Casting the Lot

“And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. — Jonah i. 7. “The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord.” — Prov. xvi. 33.

THE narrative does not inform us what response Jonah gave to the shipmaster. His best response, no doubt, was silence, To the rebuke addressed to him, however severe, he could offer no objection — “What meanest thou, O sleeper?” And as to the proposal made to him, — “Arise and call on thy God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not,” — he could scarcely very readily promise compliance with it. A prophet and true servant of the Lord though he was, he had, at present, and in so far, retired from his standing as one in communication and in communion with the King, and assumed the position of a rebel. It is not, indeed, our works of obedience that secure our prayers being heard; and our works of disobedience, repented of and confessed, forsaken and abandoned, shall not prevent our prayers being heard. But it is obviously right and inevitable that a state of disobedience continued in, a course of rebellion pursued, should cut oft’ the transgressing one from the fellowship of his God. Prayer, indeed, is an appeal to God to accomplish concerning us the things which He hath promised; to carry out in our experience and history, in our state and prospects, His own will. But the man who is following out, not the Divine will, but his own, is thereby in a position the very reverse of that which is taken up by the soul in true prayer. Hence, not merely does God refuse to hear the prayer of the impenitent: but really the impenitent refuse truly to pray. The first true prayer that comes from the transgressor begins with a resignation of his rebellion. Your coming over to God to ask Him to fulfil His will — and prayer is the offering up of our desires to God for things agree-Casting the Lot. loy

able to His will — implies the giving up, the surrendering of your will to His. It implies your return to submission, allegiance, loyalty, obedience; and though it is not the merit of this return to obedience which secures the hearing of prayer, this return to obedience is implied in the very offering of true prayer.

In his present flight, therefore, from God’s presence, and his continued refusal to perform God’s will, Jonah has shut against himself the door of prayer. To pray in faith is to pray in submission to the Divine will, and on the warrant of the Divine Word: but for Jonah to profess to do so, lays him open immediately to the rejoinder of his own conscience, How canst thou pretend such submission, when thou art carrying on this war against God’s will, and fleeing from the obedience of it? Above the voice of conscience, thus protesting his hypocrisy in pretending to pray, Jonah, till he repent and return to his allegiance, cannot rise. Conscience is too mighty for him. His attempt at prayer is strangled at its very beginning. He has the witness in himself, against himself. And it is simply in accordance with what conscience testifies, that God also testifies, when He refuses in such a case to hear prayer.

To the Jews, continuinoj to refuse obedience to the will of God, Jeremiah was required to speak thus, in the name of the Lord: — “I earnestly protested unto your fathers, saying. Obey my voice. Yet they obeyed not. And now a conspiracy is found among the men of Judah; they are turned back to the iniquity of their forefathers, which refused to hear My words. Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto Me, I will not hearken unto them” (Jer. xi. 7-11). In like manner, by Isaiah, does the Lord contend with a gainsaying and disobedient people: “When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when you make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood” (Isa. i. 15).

Does this, then, form any exception to the blessed truth that God is the hearer and answerer of prayer? No. But it proves that He is the hater of hypocrisy. The man who, in known disobedience to any command from God, approaches to pray, defies the Divine omniscience, as if God did not know his sin. Or he denies the Divine authority over him, as if God had no right to io8 Casting the Lot.

claim obedience in that particular; no right to be displeased though obedience be refused; no right to complain; no right to count this a reason for interrupting peaceable and friendly relations. The very attempt in such a case to pray is an insult to God. It is a cool and impudent attempt to proceed as if all were right, as if nothing had happened. Should God, in such a case, be inquired of? Should the Most High consent to allow His rebellious creature to reduce Him to so degrading a position; to assume over Him, what simply amounts on the sinner’s part to an overbearing attitude of dictation?

You sin against God. You knowingly refuse obedience to some particular of His clearly-revealed will. And, without repentance, and return to a better mind and a better course, you approach Him with your prayers and expect that He will answer them? You expect that He will wink at your sin; allow you to take your own way; indulge you in your disobedience; and permit you in this matter to be a god to yourself: thereby consenting, in so far, to cease Himself from being God? And all this is implied in His continuing on a friendly and prayer-hearing relation to you in the midst of disobedience! Nay! “I will go and return unto my place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek My face; in their affliction they will seek me early” (Hos. V. 15).

