Page:Latin prayers not fit for Irishmen.pdf/4

 read to an Irish or English congregation. It is surely an extraordinary thing, when a congregation assembles to join in the public worship of Almighty God to have a Priest reading to them such prayers as not one of them can understand. And we need not be surprised to find St. Paul forbidding prayers in an unknown tongue. In the 14th chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, he tells them, that some of them, who possessed the miraculous power of speaking in a great many different languages, used to do so, when there was no one present who was able to understand them; and that the gift of prophesying, or public preaching, was a more desirable and edifying one. The several reasons he gives to prove all he said, are so many unanswerable arguments against the use of Latin prayers in this country.

Firsts, he says, that public worship should be so odered as to edify the church. " He that speaketh in an unknown tongue, edifieth himself; but he that prophesieth, edifieth the church. I would that ye all speak with tongues;