Page:Heaven Revealed.djvu/328

 gaged in as a regular occupation? Would the growth of charity or the welfare and happiness of society be thereby promoted? And whatever does not tend to this end, cannot be really useful. God does not desire our prayers or praises on his own account. He desires them solely for our good. He knows them to be a means of opening our souls to the influx of his love and wisdom, and of helping us to obey more implicitly the precepts which require us to love and do good to our neighbor.

And does any one believe that a person's own happiness or growth in the heavenly graces, would be promoted by making oral prayer and psalm-singing the business of his life? Let the best man living devote himself steadily and exclusively to this for a single week, and the languor, listlessness and mental torpor thereby induced before the close of this brief period, would seem to him anything but heavenly delight. They would convince him that he was doing violence to his better nature—sinning against the laws of his spiritual being.

Acts of formal worship may be (we are told, are) occasionally engaged in by the angels; and these exercises are, in heaven as on earth, a means of spiritual improvement. But they cannot be the regular employment there, unless man's spiritual constitution is totally changed in the other world—a presumption not warranted by reason or Scripture. For man has many faculties and wants besides those which find their gratification in acts of formal worship. Each of these faculties has a definite mode of action, seeks its gratification