It appears, then, that repentance is necessarily implied in all true prayer. “Then shall ye find Me, when ye seek Me with all your heart: “— when subjecting all your will to My will, and in nothing continuing to rebel, ye can” delight yourselves in God,” then shall ye find Me; then will I “give you the desire of your heart.” Not that repentance is the meritorious reason for our prayers being heard; they are heard in the mere and free grace of God, and in the name and merit of Jesus. But repentance is implied in an application to that grace — the grace of Him who is the High and Holy One of Isi’ael, the supreme and sovereign God. It is implied, also, in all real resting on the righteousness of Christ. Hence, while we are heard solely in the name of Jesus, we may see the meaning of the Apostle’s declaration — connecting, as it does by a sure link, the prayer of faith with unreserved obedience —” Whatsoever we ask, we receive of Him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in

His sight” (1 John iii. 22). Without repenting, then, and returning to his duty, Jonali’s prayers could not be heard. Nay, rather; truly and from heart, Jonah could not pray.

To bring him to repentance, however, so that at last his prayers may be heard, is the very purpose of God’s strong-handed dealings with him: and these dealings, before they secure the end, must become more strong-handed still. It is another step in this discipline of chastisement and correction which we are called to consider in the seventh verse. “And they said every one to his fellow. Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is come upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.”

Now, in this procedure, there are two things to be attended to: First, the fact that each man, by making this proposal and going into it, disowns the guilt; and, second, the method by which they propose to discover it. It is taken for granted that there is guilt involved. It is felt that God, or the gods, the Supreme Being, or supreme powers, are displeased. Guilt has been contracted. A guilty party is in the ship. That guilt, that guilty party, God is pursuing by this storm; for the storm is extraordinary, marvellous, if not miraculous. They are forced to believe in some marvellous, some extraordinary and unwonted reason for it. This reason they think they find, in the supposition that some great crime lies concealed among them — some deadly offence, such as may be righteously pursued and punished by this great and marvellous tempest.

I. The mariners, for their part, one by one, disown this guilt by the very proposal to discover it by lot. Far from being ready in meekness and lowliness of spirit, to say, each one in his own conscience, “Is it I?” — we find them boldly refusing the charge of criminality, refusing an appeal to their own consciences as a means of discovering it, and proposing to discover it by an appeal to God.

Now, no doubt, as it happened, the anger of God was pursuing, not them, but Jonah. That fact, however, was not discovered to them till afterwards; and so long as they were in ignorance of it, their conduct is to be examined in the remembrance that they were ignorant of it. What, then, are we to say of their denying no Castino- the Lot.

any guilt that could explain or justify on God’s part, so to speak, the strong tempest that now lay upon them? Did they not acknowledge themselves to be sinners? Would they have boldly stood up and contended that they were so righteous that God, or the gods, would be unrighteous in sending any trouble upon them? Nay; they would at once have admitted that they were sinners; that ordinary calamities and trials no doubt were righteously enough sent upon them, and were what they could not complain of; and had this storm been merely an ordinary one, they would have been all ready to admit that the trial it brought with it was no excessive punishment of their offences. But it was a tempest so marvellous, indicating so clearly the special and great indignation of God, that it indicated a great and special controversy — great and special sin. Such great and special guiltiness, deserving such great and special punishment — this is what they deny by submitting the matter to the discovery and disclosure of the lot.

