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PRAYER 



TIJEO^Y AND A PACT. 






REV. D^WFAUNCE, D. D. - 



WiM 



AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY, 

ISO NASSAU STREET NEW YORK. 



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TO THE MEMORY OF 



MARY P. FAUNCE, 



WITH WHOM I HAVE PRAYED 



AND SHALL PRAISJ2. 



\ 



This Essay on "Prayer as a Theory and a 
Fact" received the prize of five hundred dollars 
awarded by the Trustees of Dartmouth College, 
as provided by the will of Hon. Richard Fletcher. 
The Committee of award were Rev. Smith Baker, 
D. D., of Minneapolis, Minn., Rev. Alexander 
Blackburn, D. D., and Rev. Charles H. Willcox 
of Lowell, Mass. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

The Possibility of Prayer as Heard and Answered, 7 

4 

(a.) The two beings involved. 

(b.) The intellectual relation of the two. 

(c.) The similar intellectual work. 

CHAPTER II. 

The Probability of Prayer as Heard and Answered, 22 

(a.; The two beings, God and man, are both moral 

beings, 
(b.) They are both at work on the moral plane. 

CHAPTER III. 

The Law of Personality in its Bearing on Prayer, . 39 

(a.) Personality in God. 
(b.) Personality in man. 
(c.) The law calls for prayer and secures answer. 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Factor of.Sin as Affecting Prayer, . . .51 

(a.) It does not destroy the natural need, 
(b.) It makes it the more necessary, 
(c.) Through God's special mercy, it does not make the 
answer less probable. 



4 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER V. 

PAGE 

The Kingdom of God as Related to Prayer, . . 68 

(a.) It is originally arranged for prayer and its answers, 
(b.) The kingdom in the human soul, 
(c.) The kingdom in its progress in the world, 
(d.) Both these involve the natural and the supernatural, 
(e.) At every point, the work is conditioned on prayer 
heard and answered. 

CHAPTER VI. 

Prayer as Related to Natural Law, . . . 106 

(a.) Theory of original foresight and arrangement, 
(b.) Theory of a law of miracles, 
(c.) Theory of personal will. 

CHAPTER VII. 
Negative Answers to Prayer are Actual Answers, . 120 

(a.) Such answers required when the petition is out of 

line with the dispensation, 
(b.) The divine compassion secures denial when not in 

accord with divine will, 
(c.) Deferred answer is not denied petition. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

The Reactions of Sin as they Induce Prayer, . . 140 

(a.) The reactions of error, 
(b.) The reactions of ages, 
(c.) The reactions of souls. 

CHAPTER IX. 

The Circular Motion of Prayer, , . . . 157 

(a.) It descends from God. 

(b.) It takes in man's voluntary petitions on its way. 
(c.) It rises again to God ; since its Inspirer and its 
Answerer are one. 



CONTENTS. 5 

CHAPTER X. 

PACK 

The Lord's Prayer as our Model, • • . .171 

(a.) In its arrangement, 

(b.) In its petitions, 

(c.) In its scope, 

(d.) In its spirit. 

CHAPTER XI. 

Supposed Limitations of Prayer 186 

(a.) From man's feebleness, 
(b.) From God's greatness. 

CHAPTER XII. 

Prayer in its Prophecy, 201 

(a.) Its increasing volume. 

(b.) Its increasing purity. 

(c.) Its natural result. 

(d.) The ultimate man a praying man. 

(e.) The ultimate age a praying age. 



PRAYER 



AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 



CHAPTER L 

THE POSSIBILITY OF PRAYER, 

Two gentlemen were strolling leisurely by a 
lighted chapel into which people were passing, 
evidently for their weekly prayer-service. Nod- 
ding toward the open door, one of them said to 
the other, " Do you believe in this matter of 
prayer?" "Yes," was the somewhat reluctant 
answer, " I suppose I do, in a certain way. I 
think it a good thing for those who really believe 
in it. But," he continued, " whether there is any 
one at the other end of the line who does act- 
ually listen and respond, is a thing about which 
I am not certain." " It seems to me," replied the 
first speaker, " that your position is that of a man 
who believes in the prayer but not in the answer." 



