people here, as it were, emulously strive with cach other in short ejaculatory petitions; each of them in the language of Scripture. "O Lord, open thou our lips;" the people respond-" And our mouth shall shew forth thy praise." These versicles are found in the fifty-first Psalm, towards the conclusion;—that Psalm, ever adapted to the lips of the contrite ;—that Psalm which our Church repeats entire in her grand annual penitentiary office on Ash-Wednesday ;"O Lord, open thou my lips, and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise:" these are the words as they stand in the Psalm in the new, or Bible, translation; the only alteration which the Church makes in them, is to adapt them to the use of the minister and people, by changing twice the singular number "my," for the plural" our." This is nearly the case in the two next versicles

O God, make speed to save us; O Lord,

taken from the first verse of the seventieth Psalm; where the Bible has it,-" Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O Lord." As they stand in our Service-Book, they signify, "O save us. speedily from the commission of those sins which we have recently confessed unto thee; and make haste, O Lord, to help us by thy grace and Holy Spirit, to fulfil all thy will, and to praise thee not only with our lips, but in our lives."-And here, assuming courage and confidence in our merciful God, we venture to quit the pos-. ture of supplicants, and to stand up. The minister and people join in the ancient Doxology of the Church, or the rendering of glory to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; glory as it was ascribed in the beginning by angels and saints; has. been ascribed by the devout from that time

to the present moment; and shall continue to be ascribed by the Church militant to the end of time, and by the Church triumphant, in company with cherubim and seraphim, throughout the countless ages of eternity. Glory to God who made us, to Christ who redeemed us with his own blood, to the Holy Ghost who puts into our minds good desires, and who helps us to bring them to good effect; who leads us to confess our sins, to pray for pardon, and impels us to praise God.-I would observe, that in this and all other passages of the Liturgy, where the minister and people each of them take a part in short sentences where the sense is continued from one to the other, it is not enough for either minister or people to repeat aloud what is set down for them, unless they accompany each other, in their hearts and minds, in those parts where they are to remain silent.

The next two versicles are, "Praise ye the Lord;"-the people answer, "The Lord's name be praised." The first of these has been used in all the liturgies which have come down to us, and is, in fact, none other than a translation of a word so sacred that it has been retained in the ancient liturgies without translation : "Praise ye the Lord," is the compound word Hallelujah, in English. In saying Hallelujah, in ancient times, the minister was deemed to call upon the angels of God to join in his praise; and, I conceive, now that it is translated, the compilers of our Liturgy intended nearly the same thing. A great many of the Psalms begin with the word Hallelujah; but the sense in which the Liturgy here uses it, I think, is best exemplified in the hundred and forty-eighth Psalm-" Praise ye the Lord; praise ye the Lord from the heavens; praise him in

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the heights; praise ye him all his angels; praise ye him all his hosts." When the minister then says, "Praise ye the Lord," and you answer, "The Lord's name be praised;" lift up your hearts, and expand your ideas, beloved; through the merits of our Lord, an entrance is procured us into the Holy of Holies, even heaven itself; we have communion and fellowship with the angels; heaven and earth are united in one family, all the members of which join in one act of adoration and praise; God's name is hallowed, and his will is done on earth as it is in heaven: our duty it is, therefore, to see that with becoming reverence and fervency, we perform our part, in those devotions where angels themselves

praise the Lord, where the invisible is made fast in one spirit to the visible Church.

Under these impressions, which it were almost impiety to efface by any addition,