The outward forms and observances of worship are manifestly intended to discourage and exclude the false refinements of an imaginative piety, and to give to the religious affections a mundane, rather than a transcendental character. The congregated worshippers come into "the house of God," the hall or court of audience, on the intelligible terms of human association; and they come by explicit invitation from him who declares that "wheresoever two or three are gathered together in his name, there he is" to meet them. And being so assembled, as in the actual presence of the "King of saints" they give utterance to the emotions of love, veneration, hope, joy, penitence, in all those modes of outward expression which are at once proper to the constitution of human nature and proper to be addressed to a being of kindred character and sympathies. Worship is planned altogether in adaptation to the limitations of the inferior party, not in proportion to the infinitude of the superior; even the worship of heaven must be framed on the same principle; for how high soever we ascend in the scale of created intelligence, still the finite can never surmount its boundaries, or at all adapt itself to the infinite. But the infinite may always bow to the finite. Those, therefore, who, inflated by enthusiasm, contemn or neglect the modes and style of worship proper to humanity, must find that, though indulgence should be given to their affectation on earth, no room can be allowed it in heaven. * * * * * The dispensations of the divine providence towards the pious have all the same tendency to confine the devout affections within the circle of terrestrial ideas, and to make religion an occupant of the homestead of common feelings. "Many are the afflictions of the righteous," and wherefore, but to bring his religious belief and emotions into close contact with the humiliations of the natural life, and to necessitate the use of prayer as a real and efficient means of obtaining needful assistance in distress? If vague speculations or delicious illusions have carried the Christian away from the realities of earth, some urgent want or piercing sorrow presently arouses him from his dreams and obliges him to come back to importunate prayer and to unaffected praise. A strange incongruity may seem to present itself, when the sons of God—the heirs of immortality, the destined princes of heaven—are seen to be implicated in sordid cares, and vexed and oppressed by the perplexities of a moment; but this incongruity strikes us only when the great facts of religion are viewed in the false light of the imagination; for the process of preparation, far from being incompatible with these apparent degradations, requires them; and it is by such means of humiliation that the hope of immortality, confined within the heart, is prevented from floating in the region of material images. * * * * *