cleanliness among the people, we should not have a word here to say against it; but if it is made an indispensable condition of acceptable prayer, we naturally remember the word of God to the prophet Samuel, which is thus recorded in 1 Sam. xvi. 7: 'For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.' But after such a declaration, every thoughtful man may see that lustrations before prayer can at best have a mere symbolical meaning, in no way affecting the prayer itself, or its acceptability to God. It is not even expressly stated that ablutions before prayer were observed by the Jews, although we know that eternal and typical purifications of this kind were common amongst them. (See Num. xix; Lev. xv; Mark vii. 1-4.) Certain it is that Jesus Christ never prescribed any such to his followers as a condition of true prayer; and in what light He would regard such an injunction may be gathered from Matt. xxiii. 25-6: 'Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye cleanse the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full from extortion and excess. Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the cup and of the platter, that the outside thereof may become clean also.' (See also Mark vii. 6-23.) And it is therefore plain that the washing of hands and feet can add nothing to the efficiency of prayer which is necessarily a mental and spiritual exercise: the

Qur'an by insisting upon lustrations before prayer, enjoins a needless outward observance no way helpful to real devotion. It is also worth remembering, that while for the bare-footed Arabs, and other inhabitants of hot countries, it is an easy and pleasant affair to wash their arms and feet frequently during the day, the command would prove exceedingly irksome to more civilized people accustomed to wear shoes and stockings; and as to the inhabitants of northern latitudes, where the snow never melts, and the people are thickly clad from head to foot to keep them from freezing, it would become a hardship endangering health and life, to be obliged partially to undress and wash their hands and feet five times a day, either with water or with sand. We see, then, the objection to these lustrations is two-fold: their purely physical character, after the gospel had already declared that God requires spiritual worship, and their striking want of adaptation to countries and climates differing from Arabia.

The cleaning of the place of prayer is doubtless very proper, like cleanliness in general, and due care for consecrated things; but it can have no more to do with the prayer itself than the washing of the body; and how it should depend upon an external act of this kind must be incomprehensible to any one who remembers that God is a Spirit, and 'dwelleth not in temples made with hands'. Can any one doubt that the earnest prayers of persecuted believers