Now, here we have an exact picture of the extent to which men are by nature willing to admit that they are sinners; indicatino- also the point where their admission ceases. They will admit that they are sinners so far as to acknowledge the justice of the smaller trials that they are called upon, in Providence, to endure. But depict to them the eternal wrath of God, the second death, banishment from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power, and consignment with lost angels to the lake that burneth, and ask the worldly, unconverted man — Are you a sinner to that extent? guilty to that degree? do you admit you are a sinner to such extent as justifies God in appointing that as the wages of your sin? — and the carnal mind revolts from making any such admission — revolts from honestly acknowledging guilt that would explain, or account for, or justify, a judgment so terrific, a vengeance so conclusive — eternal! Let there be nothing very extraordinary — extraordinary, terrific, or damning — in the storm, the tempest, the punishment; and the sinner will not stand — will not think it worth his while to stand debating the matter and justifying himself. He will admit his sinfulness; but then, in his sinfulness, admitted in these circumstances, he admits nothing extraordinary — nothing extraordinarily sinful, base, or ill deserving. Yes: and this admission he can make without any great humiliation; without needing to make any application, and without, in point of fact, making any application to God for any signal act of grace, or placing himself under any great obligation to God. His trials and punishments being nothing very extraordinary, he can contrive to bear them; to stagger on under them. He can contrive to outlive the commonplace, ordinary storms of the deep; to put the ship in order, and lie to till the tempest abate. But let the tempest become absolutely intolerable — let the anger that sends it rise in its terrors till it become evident that the Almighty has a quarrel which He will not quash, and which the sinner can neither bear nor outlive; let there be denounced upon him a punishment, a penalty, a wrath, a death, not measured by his capacity of endurance, but by the infinite power and glory of the God whom he has dishonoured and disobeyed; ask him now. Are you a sinner to this extent? so great a sinner that, in this, “God is just in speaking and clear in judging,” and appoints you nothing but your righteous and mere desert? Ah! you ask him to pass a sentence of condemnation on himself as linal, as condemnatory, as sweeping, as humiliating and complete as that eternal death is finally destructive; and you show him that the only possible escape must be by receiving deliverance as a signal act of grace — a magnificent act of stupendous and unbounded grace; so that he becomes indebted to his offended God for an undeserved kindness and compassion as inconceivably tender, and great, and lasting, as that death is lasting and great and terrific from which it saves him. The natural man is prepared neither so to condemn himself, nor so to be indebted or obligated to his God. To consent to condemn himself as worthy of any such punishment — to feel so great sinfulness in sin as to justify God in appointing for it such a punishment; — this, on the one hand, implies a heart renewed by the Holy Spirit; and, on the other hand, the same newness of heart is realised when a sinner is made willing to own that his escape from eternal death is due to the pure favour of God; that it lays him under inconceivable obligations to God; that it calls for unmeasured gratitude to God; unreserved, adoring, loving devotion to God for ever.

Have you come to this acknowledgment of guilt and grace; guilt on your part — grace on God’s? Have you come to feel that God’s sentence of condemnation to eternal death is simply righteous: and that, therefore, His gift of eternal life is simply gracious — of mere grace; mere, amazing, unclaimable, inconceivable grace, deserving celebrations of endless and adoring praise? Ah! you do not know the sweet gratitude for grace, if you do not know the unreserved and guileless acknowledgment of guilt — the guilt even of eternal death, the guilt of “the wrath which is to come.” And in that case, you cannot speak, with the Apostle’s rapturously fine and tender feeling, of — “Jesus who delivered us from the wrath to come.”

Behold, by the aid of God’s holy revelations, the everlasting mansions of the guilty and condemned! The storm waxes fierce. The lake of lire burneth. O sinner, are you for casting lots to ascertain for whom? Are you still asking. For whom could such doom be righteously prepared? Are you putting away the question, “Lord, is it I?” Are you putting away the answer — the answer that God, by His word and Spirit, by His law and your conscience, gives — “Thou art the man “? What! have you never faced this question? Is it new to you? What! and you a professing Christian! And never humbled, broken-hearted, self-condemning; justifying God’s simple righteousness in condemning you; owning His mere grace, so free, so boundless, so lovely in giving salvation by Jesus! Know you not these first principles even of Christian experience? Ah? if you know not, and own not, these things — the justice and majesty of law; the inexcusableness of sin; the righteousness of hell; the undeservedness, and freeness, and sovereign majesty of grace — you know not what it is to “awake and arise from the dead” and come to Christ’s “marvellous light.” Be not deceived by temporary, and trifling, and easily disposed-of feelings with respect to sin. Thousands admit that they are sinners, and listen to hear of salvation, who know not and own not the hell-deservingness of sin, and therefore cannot know the undeservedness and grace of salvation, and can neither manifest nor feel the gratitude which, for such salvation, is due. Ah! when I look even to that lake that burneth, and that worm that never dies; and when, by the Spirit of light and strivings, the storm in my conscience, as to my relation and feeling’s and doing’s towards God, waxes more and more tempestuous, let me not cast lots to ascertain to whom such a doom could be righteously assigned — for whose sake such a storm could righteously arise. I am myself the man. It is I whom sin is finding out. Let me own that God is not unrighteous. Let me confess I have given Him good and righteous cause for anger. Let me no more extenuate my offence and justify myself. He is righteous, and I am not. Against Him, Him only have I sinned, that He might be justified when He speaketh, and clear when He judgeth (Ps. li. 4). Especially let me be encouraged unto this confession — yea, let me be generously overpowered, overwhelmed, ashamed and charmed into this confession — seeing that He only requires an admission that my case is simply the guilty one it is, to absolve me gratuitously, fully, and for ever, from all its guilt, and free me, immediately in hope, and soon in glorious fulfilment, from all its misery.