THE POSSIBILITY OF PRAYER. 9 

closely examined and freed of all misconception, 
are among the most potent proofs of its efficacy; 
that its moods and methods befit men in all the 
variety of their human experience on earth ; and 
that it is a factor in producing character of such 
a kind that the prayers of earth, in those thus 
wrought upon, will antedate the praises of heaven. 

The general order just outlined will be fol- 
lowed in this discussion. 

If there were only one being in the universe, and 
that one being knew, or even believed, that there 
was no other, there could be no prayer. The 
one being might shout in joy or howl in anguish, 
but that would not be request or petition. He 
might try in his frenzy to impose on himself, and 
to act as if there were another to hear and re- 
spond, waking thereby the world's echoes. He 
might set himself to use all fit forms of supplica- 
tion or of entreaty, under the plea of doing him- 
self good. But all such expressions of pain or 
passion would come to nothing in the end. They 
would only react for his own harm, for he 
would know that he was attempting an imposi- 
tion on himself, and his words would falter and 
freeze on his lips. Hume says, and very justly, 
"We can make use of no expression or even 
thought in prayers or entreaties which does not 
imply that these prayers have an influence." And 



IO PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

we are told in the Scriptures, " He that cometh 
to God must believe that He is, and that He is 
the rewarder of them that diligently seek him." 

The two beings, God and man, involved in this 
act of prayer, are, personally, minds or spirits. 

In his book entitled " Primitive Culture," Ed- 
ward B. Tylor gives the fit name of animism to 
the universal conviction that mind is distinct from 
matter. Assembling a vast mass of evidence in 
proof of his position, he says, "We must take 
our basis of inquiry in observation rather than in 
speculation ; and we have to admit that the belief 
in spiritual beings appears among all low races 
with whom we have a thoroughly intimate ac- 
quaintance." Such a universal conviction among 
such inferior races has been called "the knowl- 
edge of God reduced to its lowest terms." But 
among the highest races there is also an intense 
conviction that another Spirit than ourselves ex- 
ists. Lift the conception to its highest terms, 
and it gives us God.* 

* In Timbuctoo, the natives write their prayers on the section 
of a tree, carrying it to a spring of water which will wash it off, 
and so send the prayer away. Similarly, the Thibetan pastes his 
prayer on a revolving cylinder and sets it in the nearest waterfall, 
that its face may be ever toward God. The Chinese burn gilded 
strips of paper and consult the ashes, as the Romans the entrails 
of the victims of the altar. Even the lower class of the Moham- 
medans, while holding to one supreme God, believe in inferior 
deities, and so cast their written prayers upon the bosom of their 



THE POSSIBILITY OF PRAYER. II 

Is this universal affirmation false or is it true? 

If it be not true, or, indeed, if there be any 
serious doubt about its truth, the discussion must 
close here at the outset. For prayer is going to 
be vastly more than the bare recognition of a dis- 
tant fact, like that of the solar spectrum in the 
far-away stars. A belief that God is, is funda- 
mental. His existence must not be a speculation 
to us, nor an indistinct inference. He is not a 
universally diffused ether, or a shapeless phan- 
tom, or an impersonality, or a force, or an es- 
sence, but the actual personal God, if we are go- 
ing to pray to Him and get from Him an answer. 

No less must the fact be established for our- 
selves that we are actual persons. The validity 
of the evidence for man as an individual must be 
undisputed. Happily, here doubt is impossible. 
Forlthe instant question, when man says that he 
doubts, is this, " What is it that doubts, and who 



sacred river, holding that the god of the waters is great enough 
to ward off the approach of disease. 

And over against these lowest populations it would be easy to 
cite the most eminent men, some of them not Christian believers, 
who own a God. " I have lived," said Benjamin Franklin, in the; 
convention for forming a Constitution, ** for a long time, and the 
longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this trflth, that 
God governs the affairs of man. I therefore beg leave to move 
that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of heaven on our 
deliberations be held in this assembly every morning before we 
proceed to business." 



12 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

is it that asks the question ? " "I think, therefore 
I am " is an argument which thousands feel and 
rest upon with absolute certainty, who could not 
put their conviction into logical statement. 

" The baby, new to earth and sky, 
What time his tender palm is pressed 
Against the circle of the breast, 
Has never thought that " this is I." 
But as he grows, he gathers much, 
And learns the use of " I " and " me," 
And finds ' ' I am not what I see, 
I'm other than the things I touch." 
So rounds he to a separate mind, 
From whence clear memory may begin, 
As through the frame that binds him in 
His isolation grows defined." 

