The Prayer is a beautiful one, finely constructed, full without being drawn out, and breathing throughout deep personal religion. It is certainly one of the best pieces in the Apocrypha. After the invocation to God Almighty, “the God of our fathers, of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and of their righteous seed,” comes an acknowledgement of His power and glory; all things tremble before His might, and His wrath against sinners is unendurable; yet His mercy is without limit to the repentant: “Thou art the Lord Most High, of great compassion, long-suffering and abundant in mercy, and repentest Thee for evils of men,” i.e. God in His pity relents because of the sufferings of men, even though brought on them by their own sins. God is then called upon to fulfil His promise of forgiveness to His repentant servant. The supplicator confesses his manifold sins, and protests his sense of unworthiness: “I am not worthy to behold and see the height of heaven by reason of the multitude of mine iniquities.” Then after further confession of sin, and pleading with God to put away His anger and to show His mercy in forgiveness, the Prayer concludes with the words: “And I will praise Thee for ever all the days of my life; for all the host of heaven doth sing Thy praise, and Thine is the glory for ever and ever. Amen.” II. THE ORIGIN OF THE PRAYER In 2 Chronicles xxxiii. 12, 13 it is said that when Manasseh “was in distress he besought the Lord his God, and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers. And he prayed unto Him; and He was entreated of him, and heard his supplication, and brought him again unto Jerusalem unto his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord He was God.” Again, in verses 18, 19 of the same chapter the chronicler says: “Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh, and his prayer unto his God, and the words of the seers that spake to him in the name of the Lord, the God of Israel, behold, they are written among the acts of the kings of Israel. His prayer also, and how God was entreated of him ... behold, they are written in the history of Hozai.”[428] The “Prayer of Manasses,” it is usually held, purports to be the prayer to which the chronicler refers; Ball, for example, says: “It is evident from the references in 2 Chronicles xxxiii. 18, 19 that a prayer of Manasseh, written in Hebrew, lay before that writer [i.e. the chronicler]; and we may perhaps venture to add that there is nothing in the form or substance of the Prayer before us which can fairly be alleged against the possibility of its having been ultimately derived from that lost Hebrew original.... We incline to think that the Greek is a free translation from some lost Haggadic narrative, which was itself perhaps founded upon the older document from which the chronicler derived his peculiar details of the history of Manasseh.”[429] This is an attractive theory, but there are some objections to it which will appear as we proceed. Ryle