believe the Bible, we must ask God to give us the blessings we stand in need of, and cannot warrantably expect to receive without asking. The same holds good with regard to family prayer. I ask eternal life for my wife, children, or friends. How vain is all my labour! For if God has decreed to give them eternal life, they shall have it in the way, time, place, and manner it is decreed for them, whether I pray or not. And if God has not decreed to give it unto them, all my praying can never change the decree. I find a love to poor perishing sinners in some town or village, and I go to persuade them to be reconciled to God: Many of them use me ill, not only with reviling language, but even with sticks, or stones, or clods, or rotten eggs. Why, what a fool was I to expose myself on any such account! If they are decreed to be saved, they shall be saved; or lost, they shall be lost: So that my suffering and preaching are entirely in vain.--See that pert young man, he has just left his loom or his plough, and he is going to hammer at a bit of Latin; by and by, he becomes a mighty smatterer: With his little sense, little grace, and next to no learning, he harangues famously about a decree and a covenant, and puffs and parades, and shouts out amain, "O the sweetness of God's electing love!" Having by this time acquired a pretty good stock of assurance, he looks out for a shop, that is, in the quaint phrase, "he waits for a call;" by and by the desired object appears, the bargain is struck, and the stipend is settled, and now we have our pert youngster a Reverend Sir!--"Well, but what is he to do?" Why, we should think, call sinners to repentance, and comfort mourners, and establish believers, and help their faith. But, alas! this is all in vain. This Reverend Sir might as well have stayed at his loom or plough, as take the poor people's money for watching over their souls, when all from first to last was settled by an unalterable decree. Such is the consistency of predestinarian teachers. Poor simple souls, who are thus led, do not you see that if such a decree is gone forth, you are supporting an idle man in vain?[1]--What end is preaching to answer? Let him lecture with ever such state and assurance, if the time, the place, the manner be all fixed: I say he is an ignorant, lazy drone, who is picking his poor people's pockets; but, perhaps, it was decreed that it should be so.[2]