I often say my prayers, But do I ever pray, And do the wishes of my heart Go with the words I say: I may as well kneel down And worship gods of stone. As offer to the living God a prayer of words alone, For words without the heart The Lord will never hear; Nor will He to those lips attend Whose prayers are not sincere.--_John Burton._ A STARTLING CHARGE. i. 15. _Your hands are full of blood._ Such is the reason which God assigns for turning a deaf ear to the prayers of His ancient people: the hands they lifted up to Him in supplication were blood-stained. It was as if Cain, red with the murder of Abel, had lifted up his hands in prayer to God for blessing. By this startling charge we are reminded--+I. That between the estimates formed by God and man as to what takes place in the sanctuary there is often an infinite disparity.+ Behold the court of the temple filled, apparently, with devout worshippers, who lift up their hands to heaven in earnest supplication,--what a pleasing sight! But God looks down, and says, "Those hands are full of blood." The same contrast is repeated in another form (ch. xxix. 13). Other contrasts: Eli sees what he thinks to be a drunken woman; God sees a humble supplicant (1 Sam. i. 12, 13). Men see an eminently religious man praying in the sanctuary; God sees a man prostituting prayer into a means of self-glorification (Luke xviii. 11, 12). Men see a foul wretch whose presence in the sanctuary is a pollution; God sees a broken-hearted penitent, and hastens to bless him (Luke xviii. 13, 14). So it is in our sanctuaries to-day. +II. That God holds us responsible for the ultimate consequences of our actions.+ The men who thronged the temple in Isaiah's time, and whose prayers God rejected, were not bandits and murderers in the ordinary and coarse fashion by which men are brought to the scaffold. Yet the charge brought against them was true. For there are other ways of murdering men than by acts of violence of which human law takes note. By grievous oppression millions of men have been brought to an untimely grave. If a man destroys another by _slow_ poison, is he not as truly a murderer as another who kills his victim by means of prussic acid? In God's sight oppression is murder; and of oppression in its worst forms the Jews had been guilty (vers. 23; iii. 14, 15, &c.) It is in accordance with this declaration that opprobrium is heaped upon Jeroboam as the man "who made Israel to sin" (2 Kings x. 29); and that we are so sternly warned against leading others into transgression (Matt. xviii. 6, &c.) This fact--1. _Casts some light on the doctrine of future punishment._ The results of the evil actions of men go on eternally propagating themselves, and it is therefore not unjust that the punishment of those actions should be eternal also. 2. _Should cause us to halt when we are tempted to acts