No! I will cast no lots to discover who is “the chief of sinners.” The great Prophet of the Church, by His word and Spirit, declares unto me, “Thou art thyself the man.” Yes: and when I truly bow in meek submission, and in free, and unreserved, and full acknowledgment, the same Prophet turns not away from me, nor tarries for a moment in His communications till he tells me, with a voice as true, as powerful, as convincing, “The Lord hath put away thy sin” (2 Sam. xii. 7-13). For “if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John i. 9).

The conduct of these sailors implied that they made no confession. They justified themselves as not deserving any such prosecution and punishment at the hands of Divine justice as the threatened destruction implied. And so can sinners own themselves to be sinners, and guilty to the extent of being worthy of such ordinary punishment as they can put up with, and such that deliverance from it would imply on God’s part little grace, and demand on their part little gratitude. But to own, in holy, self-condemning silence, that they deserve the eternal wrath of the Holy One of Israel — a wrath so great and so righteous that deliverance from it cannot be proposed on God’s part, save in signal, and singular, and inconceivable grace and love, and cannot be embraced on their part, save with feelings of unbounded gratitude and love in return; this is the self-humiliation to which the old Adam will never stoop, and which, wherever it is found, indi-H cates the presence of the new man, and the prior working of God’s regenerating Spirit.

II. Let us now consider the method by which they propose to discover the guilt which they thus disown. “And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is come upon us.”

We have several instances in Scripture of the practice of casting lots. It was by a lot — and after prayer to God to “give a perfect lot” — that Jonathan was discovered as having transgressed his father’s rash and arbitrary command to the army not to taste food till the going down of the sun (1 Sam. xiv. 42). It was by lot, and after special prayer that God would guide the lot according: to His will, that Matthias was chosen and added to the apostleship, filling up the vacancy caused by the apostacy and death of Judas (Acts i. 26). It was, in all probability, by the lot that the Lord, the King of kings, indicated His choice of Saul to be king over Israel (1 Sam. x. 21); and that the Righteous One, the Judsfe of all, discovered Achan as the troubler of Israel’s camp (Joshua vii. 16-18). And we are familiar with the saying of the wise man: “The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord” (Prov. xxi. 33).

The principle implied in casting lots is, that thereby a solemn appeal is taken to the Lord to indicate His pleasure in a matter that cannot otherwise be decided. Or, taking somewhat lower ground, it is a method of avoiding responsibility and shunning occasion of jealousies.

A question arises. When is it lawful to have recourse to the casting of lots? And when would such procedure be unlawful? What are the limits between a legitimate and improper use of the lot?

Now, because such a question is only one of a class, a large class of cases of conscience, all involving substantially the same principles, and all to be dealt with in very much the same way, let us devote a little attention to it. What are the limits between a lawful and unlawful appeal to the lot?

1. First, then, let me describe to you a case where its lawfulness is obvious. A general of an army is about to arrange his forces for an assault upon the enemy’s citadel. The party that heads the attack are exposed to be cut in pieces; the probability of escape to each o£ them is exceedingly small, the probability of death exceedingly great. They are, alas! “the forlorn hope.” Overawed by the thought of appointing his fellow-creatures thus to almost certain death, the general, instead of himself fixing on the portion of his army that shall lead the van, chooses to decide the matter by casting lots. Clearly he makes a most lawful appeal to the lot in such a case. Whether simply as refusing the responsibility, or as making a solemn appeal to God, he is only embracing a legitimate privilege. He may with a good conscience, as in the sight of God, and in the spirit of prayer, cast lots to settle this very solemn matter. He ought to do it in the spirit of prayer; and, if a godly man, he will. Such is a case where the lawfulness is quite unquestionable.

