LXXXII. From these two principal duties, spring, as corollaries, others of no less importance, which come, also, within the sphere of the first cardinal point of biblical revelation, the knowledge of God. He, who truly loves and fears God, will surely feel the necessity of placing in Him exclusively all his trust, for he is convinced that there is no being in nature, besides God, that can offer an infallible support to human hopes. He will find in his heart an almost irrepressible impulse to praise the Divine perfections, to extol His glory, to offer sincere homage to the Sovereign of the universe, to worship and serve Him with purity of heart, to thank Him for favours received, to supplicate Him for help, to confess to Him sins committed, and to ask His pardon with contrite spirit. All these and other like acts of filial dependence and piety, find their expression in that elevated form of external worship called _prayer_, which, whether exercised publicly in appropriate and consecrated temples, or recited in the solitude of the domestic closet,[4] whether strictly following an established formulary, or pouring out the impulsive feelings of the heart, is always an urgent want and an indispensable duty of every religious man. Lastly, the true love and fear of God imply the obligation of avoiding, in all that pertains to Divine worship, everything that might have the appearance of idolatry, of intrusion of intermediate powers, or of any superstition whatever; above all clearly emerges the duty of not abusing the holy name of God, either by uttering it on trivial occasions--which would tend to diminish the reverence due to Him--or by profaning it with an invocation to a false testimony, whereby the detestable crime of perjury would be consummated. [Note 4: Public, as compared with private worship, has the undoubted advantage of being in itself a public homage to the omnipotence of God, and a solemn testimony of the dependence of man on Him. True, solitary worship is often more likely to be attended with the requisite mental abstraction from all worldly objects, and intellectual elevation of the soul towards its Divine Source--a condition of mind indispensable to establish a true spiritual communion in Prayer, and without which all our orisons and ritual ceremonies would be but mechanical and meaningless performances, a body without soul. It is this condition of the mind that, in Talmudical style, is called [Hebrew: het-nun-vav-kaf], as is well known, and that later ascetic writers termed [Hebrew: tav-vav-dalet-dalet-vav-bet-het-he], from the circumstance that it is superinduced by solitary meditation. But whenever this condition is attained in a public service, then indeed is that service "divine," and humanity is exalted in its approach to the Throne of Mercy.--THE TRANSLATOR.] CHAPTER XIII.