When plain men wish to express the utmost 
degree of conviction, they say, " I am as certain 
of that thing as that I exist." 

All logical minds must have similar powers. 
Exceedingly unlike may be the degree, but the 
powers must be enough alike to work on the 
same logical plane. So far as we can under- 
stand, the highest mode of intelligence is con- 
nected with reasoning powers. The reasonable 
is of higher grade than the instinctive. All 
minds made up so as to use reason, must be simi- 
lar in make and in working. They must work on 
the plane of " the true and the false." All things 
in the intellectual sphere are measured by that 
one plumb-line. In this realm of the logical, the 



THE POSSIBILITY OF PRAYER. 1 3 

realm measured by this one rule of " the true and 
the false," we do our work, and the highest 
worker in this realm we call God. Dropping, 
here and now, that we may the better take them 
up by-and-by, all those convictions usually termed 
" moral " and "spiritual," holding now to the 
word spiritual only in its merely intellectual sense, 
we may just glance a moment or two, less to in- 
crease our confidence and more to realize our im- 
pression, at the way in which we come to be 
obliged, in this logical realm, to believe in our 
God. 

There is a quick, sharp argument that satisfies 
most men. It is this. A designer will manifest 
design in his work. Evidences of designing are 
everywhere about us, in earth, in air, in sky ; are 
seen equally in things, and in the law of them ; 
are obvious in forces, and in the way they are 
made to work; in tendencies, and the ends to- 
ward which they are developing ; in these minds 
so made up as to refer in every case a design to 
a designing mind, a plan to a planning mind, a 
universal plan of things to a universally existing 
and planning mind — and this mind is God. The 
statement of the proposition is, to many persons, 
the best proof, for it is to them nearly or quite 
self-evident. 

It has indeed been said in reply that the argu- 



14 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

ment from design proves a very grand and super- 
natural being, who, since he is the highest being 
we can know, deserves our recognition, reverence, 
and worship. He is Creator, Sustainer, Sover- 
eign Ruler over all we know. But it is urged that 
he need not be the Absolute God ; that the argu- 
ment goes very far but does not fully and, at the 
last point, actually reach so far up as to prove the 
One Ever-living and Eternal God. Why not, say 
some, own this designer, architect, worker, just a 
little short of the Sovereign God ? Few will see 
the difference ; yet some would claim that there 
might be a flaw in some far-up link of the chain. 
Suppose we admit it. Then we have this to say, 
that when we have gone up as far as our reason 
can go, there is a round out of sight, a final 
round of our ladder not quite discernible; but 
that with every step in our climbing, so far from 
the prize eluding us, we have grown in the con- 
viction that God is there, that in that direction 
lies the infinite trend of things and the final goal 
of thought. Indeed, for some minds this trend of 
things is the best possible proof of God. The 
line of approach is better than any supposed 
finite culmination. 

But the two ways of reaching the same convic- 
tion are not in themselves really antagonistic. 
They are methods suited to unlike minds. The 



THE POSSIBILITY OF TRAYER. 1.5 

broad way of our human reason is wide enough 
to admit upon it many paths, some of which run 
nearer, it may be, to the middle of the course than 
others, but all of which are within the happy 
limiting lines that bound the truth. There are 
minds so constituted that a grand trend is more 
convincing than the sight of the ultimate goal. 
Inclosed in the circular box men call a compass 
is a delicate needle, which, however you dis- 
turb it, trembles back to its pole. And it does 
this because all over the earth run unseen mag- 
netic currents converging toward an unseen mag- 
netic centre far away in the North. And men 
sail on every ocean of the world, and measure 
their land on every continent of the round globe, 
by that little needle that follows the trend of 
those magnetic currents toward the pole. But, 
then, no mortal foot ever touched that pole, no 
mortal eye ever saw it. It is, the world over, only 
a trend. And yet on that trend rests all the sci- 
ence of navigation and all the science of mensur- 
ation. And not only the earth beneath, but the 
wide heavens are marked out and mapped off in 
lines of gigantic boundary by that steady trend 
toward a pole that no man has ever seen or 
touched. The trend toward God in all forms of 
human thought is just as distinct. And he is as 
unreasonable who would destroy all the fair fab- 



1 6 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

ric of modern sciences, celestial and terrestrial, 
because no human foot has as yet touched that 
pole, as he who denies the culminating point of 
all religious trend because his reason cannot put 
its logical finger on his God. 