2. Let us go at once to the other extreme, and describe a case where the u?ilawfulness is equally obvious. A party of men agree to furnish each a certain sum of money to a common store, and then they cast lots to determine to whom the whole sum shall belong. The character of such a proceeding is clear. All such lotteries, raffles, gamblings, are immoral, — profane. They are, in their very essence, atheistic profligacy. The parties themselves may be made quickly to confess that they are. Will you dare to say, we may ask them, will you dare to say that you can ask the Divine sanction on a step like this? Do you think, if you lose in this speculation, that Almighty God will not hold you responsible for the worldly good you thus lose? for you put away what God gave and what God commanded you concerning, saying, “Occupy till I come.” And He will demand an account of it, as what you lost without His providence taking it from you. And if you gain, will He not reckon with you, in like manner, for being in possession of what He never gave? And will you dare to call Him in to decide and allocate in such shameful transfers? “The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord.” And you take that method which most especially involves His finger to settle what He most especially abhors! The reply of course is that any such thought of thus appealing to God is never entertained. And doubtless that is true enough; for it is evident that the thoughtless agents are acting all too plainly as those that are without God in the world.

But it remains none the less true that “the whole disposing of the lot is of God;” and if in such a case it would be blasphemy to realise it to be so, and still persist, it is practical atheism not to realise it all. For if “the very hairs of our heads are numbered,” and “not a sparrow falleth to the ground without our Father;” — and the falling out of the lot is not more truly, but certainly more obviously, of His sole will and pleasure; — then if men can use it without thinking of God and His providence, attributing the result rather to chance, or luck, or fortune, or fate, is not this an atheistic exclusion of the Almighty from the affairs of His own world, and only next in its profligacy to the blasphemy which would be involved in saying that they appealed the lot to God, and sought to make Him a party to their dishonourable dealino:s? Enouo’h has been said to show the immorality of casting lots in such a case.

We have taken, then, two extreme instances; one where the propriety and lawfulness are obvious, the other where the unlawfulness and profanity are equally clear. But then, between these two extremes there may range a vast variety of cases more or less clear as they are nearer to the one or other of the extremes, or approach to some middle line or limit between them. A father, for instance, in dividing some little gifts or presents among his children, to avoid jealousies or dissatisfaction, may have recourse to the casting of lots. They (hraiu cuts. If this is right, it is clearly not so obviously right as the case of a general drafting by lot the parties to whom in the breach a death of violence is all but certain. Or again, two young people, engaged in an exercise of lawful recreation, may cast lots to determine who shall begin. If this is wrong, it is clearly very far from being so obviously wrong as an appeal to the lot in a matter of gambling. Is the one, then, really right, and is the other really wrong? Where is the limit between the right and the wrong? Where is the line that separates the lawful from the unlawful use?

