ERRORS IN PRAYER.. 341 from the guilt and punishment of sin. But if you stop here, your devotion is most imperfect. If you do not also pray to be delivered from its power and domi- nion over your heart and life, you do not go much farther than the heathens of old. ',hey seem to. have had a strong feeling of guilt, by' their fond desire of expiating it. by their sacrifices and lustrations. Of their terror of its punishment we have many intimations .in their fables ; fok what is fable to us, was probably to them obscure history, or wild tradition worked up into an absurd but amusing mytho- logy. The eternity of their punishments is strongly implied in the insatiable thirst and ungratified appetitess of Tantalus ; his misery augmented by that flowing water and those tempting fruits which hung in his sight and mocked his appe- tites, not unlike the anguish of Dives, which was rendered more intolerable by beholding the blessedness of thoseon the other side of the great gulf. The pro 3
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