Prayer and Thanksgiving

—I copy the following article from the Courier newspaper of the 2d inst.—”The following Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving for the repeated successes obtained over the French army in Spain by the Allied Forces, and especially for the signal victory of the 21st June,¹⁰⁸ was read yesterday in all churches and chapels, both at morning and evening service:— / ‘O Lord God of Hosts, who chiefly declarest thy Almighty power, by protecting the oppressed, and smiting to the ground the proud oppressor, and who, in the defence of injured nations, teachest thy servants to war, and girdest them with strength for battle, we yield thee praise and thanksgiving for the continued successes in Spain, with which Thou hast been pleased to crown the conduct of our General, and the valour of our soldiers: but more especially for the signal and decisive victory which, under the same Commander, Thou hast recently vouchsafed to the Allied Armies in the battle of Vittoria. Continue, we pray thee, thy blessing upon the counsels of our General; maintain and support the courage and strength of the allied armies; sanctify the cause in which they are united; and as it hath pleased Thee to put back, with confusion of face, the proud invader of Spain and Portugal, let the allied armies and allied kingdoms prostrate themselves with one consent before Thee, and acknowledge with humility of heart the victory to be Thine. These prayers and thanksgivings we humbly offer to thy Divine Majesty, in the name and through the mediation of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.— Amen.’”—I do not know whether this be really authentic, and I therefore give it as an article that I have found in the newspapers.—The sentiment, or rather the principal sentiment which it contains, is this: That God chiefly (that is to say, I suppose, in most cases) gives the victory to those who are fighting against oppressors.—There is one of our church-prayers, which, addressing itself to God, begins thus,—”Almighty God, the giver of ALL victory.” Now, there seems here, in this new prayer, to be a little modification of the prayer of the church; for in the new prayer, God is said chiefly to show his power by protecting the oppressed, and smiting to the ground the proud oppressor.—This is not, indeed, a contradiction of the sentiment used in the church-prayer, because the latter, in saying that God is the giver of all victory, does not imply any denial of the fact, that victory, in most cases, is on the side of those who are fighting for the oppressed.—I take it, therefore, for granted, that God is the giver of all victory; and, in this sentiment, His / Royal Highness the Prince Regent seems to concur, when he says, in his last speech to the Parliament, that, in the recent successes, he acknowledges with devout gratitude, the hand of Divine Providence. And when he says, in his letter to Lord Wellington, that he knows no language in the world which is worthy of being employed to express the praise due to the conduct of that Lord; that it is beyond all human praise, and that he feels that he has nothing left to say, but devoutly to offer up his prayers……..I stop here to notice a small grammatical error, which, in the fervency of the moment, appears to have escaped attention. The rules of grammar would have required His Royal Highness to say, that he had nothing left to DO but devoutly to offer up his prayers, &c. and not, that he had nothing else to SAY. While I am about it, I may as well notice another little error of the same kind towards the bottom of the same letter, where His Royal Highness states his WISHES, in the plural number.* If the reader looks at the last sentence of the letter, he will clearly perceive that there is but one wish, though many things are wished for.—I mention these trifles, in order to shew, that accuracy, on such occasions, ought not to be neglected; but, perhaps, the advisers of His Royal Highness knowing of no language in the world worthy of expressing their Royal Master’s feelings upon this occasion, thought it right to treat our own poor mother tongue without any sort of ceremony¹⁰⁹……..But to return to our subject; these prayers agree that God is the giver of victory, and that he chiefly gives it to those who are fighting against oppressors.—Now, I could have wished, that those who composed the last prayer / had gone a little further, and assigned some cause for the numerous, signal, and most terrible victories of our enemy. It will not, I am sure, be denied, that he has gained more victories than we have, and that he has smitten to the ground an infinitely greater number of human beings, than we have, and indeed, than all the armies in Europe put together have, since he began his career as a General. My fear, therefore, is, that there may be some persons who may possibly confound his victories with ours, and suppose that he also has been fighting, in most cases, for the protection of the oppressed.¹¹⁰ He and the generals under him have frequently been made the instruments of putting back invaders with confusion of face. I will not take up the time of the reader with an enumeration of the long list of invaders which he and his generals have put back, and that, too, with most terrible confusion of face. The fact is too notorious to be dwelt upon in detail; and, therefore, I could have wished, for the insertion of some passage in this prayer and thanksgiving, calculated to make people see clearly the distinction between our victories and the victories of Napoleon, lest they should be apt to believe that God was on his side, and approved of his conduct, which men of information must know to be utterly impossible, seeing that he has so long been the scourge of the human race.¹¹¹—This appears to me to have been the more necessary, as we daily read in our newspapers of prayers and thanksgiving in the churches of France for victories gained by him! Yes, he has the impudence to pretend that the Almighty sets him on, and gives him success, and his prostituted knaves of priests, with a crowd of canting wretches at their heels, have the base hypocrisy to inculcate the same sentiments from their pulpits, with their hands clasped together, and their eyes turned up towards the clouds!—This being the case, and accounts of these scandalous mockeries being frequently published in our own newspapers, I could have wished, I say, for the introduction of some sentence, shewing the difference between victories gained by different armies. It can easily be conceived, that Napoleon is merely permitted by Divine Providence to gain victories for the purpose of scourging a wicked world; just as the devil is permitted to perform all his various functions. Napoleon may be looked upon in somewhat the same light as the devil; and we are no more to arraign the / justice and wisdom of Providence for permitting the former to triumph, than we are to arraign them on account of the permission of the latter. For reasons inscrutable to us, the devil is suffered to be continually roaming up and down, tempting poor weak mortals to their everlasting destruction; tempting them to do such things as shall subject them to be kept alive amidst flames of fire for millions and millions of ages; or, in the emphatical and beautiful language of the Scripture, he is suffered to go up and down, like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. This being the case, as we know it is, and being consistent with the justice and wisdom of Divine Providence, which we have no right to call in question, is it not reasonable to suppose that Napoleon is suffered to gain victories upon somewhat the same principle, or, perhaps, (for who can tell) for the purpose of bringing nations into a state of humility; to humble them into a sense of their own weakness; to make them flee to heaven for protection; to make them, in short, penitent and godly, and thus to take them out of the power of Satan?—This, it appears to me, is the light in which we must necessarily, in a religious view of the matter, look upon Napoleon. That we ought to regard him as a sort of an auxiliary to Satan in his intention and actions, and, at the same time, as an instrument in the hands of Divine Providence for the chastening of the offending nations of Europe.—In this way, I am quite satisfied, every Englishman who reflects upon the subject, must see the thing; but, the misfortune is, that there are many who do not reflect; and, therefore, I could have wished that something had been introduced (if it had only been in the way of parenthesis) calculated to give rise to that train of reflection into which I have here been led, and which I fervently hope may, in some small degree, contribute towards a general right way of thinking upon this subject.