Now this is precisely the question which we think no intelligent religious teacher will undertake to answer; and that simply because the Bible itself does not answer it. The Bible does not deal with God’s people in the way of answering in set terms every question of conscience that may arise. And if God himself does not in set terms answer every such question, it would surely be wrong in us to attempt to do so. We need not say that if every case and question of conscience which might arise along the whole course of time, and amidst the countless multitudes of the Church in all climes and ages, had been, in so many words, provided for and answered in a revelation from heaven, the sacred book would have reached dimensions of such enormous magnitude as would have rendered it perfectly useless. “I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should have been written” (John xxi. 25). But apart from that consideration. While God trains His children under certain clearly-enough announced commandments, and has given us His moral law in its various precepts as the rule of our duty, He has not placed us under an unbending martial drill, under a miserable martinetlike subjection to incessant, and express, and verbal instructions, leaving no room for His free Spirit to exercise our consciences in freedom, or to guide us in filial and manly enlargement. He deals with us, not under a servile arranoement that would incessantly, and in terms, dictate to us, giving us nothing higher and nobler to do than to creep along every moment exactly by the tight line drawn for us, and to square our conduct by dead mechanical rule. No. Our Lord gives us His holy law, which is the image of His own holy nature, and the expression of His own holy life; and which bears in it, therefore, the image and the impress of the freedom of His own free holy natures, both as God and man. He writes this law on our hearts; supreme love to God, unfeigned love to man; when He freely reconciles us, as friends and children, to the Father. Then He places us in His vineyard to do His work; — “Son, go work to-day in My vineyard.” That vineyard we find, not bordered, and hedged, and railed in, on the supposition of. our being infants under tutors and governors. We find in it no such series of instructions as would allocate the particular duty of each particular hour; and we find no such arrangement as would ring us oflT, by bell or token, from one duty to another, at the exact moment, leaving us nothing to do but mechanically to wait the summons and follow the continual leading strings. This is not God’s way of disciplining His people. He leaves them much more at freedom, and, in a sense, much more to their own discretion. Nor does He thereby diminish their responsibility. Very much the reverse.

He lays upon them a far greater responsibility. He gives them great general rules, and He calls upon them to apply these rules. Instead of pointing out each separate thing they are to do, in which case they might do it and be little disciplined in spirit by doing it, He calls upon them in terms like these, “Whatsoever ye do, whether in word or in deed, do all to the glory of God.” He asks them to keep alive on their spirits a sense of responsibility to Him; to walk under His eye, ready to do His will. He asks them to keep a single eye to His glory, and a heart submissive to His pleasure. And having freely adopted them to His love, and graciously renewed them by His Spirit, He places them amidst difficulties, no doubt, and trials and temptations, and in circumstances where their sincerity will be subjected to proof, and gives them call and opportunity to show of what spirit they are, by “doing all things in the name of Christ Jesus” (Col. iii. 17); or doing all things in a manner “worthy of their high calling from God” (Eph. iv. 1); by “doing all things to the glory of God” (1 Cor. X. 81); or doing all things “unto the use of edifying” (Eph. iv. 29).

Are you thus reconciled to God? Are you, like Abraham, God’s friend? And are there questions that arise, like this of casting lots, or in matters of apparent conformity to worldly custom, — cases of conscience and of casuistry? And have you to inquire, Is this lawful? may I take the step that is recommended to me? does my Christianity require me, in this or that other matter, to act differently from the multitude around me? And have you difficulty in settling a variety of points connected with your actual daily doings in the world? Expect not an exact, minute, verbal statement, in every case, of what you ought to do. Such statement is impossible; and, were it possible, it is not desirable. And beware of getting fretted into a regret that you have not more definite and exact instruction. Look rather to the spirit that dwelleth in you. Are you of the same mind that was in Jesus? How, think you, would Jesus have acted in the case supposed? Are you willing to decide by that test? Bring into mind the great principle, “Whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” How does the proposed line of conduct appear when that rule of duty is applied to it? Can you take this proposed step, and yet glorify God? Rather, can you take this proposed step, and thereby glorify God? Will it stand side by side with a reanimated fear of the Lord? Will it consist with the spirit of prayer? Can you engage in it, and your fellowship with God not be interrupted? Let no man say that solemn rules like these, applied to our current and continual conduct, would mar the happy social enjoyments of life, and the innocent recreations of buoyant youth or of fatigued manhood unbending from weary care. It is not so. God hath made us for mutual society; He hath made us so that continual strain on body or mind without recreation is destructive to our health and usefulness. No enlightened conscience will see any inconsistency between healthful and happy recreation, on the one hand, and glorifying God, on the other. These very recreations, and whatsoever He doeth, the enlarged and free-hearted believer can do — to the glory of God. Only let this principle really rule, — “How may I best and to the utmost degree glorify God?” — and all narrow, creeping, bondage-ridden questions, and all symptoms of a timid, hampered, unmanly, faltering, unfree walk with God, will disappear. And without a free, holy, cordial, open, ingenuous walk with God, all minute and accurate and verbal and mechanical rules might most mechanically and accurately and minutely be observed, but the soul of man be not any more trained to the exalted dignity of a free companionship and unfettered friendship with Heaven.