Paley's argument for design, founded on the 
watch supposed to be discovered on a heath, and 
by the finder to be accounted for, has served its 
purpose in the form in which he gave it. Men 
then were considering the facts simply and only, 
and from these alone Paley's inference was 
strictly logical. The watch had a maker. But 
now that both facts and the law of them are mat- 
ters for consideration, the inference of a design- 
ing mind, so far from being weakened, is every 
way broadened and strengthened. The design 
runs back as far as the law is seen to exist. The 
further the line of development, and the wider 
the range of the laws under which that develop- 
ment is seen to have taken place, the larger is the 
design, the greater the wisdom and power that 
are manifested, and the stronger the argument 
for a God. Instead of the one fact, you have 
now to consider the thousand previous facts that 
led up to it, and the longer the line of the devel- 
opment, the more remarkable becomes the de- 
sign of the designing mind. For law is only 
method, in accordance with which fact comes 



THE POSSIBILITY OF PRAYER. \J 

into notice. The larger the play of the forces, 
and the more complex their working, the more 
the need of control, lest they destroy the devel- 
opment. 

Says another, " Since we find that these forces 
can be controlled by us within certain limits, the 
most reasonable conclusion seems to be that they 
(these laws) are connected with another Will, ' in 
whom is no variableness,' and who is ' the same 
yesterday, to-day, and forever.' " 

When Mansel argued that the Infinite One 
must be the Unknowable One, and yet strove 
vainly to escape from the consequence of his re- 
morseless logic, it only needed that some one 
should point out the wide difference between 
comprehending God and apprehending him. On 
the shore of the ocean one may feel the salt sea 
breeze as it fans his • cheek, and may taste the 
spray that loads the air, and may mark the white- 
winged ships, flying the flags of all nationalities, 
and in this way may apprehend clearly and cer- 
tainly the fact that the vast body of water on 
which he is looking is the ocean, even though 
he knows that his vision cannot comprehend its 
breath, nor take in the sight of the continents 
beyond its rolling waste of waves. 

And those who claim to have rational intuition 
of God are not to be overlooked, either in the 



1 



1 8 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

goodly number of them or the intellectual force 
they carry. It is claimed that the idea of God 
is involved in the very process of our human 
thinking; that every thought is an inquiry for a 
cause, and so comprehends in it the final idea cf 
a First or a Chief Cause ; that all right thinking 
involves a Standard Thinker; that God is in- 
volved in all thought, just as is self-hood ; that 
God is the " Alter Ego," as the thinker is himself 
the " Ego." Thus, when we are born, we are 
ushered into a scheme of things already existing, 
where one finds that the great distinction be- 
tween the u true and the false " is not established 
by us, but is a perpetual existence — made so by 
the Eternal Mind. So that it becomes as true 
of mind as of body, that in God " we live and 
move and have our being." And thus we find 
the intellectual plane on which we meet God and 
" can think over his thoughts." And meeting on 
this plane, we see the possibility of two beings 
like God and man so entering into a relation 
with each other that the one can give answer to 
the other's prayer. 

And it has also been urged that the human 
mind is constituted in such a way as to be re- 
ceptive to the idea of the One Living and True 
God ; that we are so made up intellectually as to 
be in waiting for the idea; that the idea finds an- 



THE POSSIBILITY OF PRAYER. 1 9 

ticipations and preparations for it in our nature ; 
that the suggestion of it, from whatsoever source, 
finds a readiness of response that amounts to an 
affinity for it ; that, whether it rises out of the 
soul within, born of the lower consciousness, or 
starts out of our emotional nature to be after- 
ward received and justified by the intellect, it is 
always presented to the mind; that everywhere 
man is constitutionally fitted to know God, and 
so by every avenue of his being, mental and moral, 
he is made up to apprehend the fact that lies at 
the basis of all facts, that God is. 

