Old Paths In Portrait

An Act Of Deprecation

“Look down, O Lord our God,

from Thy lofty dwelling-place, and from the

Throne of Thy Glory.

Thou, Who dwellest on high, and beholdest the humble,

Look down upon us, and destroy us not;

Yea, rather deliver us from evil.

From all evil and misfortune, deliver us.

As of old time Thou disdst deliver our fathers, deliver us.

By whatsoever is dear to Thee, or beloved

by Thee, deliver us.

In all our straits, deliver us.

From the evils of the future state,

From Thine anger,

But yet more from Thy ceasing to be angry,

from everlasting damnation,

from all the terrors of the life to come,

from the wrathful countenance of the Judge,

from being placed on the left hand,

from the hearing of that dreadful and terrible voice,

DEPART FROM ME,

from being cast into outer darkness, from eternal chains

under darkness,

from the lake of fire and brimstone, where the smoke of

their torments goeth up,

forever and ever, deliver us.

Spare us, O Lord, have mercy upon us.

Deliver us; and let us never be confounded.

From spiritual evils;

from blindness and hardness of heart,

which leads to impenitence;

from softness and from hardness of forehead,

from a seared conscience, and ceasing from penitence after sin,

from a reprobate mind,

from the contempt of Thy threatenings,

from the sin unto death,

from the sin against the Holy Ghost,

have mercy upon us and deliver us, O Lord!

That I be not parched among the tares and stubble,

nor grieve among those that are on the left hand,

not withered by the tempest,

nor lament in the fire that is never quenched,

nor be condemned in the flames,

nor suffer shame in Gehanna,

nor waste away among the overflowings of Belial,

nor weep in chains of darkness,

nor gnash the teeth in the banishment of the reprobate;

being miserable, thrice miserable,

with the fiends in darkness, downward

in the abyss, which even Satan dreadeth

and abhorreth.

[On the one hand]

Is the vision of God:

[on the other]

the hiding of His face.”

-Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626) from The Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes