word of life, as he was able to bear them; enough to say, that William Howitt rose from his sick bed another man. Conscious that an unruly self-will had been a main cause of his former wickedness, he ever after showed that his conversion was real, by the humble obedience that he paid to all the instructions of Christ's Body, the Church, and by a regular attendance upon the blessed means of grace with which She strengthens and refreshes the souls of Her children. In one thing only he was unchanged, in his affection for Mabel Brand; but this affection was now sanctified by religion. His love to Christ made him love that true handmaid of Christ more and more purely. He was very humble now, and he dared not speak to her on the subject; but he ventured to make her an offer of marriage through one of their friends. Mabel kindly and gently refused. She might have feared his steadiness in his new manner of life; perhaps, too, she naturally shunned such a close connexion with one whom she must always look upon as, in some measure, the tempter and the destroyer of her brother. Of Mabel it need only be said, that, after her mother's happy release, which took place about a twelvemonth after Cuthbert's funeral, she went to keep house for her uncle Adam. In this trying situation her tenderness and care, her lowly mind, and truly Christian spirit, by degrees softened the ruggedness and hardness of the old man's character; so much so, at least, that he let the clergyman and his family come and go on their frequent visits to his niece without raising any of his favourite disputes. In his last sickness, to the surprise of every one, he allowed Mr. Scarsgill to be sent for; and a few days before his death, actually begged to hear the whole of the burialservice. Nay more, at his own desire, he was buried by the side of Cuthbert and Mrs. Brand, in Ermenwold churchyard. When his will was read, it appeared that he had left all his property to Mabel. That excellent young woman remained single all her life. At the request of Mr. Scarsgill, she undertook the situation of governess of the Church-school. The salary made a very considerable addition to her means; but those neighbours who disliked her for her goodness declared that her miserly love of money was quite a scandal. Many religious and sensible people did wonder at the saving habits she seemed to have fallen into. But the secret was discovered, at least by Mr. Scarsgill, when, some years after she came into her uncle's property, she placed five hundred pounds in his hands; and begged that if he thought her worthy of such a holy work, it might go privately to put the house of God, which had been such a comfort and blessing to her life, into a condition more suitable to His greatness for Whose glory and service it was first built. PRAYER A SECURITY FROM TEMPTATION. THE other great preservative and remedy against temptation prescribed in the text is prayer ; "Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation:" the reason and necessity of which duty is founded upon the supposition of this great truth, that it is not in the power of man to secure or defend himself against temptation, but that something above him must do it for him, as well as very often by him; and prayer is that blessed messenger between heaven and earth, holding a correspondence with both worlds, and by a happy intercourse and sure conveyance carrying up the necessities of the one, and bringing down the bounties of the other. This is the high prerogative of prayer, and by virtue of it every tempted person has it in his power to engage omnipotence itself, and every one of the divine attributes in his defence; and whosoever enters the lists upon these terms, having the Almighty for his second (let the combatants be never so unequal) cannot but come off a conqueror. A state of temptation is a state of war, and as often as a man is tempted, he is put to fight for his all; danger both provokes and teaches to pray, and prayer (if any thing can) certainly will deliver from it. And to convince men how infinitely it concerns them to fence against the danger threatened, by persevering in the duty enjoined, let them assure themselves, that there is not any condition whatsoever allotted to men in this world but has its peculiar temptation attending it, and hardly separable from it: for whether it be wealth or poverty, health or sickness, honour or disgrace, or the like, there is something deadly in every one of them, and not at all the less so for not killing the same way. Wealth and plenty may surfeit a man, and poverty starve him; but still the man dies as surely by the one as by the other. God indeed sends us nothing but what is naturally wholesome, and fit to nourish us, but if the devil has the cooking of it, it may destroy us: and therefore the divine goodness has prescribed prayer as a universal preservative against the poison of all conditions, extracting what is healing and salutary in them from what is baneful and pernicious, and so making the very poison of one condition a specific antidote against that of another. In fine, let none wonder that prayer has so powerful an ascendant over the tempter (as mighty as he is) when God himself is not only willing, but pleased to be overcome by it; for still it is the man of prayer who takes heaven by force, who lays siege to the throne of grace, and who, in a word, is thereby said to wrestle with God: and surely if prayer can raise a poor mortal so much above himself as to be able to wrestle with his Maker, it may very well enable him to foil the tempter. And therefore, since both our Saviour himself, and his great apostle St. Paul, represent prayer without ceasing as so eminent a duty, and so opportune a succour, we must needs own, that there cannot be a more pressing argument for a neverceasing prayer than never-ceasing temptations; and therefore whatsoever our personal strengths are (as at best they can be but little), it is certain that our auxiliary forces and supplies must come in from prayer; in a word, I know no one blessing so small, which can be rationally expected without it, nor any so great but may be obtained by it. But then to render it thus prevalent and effectual, there are required to it these two qualifications: 1. Fervency, or importunity; 2. Constancy, or perseverance. 