essedly the invocation of saints and
angels, to any other being than Himself alone, what words could have
been employed more stringently prohibitory?

Secondly, had such an address to saints and angels, as the Church of
Rome now confessedly makes, been contemplated by our heavenly Lawgiver
as an exception to the general rule, would not some saving clause, some
expressions indicative of such an intended exception, have been
discovered in some page or other of his revealed will?

Thirdly, if such an appeal to the angels of heaven, or to the spirits of
the just in heaven, had been sanctioned under the elder covenant, would
not some example, some solitary instance, have been recorded of a
faithful servant of Jehovah offering such a prayer with the Divine
approbation?

Lastly, when such strong and repeated declarations and injunctions
interspersed through the entire volume of the Old Testament,
unequivocally show the will of God to be, that no other object of
religious worship should have place in the heart or on the tongue of his
own true sons and daughters, can it become a faithful child of our
Heavenly Father to be seeking for excuses and palliations, and to invent
distinctions between one kind of worship and another?

God Himself includes all in one universal prohibitory {21} mandate,
"Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve." So
far from according with those general rules for the interpretation of
the revealed will of God, which we have already stated, and from which,
in the abstract, probably few would dissent, an anxiety to force the
word of God into at least an acquiescence in the invocation of saints
and angels, indicates a disposition to comply with his injunctions,
wherever they seem to clash with our own view, only so far as we cannot
avoid compliance; and to seek how we may with any show of propriety
evade the spirit of those commands. Instead of that full, free, and
unstinted submission of our own inclinations and propensities to the
Almighty's will wherever we can discover it, which those entertain whom
the Lord seeketh to worship Him; to look for exceptions and to act upon
them, bears upon it the stamp of a reserved and grudging service. After
so many positive warnings, enactments, and denunciations, against
seeking by prayer the aid of any other being whatever, surely a positive
command would have been absolutely necessary to justify a mortal man in
preferring any prayer to any