To still others, the genesis of the idea is in the 
correlative demands of the nature alike of God 
and of man. God is, as they say, the comple- 
ment truth to man's being. God has need of 
some such being to bless and love, a being with 
whose welfare he can charge himself, and whose 
prayer he can hear ; a being outranking angels, 
with powers for understanding in some degree 
his works, and his providence, and his Word. So 
that, " Let us make man," is the expression of a 
yearning for a being of high moral grade, " made 
in the image of God." And in turn man, in his 
dependence, needs God's help and sustenance; 
and in his littleness, needs God's greatness. Man 
is made to cling and clasp, as the vine its oak. 
He is never centred in self, but is to be centred 



20 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

in God. God is the cap-stone of man's thought, 
as well as the supply for the yearning of man's 
heart. As the earth needs a sun and was made 
for it, so the sun needs an earth to shine upon. 
The craving for God in our human nature must 
have been put there by him who is at once its 
source and its supply. And all this proves, at 
least, the possibility of prayer. Not now to urge 
more than this, it must be granted that there is 
room for the belief. It is clearly in the range of 
possible things that the two beings should inter- 
change thought and care, man bringing his word 
of prayer, and God his word of revelation. There 
is enough in these indications to induce hope 
that it may be so. The idea of God, and of such 
a God, is strong in some minds in this way of 
complementary supply for a craving that can find 
no other satisfaction. 

These various ways of seizing with the logical 
reason on this idea of God are by no means mu- 
tually exclusive of each other ; and they are so 
far from contradictory that they are the rather 
helpful. Their trend is in one direction. And it 
is to be expected that this universal idea of God 
will pervade all our faculties, and the whole na- 
ture of man be hospitable thereto. All these 
various ways of looking are in one direction. A 
man may stand at the foot of the Bunker Hill 



THE POSSIBILITY OF PRAYER. 21 

Monument, and look up its slant sides, putting by 
turns his eye to each. He seems to touch the sky 
with his vision. He does not actually do that. 
But the sky is that way. He is looking in that 
direction. He knows that somewhere, far above 
the monument, those lines in his eye reach an 
apex, and that any one of them, continued on, 
would strike the sky. To many minds, and they 
are among our surest mental workers, there are 
no such strong proofs, in any matter, as are these 
of trend, and direction, and convergence. The 
fact that various minds approach the idea from so 
many positions is reassuring. Such men feel that 
they are treading, when they go over all these 
various arguments, along the lines of the grand- 
est thought, and are walking safely. The best 
thinking must be ever " thinking over again the 
thoughts of God." These souls, in the complete- 
ness of their own satisfaction with the argument, 
might not be content with claiming a mere infer- 
ence as to the possibility of prayer. They would 
insist upon a stronger inference. But let us be 
modest in our claim at this point of the discus- 
sion. Let us claim only that even the sceptic 
must allow that there is a mighty trend toward 
the belief that it is possible for God to hear and 
answer prayer. 



22 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 



CHAPTER II. 
THE PROBABILITY OF PRAYER. 

We have seen which way lie the possibilities 
on this question of answered prayer. 

It is now to be urged that the immense proba- 
bilities run in the same direction. The argument 
has been along the line of the actual existence of 
the two beings involved in this exercise of prayer. 
God and man have been seen as related, since 
they are working, intellectually, on the same 
" plane of the true and the false," and are using 
similar though unequal powers, by which they 
can seek a common result. 

But these two beings are also workers on an- 
other plane — that of the spiritual life. 

It is to be noticed that both God and man are 
supernatural factors in securing results; and so 
they are both, by virtue of their rank of being, 
capable of working over and above, as well as in 
and through, those things which we call " nat- 
ural." For free actors have a certain power of 
personal force. They are capable of initiating 
action where it did not exist before. They 



THE PROBABILITY OF PRAYER. 23 

originate. They put into exercise a new force. 
They thrust in a new energy, which is outside of 
" nature" and in addition thereto ; it is the self- 
originating force of will. It is sometimes con- 
ceived of less as the exercise of a single faculty, 
and more as an act of the mind itself, using itself 
executively. And this kind of force is entirely 
unlike those powers with which physical objects 
are supposed to be equipped. In man, physical 
brain-force and mental will-power are parallel 
facts, and for that very reason are not identical. 
They exist together, and one is as is the other; 
and therefore the one is not the other. Says 
Tyndall, " We can trace the development of a 
nervous system (in man), and can correlate it 
with the parallel phenomena of sentient thought. 
Parallelism without, contact is implied ; but there 
is no fusion possible between the two classes of 
facts." So elsewhere Tyndall says, " Thought and 
sentiment are accompanied doubtless by move- 
ments in the molecules of the brain, but the mode 
of connection between the two is simply to us 
unthinkable. The connection between mind and 
matter is not necessary but empirical." In some 
way, we know not and need not to know how, this 
will-power touches the physical in man's body, 
and the touch proves them utterly unlike. Body 
and mind have not a quality in common. In the 



24 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

physical realm there is the " natura," and in the 
spiritual realm there is the "super-natura; " the 
two, in the case of man, are singularly conjoined, 
and as singularly separated. There is just enough 
of resemblance and relation between the facts 
and forces of the physical world and those of the 
spiritual world to warrant very careful and dis- 
criminating analogy. To confound the facts or 
laws of the two is to destroy both realms for us 
as objects of thought and inquiry. If Prof. Drum- 
mond, in his popular work, " Natural Law in the 
Spiritual World," is held to have proved the laws 
of the two realms to be analogous rather than 
identical, he will have done service to science by 
rendering it more intelligible to thousands of 
plain readers, and none the less service to religion 
by showing that its facts have both parallel and 
illustration in the physical world. 

It must be admitted that God, one of these free 
and supernatural factors, could have so arranged 
the original scheme of things as to provide for 
hearing and answering prayer. The contrary can 
be maintained only on some theory that denies 
the divine sovereignty. It has been alleged that 
existing arrangements show no place open for 
such things as answers to prayer. But does any 
man know all the existing arrangements ? To as- 
sume that God cottld not, because he has not, so 



THE PROBABILITY OF PRAYER. 2$ 

far as some men can see, arranged for answered 
prayer, is not only poor logic, but it is the as- 
sumption of omniscience. For if there be one 
fact or force unknown, one arrangement not un- 
derstood, one purpose of God not disclosed to 
this objector, then the one undiscovered force, 
the one unrevealed purpose, may be the very 
thing needed to answer all objections, and to show 
God abundantly able and willing to do this thing. 
It is hard to believe that a free being would have 
so imprisoned himself in his own universe that he 
should not be able to listen to the great cry that 
in all ages would come up into his ears from man, 
the creature made in his own image. Able to 
make the arrangement through his original plan 
of nature, in the absence of any conflicting rea- 
sons, is it not probable that, as our loving. God, 
he would have so ordered facts and forces that 
room would be secured for the answer of prayer ? 
And the probability increases when we con- 
sider the peculiar duality and yet unity of the 
known and visible universe which God has made. 
For the actual universe, so far as we can under- 
stand it, presents itself as having both a spiritual 
and a physical world, and the one the counter- 
part of the other. Thought is greater than thing, 
but thing is conformed to thought. Long ago 
Herschel pointed out the fact that the atoms of 



26 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

which the visible universe is composed have on 
them the stamp of being manufactured articles ; 
that the unseen is indicated by the seen and dom- 
inated thereby in purpose ; that the natural world 
must have a beginning in time and would have 
an ending ; and that, when it ends, it will leave 
behind it that unseen world whence came its idea 
and existence, and to the more central facts of 
which it is conformed, as vesture to the body it 
clothes. The natural is the illuminated dial plate, 
all the figures of which are visible to us only be- 
cause of the light behind it. So that the natural 
and the spiritual worlds are to be conceived of as 
constituting, when taken together, the one uni- 
verse of God. If the physical part of it be re- 
garded as placed under the fixed law of the nec- 
essary, the other part is to be deemed under the 
correlated law of the personal and the free. The 
material world has its objects with such qualities 
as hardness and softness, color and weight. But 
none the less has the spiritual world its objects, 
having qualities such as memory and will, love 
and hate. It is the realm where " the law of the 
right and the wrong " is just as really a law as is 
gravity in the physical world. This spiritual 
world has its facts of God and the soul, of con- 
science and commandment, of obedience and dis- 
obedience, of probation and immortality. We 