1. And first for fervency. Let a man be but as earnest in praying against a temptation as the tempter is in pressing it, and he needs not proceed by a surer measure. He who prays against it coldly and indifferently, gives too shrewd a sign that he neither fears nor hates it; for coldness is, and always will be, a symptom of deadness, especially in prayer, where life and heat are the same thing. The prayers of the saints are set forth in Scripture at much another rate, not only by calls, but cries, cries even to a roaring and vociferation, Psalm xxxviii. 8; and sometimes by "strong cries with tears," Heb. v. 7; sometimes again by "groanings not to be uttered," Rom. viii. 26: things too big for vent, too high for expression. In fine, he who prays against his spiritual enemy as he ought to do, is like a man fighting against him upon his knees; and he who fights so, by the very posture of his fighting, shows that he neither will nor can run away. Lip devotion will not serve the turn; it undervalues the very thing it prays for. It is indeed the begging of a denial, and shall certainly be answered in what it begs; but he, who truly and sensibly knows the invaluable happiness of being delivered from temptation, and the unspeakable misery of sinking under it, will pray against it, as a man ready to starve would beg for bread, or a man sentenced to die would entreat for life. Every period, every word, every tittle of such a prayer is all spirit and life, flame and ecstasy; it shoots from one heart into another, from the heart of him who utters, to the heart of him who hears it. And then well may that powerful thing vanquish the tempter, which binds the hands of justice, and opens the hands of mercy, and, in a word, overcomes and prevails over omnipotence itself; for, "let me go," says God to Jacob, Gen. xxxii. 26; and “let me alone," says God to Moses, Exod. xxxii. 10. One would think there was a kind of trial of strength between the Almighty and them; but whatsoever it was, it shows that there was and is something in prayer, which he who made heaven and earth neither could nor can resist; and if this be that holy violence which heaven itself (as has been shown) cannot stand out against, no wonder if all the powers of hell must fall before But, it. 2. To fervency must be added also constancy or perseverance. For this indeed is the crowning qualification, which renders prayer effectual and victorious, and that upon great reason, as being the surest test and mark of its sincerity; for as Job observes, Job xxvii. 10: "Will the hypocrite call always upon God ?" No, he does it only by fits and starts, and consequently his devotional fervours are but as the returning paroxysms of a fever, not as the constant kindly warmths of a vital heat: they may work high for a time, but they cannot last, for no fit ever yet held a man for his whole life. Discontinuance of prayer by long broken intervals is the very bane of the soul, exposing it to all the sleights and practices of the tempter. For a temptation may withdraw for awhile and return again; the tempter may cease urging, and yet continue plotting; the temptation is "not dead but sleeps," and when it comes on afresh, we shall find it the stronger for having slept. 66 And therefore our Saviour casts the whole stress of our safety upon continual prayer, by a notable parable, intended, as St. Luke tells us, Luke xviii. 1, to show that "men ought always to pray, and not to faint;" nothing being more fatally common, than for men, not receiving immediately answers to their prayers, to despond and give over, and to conclude with themselves, as good not at all as to no purpose." A man perhaps labours under the tyranny of some vexatious lust or corruption, and being bitterly sensible of it, he sets upon it with watching and striving, reading and hearing, fasting and praying, and after all thinks he has got but little or no ground of it; and now what shall such a one do? Why, nothing else must or can be done in the case, but resolutely to keep on praying; for no man of sense who sows one day expects to reap the next. This is certain, that while any one prays sincerely against a temptation, he fights against it, and so long as a man continues fighting, though with his limbs all battered, and his flesh torn and broken, he is not vanquished; it is conquest, in the account of God, not to be overcome. God perhaps intends, that there shall be war between thee and thy corruption all thy days: thou shalt live fighting and warring, but for all that mayest die in peace; and if so, God has answered thy prayers; I say, answered them, enough to save thy soul, though not always enough to comfort and compose thy mind. God fully made good his promise to the Israelites, and they really conquered the Canaanites, "though they never wholly dispossessed and drove them out. And, therefore, since God will still have something remain to exercise the very best of men in this life, if thou wouldest have thy prayer against thy sin successful, in spite of all discouragements, let it be continual: let the plaister be kept on till the sore be cured. For prayer is no otherwise a remedy against temptation than as it is commensurate to it, and keeps pace with it; but if we leave off praying, before the devil leaves off tempting, we cannot be safe, we throw off |