of the day, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened. My business is to shew that the practice is neither accordant with reason, nor consistent with scripture; and althought this has already been done in your Magazine, I am not aware that the subject has occupied a space in your pages proportionate to its importance. And really, Sir, the subject is important-either public social worship forms a part of Christianity, or it is contrary to its spirit and character. The latter I hope to prove; and when I shall have submitted my argument to the public, through your medium, I do think, Sir, that I ought to expect of some of the numerous supporters of the practice I have been oppugning, a reply to my reasoning, and a defence of that which at present I consider indefensible, This expectation, so natural in me to form, I candidly confess to you has no application to the ministers of the church of England-they, the whole of them, en masse, had much rather see their cause defended by the only successful advocate they have among themthe Attorney-general!! I hope nothing from the preachers among the Arminian or Calvinistic Dissenters-the wrapper of your Magazine, Sir, will be sufficient for them Happily there are those who are running the same course with ourselves, who consider Christian truth is best established by the comparison of opinion, and that reason should know no bounds save those which reason prescribes. The friends of truth! the Unitarians! cannot be indifferent about any thing which respects their own practice, and its consistency with the precepts of our common master. This letter will be read by some of the most popular preachers among the Unitarians. My neighbour, Mr. Aspland, will feel a lively interest in the argument-as the Editor of the Monthly Repository, his life is devoted to the cause of truth

-the subject lays exactly in his way-he regularly conducts the devotions of the enlightened few at Hackney; and has, I understand, at his house a select band of young gentlemen in training, who are to be distributed over the country for a similar purpose. There is Mr. Gilchrist too, who, I see by the advertisements in the daily papers, has just set up in business in the Borough. Mr. Gilchrist is the author of a pamphlet on the subject of Public Worship, which I shall have occasion to notice; and as public worship forms a part of the engagements of the new concern in the Borough, no person can be better fitted to defend the practice than Mr. Gilchrist. Whatever may be my opinions of the principles and conduct of either of the gentlemen just named, they will find that their arguments shall be done justice to, and that

all personalities will be waved on my part, should they feel it their duty to refute the reasoning I am about to advance; but should it so happen that not one of the friends to truth, nor one of the leaders of the friends to truth-that not a man, among a body of men distinguished for enlightened controversy on religious subjects, should be found to reply to objections seriously urged to their Christian practice, and to notice an argument involving an enquiry into the reason and authority of their accustomed worship, will it not be too much to expect me to put a charitable con

struction on their silence?

It may be necessary to premise, that the term worship will be used throughout the course of the following observations in its limited and partial sense, as descriptive of prayer and praise to Deity; for in the general acceptation and meaning of the word, both in seripture language and modern usage, as reverence or respect, it is presumed there can be no resonable objector to public worship and to public social worship--that is, to a public and social reverence of the Deity, by meeting together to speak of his goodness, to tell of his tender mercies to the children of men, to dwell on the perfection of his nature, to descant on the wonders of his works, to trace the wisdom of his providence, and to provoke an obedience to his revealed will. To this simple, pure, and reasonable worship, I repeat, Sir, there can be no objector; at least I am not that objector. It must be further and particularly premised, that nothing which I shall have occasion to submit to you, in the present enquiry, is intended to apply to or to militate against, even in the most distant manner, that which I consider the best privilege of the Christian-private prayer. I am anxious that my readers should bear in mind these two points, and that the advocates for the practice I am about to oppose should closely attend to them in all their relations and bearings upon the question at issue; as I am convinced, from the tenor of all the defences of public worship that have fallen in my way, that if these two points, simple as they may appear, are suffered to have their full consideration, most of the arguments drawn from utility and experience, in favour of public prayer, will be at once swept away,

I purpose directing this communication to the considere tion of the reasonableness of public social worship, reserv ing the scriptural department of the subject to my next. have just this moment, Sir, been reading Mrs. Barbauld's remarks on Wakefield's, " Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship;" and entertaining,

as I do, the highest opinion of the good sense and acecmplished mind of Mrs. Barbauld, I confess to you, almost with reluctance, that I have seldom seen a composition so rich in words, and so poor in argument. Mrs. Barbauld paints, she does not reasón. She considers that there is a natural and almost instinctive tendency in the human mind in favour of public worship, and takes as the principle of her argument the fact of man being a social being, and of the social tendency of all his feelings. To this effect she observes-" One class of religious duties, separately considered, tends to depress the mind, filling it with ingenuous shame and wholesome sor row, and to these humiliating feelings solitude might per haps be found congenial; but the sentiments of admiration, love, and joy, swell the bosom with emotions which seek for fellowship and communication. The flame indeed may be kindled by silent musing; but, when kindled, it must infalli bly spread. The devout heart, penetrated with large and affecting views of the immensity of the works of God, the harmony of his laws, and the extent of his beneficence, bursts into loud and vocal expressions of praise and adora tion; and, from a full and overflowing sensibility, seeks to expand itself to the utmost imits of creation. The mind is forcibly carried out of itself, and, embracing the whole circle of animated, existence, calls on all above, around, below, to help to bear the burden of its gratitude. Joy is too brilliant a thing to be confined to our own bosoms; it burnishes all nature, and with its vivid colouring gives a kind of factitious life to objects without sense or motion." Now if we make some reasonable abatement for the description, there is in reality nothing in the sentiment intended to be conveyed, to which the opponent of public worship can ob ject--against the recluse, against the solitaire, against the morose man, the passage is well pointed; but the writer evidently runs into the common error of every writer on her side of the question-she imagines that the enemy to social prayer must be an enemy to social feeling; and indeed with her the terms are used as almost synonimous-so that we, who do not pray together, are accounted insulated individuals, and unsocial beings-the sympathies of our common natures are dissolved-the ties which hold us to each other are broken-we can no longer converse together, or expatiate together on the works of creation, or impart to each other the overflowings of grateful and reflecting minds; and this simply because we prefer the quiet unassuming prayer of the closet to the distracting and fetid ad dresses of the congregation; because we individually, and

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without ceremony, put up our petitions to the court of heaven, without presenting then through the medium of the gentlemen in waiting; because, instead of meeting together to "sing down Pope and Turk," we meet together to exhort one another to love and good works. This palpable misapprehension, this specious mistake, runs through the whole of Mrs. Barbauld's pamphlet, and is the foundation of all her reasoning. It is indeed amusing to see to what ridiculous extremes a principle good in itself may be pushed, and what strange combinations it may be fancied to be susceptible of, when it is taken to support an absurd, an untenable opinion. The sympathetic character, and the social feelings of man, which no one presumes to deny, are assumed as a sort of axiom in the argument by the accomplished female whose work we are noticing and feeling as she well might the firmness of her footing, she shrewdly observes, "we neither laugh alone, nor weep alone-why then should we pray alone?" I answer for very good reasons, which I shall presently make appear; but might I not ask why we sleep alone, or dress alone, or write alone, or study alone, seeing we "neither laugh alone, nor weep alone?" Our mutual sympathies and social feelings, it seems, are to admit of no limits; we are henceforth, if the argument is good for any thing, to do every thing in a body. Ladies are to assemble together at the toilet-gentlemen to meet in companies, for the purpose of drawing on their boots and footmen to go in congregations behind their masters? carriages! But the writer is rather unhappy in one of the instances she has chosen; for the fact is we do weep alone, Grief is rather a solitary affection of the mind-it seeks retirement-it reposes in solitude-it is dissipated by society -its wounds are closed by the balm of friendship! The question is then, whether prayer be not of a quality to require quiet and secresy to render it effective; and this without impugning our social character, or implying any negation to the reciprocity of our affections. None of our feelings (says Mrs. Barbauld) are of a more commonicable nature than our religious ones. If devotion really exists in the heart of each individual, it is morally impossi ble it should exist there apart and singly." You see, reader, how necessary it was for me to guard the entrance of this subject, and to lay it down as the first step in the discussion, that the mutual communication of our religious and moral feelings is both consistent with our nature, and conducive to our improvement; that it is, in fact, a practice which wise and good men, and those who wish to continue

wise and good, will pursue :-what then? is there no class of religious duty of an individual and retiring kind-must man at no moment of his busy existence detach himself from all around-are there no seasons when his dear est friends would be esteemed intruders-is the secret communion of the creature with the Creator an unsalutary and unprofitable exercise--or rather will not his self-examinations, will not his private devotions, will not his individual prayers, tend to develope the kindred sympathies of his nature, when he knows that the common parent of all may at the same moment of time be addressed by any of his intelligent offspring, in whatever part of the earth they may exist, or at whatever point of creation they may be placed Nay! will not private worship fit us for public life-will it not communicate vigour and elasticity to our social feelings will it not give a zest to our mutual and religious duties? All this is admitted; we are agreed then upon principle, it seems, that man is a social being-that his religious exercises should bear in a certain, and indeed extensive, degree, a social stamp and character--and that it is by no means inconsistent with such a being as we have. considered man to be, that he should habituate himself also to private and individual devotion. It remains then only, for us to enquire, whether prayer (a particular part only, remember, of religions worship) does not, from its nature and quality, require privacy; whether, in fact, it can or ought to be practised as a social duty. And here to do justice to our enquiry, we must divide it into two parts, and discuss each of the parts in a great measure separately-first, publie prayer-second, social prayer; for prayer may be public yet not social. By public prayer, I understand the practice of a number of individuals meeting together, in some public place, to petition or address the Deity; and this each may do singly and of themselves, as was the case with the Jews in the temple and synagogue worship. By social prayer, [ understand an assembly of persons concurring in some defimite petition or address to Deity, which they put up toge ther, or which is put up without any such concurrence, through the mediuni of one of the individuals, as the sentiment and expression of the body. Public social prayer is the union of both the ideas conveyed in the definitions, and is the custom of the Christian world generally.

To begin with public prayer. Ere man was tutored by phi losophy-when as yet he could form but childish and puerile conceptions of Deity, as a being possessing feelings and pas sions in a great measure in common with mortality—it was