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"Gradual renewal and recovery": A Hackney Phalanx sermon for Rogation Sunday

From A Course of Sermons, for the Lord's Day throughout the Year, Volume I (1817) by Joseph Holden Pott - associated with the Hackney Phalanx - extracts from a sermon for Rogation Sunday, on the opening words of the Gospel of the day, "Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you".  

Pott offers a wonderful description of how prayer reflects the truth that grace does not destroy nature, for prayer is a means "of gradual renewal and recovery":

At all times the needs of men which have been remedied by the counsels of the Lord, and supplied with a rich abundance by the dispensations of his grace, must receive their succour in a way consistent with a state of gradual renewal and recovery; and to that state the exercise of prayer is more especially adapted. He who moves but by steps and stages, and has need of vigilance and caution at every step, and who must measure every stage with some sad reflection upon that which falls out by the way to remind him of his own infirmity, how shall he not take up the first advances of each successive portion of his course, and close also the journey of each day with prayer? 

Prayer likewise demonstrates that, in the Christian life, all is grace:

Prayer is the comrade and associate of the Christian graces, for they also have one language; they join in one acknowledgment that their strength and their supplies are from above; and to that source from which the light breaks, the eye turns naturally, and the heart is lifted. In looking thus upon the progressive course, which is that which human life presents to us, and that also to which the Christian life is evermore adapted, we must find again that the use of prayer is applicable to all times, and is requisite and per at all seasons. How needful is it that the first state of the Christian growth should be fenced and protected by these guards.

Finally, in true Old High fashion, Pott counsels how the ordinary practice and discipline of prayer contrasts with an Enthusiast's "scrupulous and narrow misconceits, or wild and fanciful exaggerations":

But above all, prayer is that exercise of the mind and spirit which will render every profitable Occupation or pursuit both safe and prosperous. It is this which strengthens every faculty whilst it seeks strength from above. It is this which refines and regulates the faulty tendencies of passion, in a weak disordered nature. It is this which fixes the attentions and desires on noble objects. It is this which furnishes the Christian either for the day of travel or the season of encounter. By such means will the truth of that word of our Lord be understood, who declared that he came not to lay an heavy yoke of base and trifling superstition on the necks of men, but to endow them with a generous and manly freedom, which can weigh things according to their real worth, and pursue the good, and shun the evil, without scrupulous and narrow misconceits, or wild and fanciful exaggerations.

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