THE PROBABILITY OF PRAYER. 2J 

do not make the physical world with its objects 
and forces and laws. We are born into it in 
body. It was here before we came. We simply 
accept it as an arrangement of God appointed for 
our physical position. We take it as ready-made 
to our hand, and do our work amid these facts 
and forces which we find adapted to our mortal 
life. In the same way we are born into the men- 
tal realm. It is the realm of the knowable. It 
has its facts and laws. Its great law, fundamental 
as is gravity in the physical realm, is " the law of 
the true and the false.". We do not make a thing 
true or false. It is so, outside of ourselves or our 
decisions. We simply recognize it as such, and 
act upon it. We do not make the standard by 
which we judge things. We find this law of the 
true and the false in the world when we come ; 
we find it used by men, and we accept it. It is 
a system of things that we did not originate, but 
into the midst of which we are thrust to do our 
mental work in life. Exactly as it is with the 
physical and mental realms, so is it with the moral 
realm. We are thrust into the midst of its facts ; 
and they are as real as are those of the physical 
or the intellectual world. It has its own objects, 
its own forces, and its own laws. It is the realm 
where reigns " the law of the right and the wrong," 
exactly as in the intellectual sphere we have " the 



28 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

law of the true and the false." No man makes 
anything right or wrong. It is so in itself. It 
was so before we came, and would be so if we 
were out of the system. It is the world where, 
by virtue of our moral equipment of faculties, wc 
do our work, exactly as by our physical equip- 
ment of hand and foot and eye and ear we do 
our physical work. Physical material is, in our 
physical world, just what moral material is in our 
spiritual world. Physical facts are our environ- 
ment in body, as spiritual facts are the furnish- 
ing for our spiritual life. They are not it. It 
demands them. Intellectual truth for the sen- 
tient mind, and moral truth for the conscious 
soul, are the requirements of faculty, just as is 
light for the eye and an objective world for the 
sense of touch. 

As to the rank of these three realms, the phy- 
sical world, the intellectual world, and the moral 
world — it is to be noticed that the latter has 
some deliverance to offer upon each of the other 
realms besides its own. The final ends of God 
are moral ends ; and God and man both have it 
to use the physical and the mental so as to secure 
moral results. Prayer in its askings and answer- 
ings will have to do mainly with the moral realm ; 
for the soul's duties and trials, its perplexities and 
weaknesses, its sins and its sorrows, its struggle 



THE PROBABILITY OF PRAYER. 29 

and its salvation, are the main things about which 
prayer is concerned. And yet the physical often 
bears so closely on the moral that we ask for 
material things as they are related to our spiritual 
life. 

Dr. Bushnell, after urging that matter is not a 
two-faced something, one face of which is physi- 
cal and the other spiritual, insists that " God has 
in fact erected another and higher system — that 
of spiritual government — for which nature exists." 
But as the two worlds are related, and prayer 
may have to do with them both, the answer may 
come in the related realm rather than that con- 
cerning which we specifically ask. But by far 
the larger number of requests will be within the 
spiritual sphere of things. Our prayer-tests will 
be mainly in the moral realm, where lie our largest 
needs, and to which come the promises that are 
of grandest scope. In this moral realm, it is soul 
meeting soul, the essential man meetirig the One 
in whom his largest desires find their satisfaction. 
Both act under the law of sympathetic touch; 
and the prayer would seem to be not more natural 
than the answer. It is heart drawn to heart. It is 
a moral act in which two spiritual beings, in moral 
agreement, and acting on the same moral plane, 
speak to each other of their moral work. What 
more natural than that the one should ask, and 



30 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

the other give, counsel ; that the weaker in right 
should seek help of the stronger; that recognition 
should pass into communion of thought and feel- 
ing, in those who, however far apart in position, 
are seeking a common moral end ? Is there any- 
thing improbable in such an exercise ? Surely 
there should be an arrangement by which, at least 
occasionally, and in the great crises of a man's 
life, this thing might be done. We'can certainly 
maintain it as a very strong probability that it 
is done. It is more than likely that somewhere 
and somehow, at least in the interspaces of event 
and law, if in no other way, God has left himself 
room for answer to the petitions of those so evi- 
dently made in his own image. What if, by-and- 
by, further on in the argument, we shall find that 
God is shut up to no such narrow limits as some 
might think ; that there is no reason to ask how, 
under and between physical laws, there can be 
crevice and loophole, so that God can find place 
to send answer to human petition ; but that, alike 
by abundant arrangement, both in the physical 
and spiritual realms, and by his own ever-present 
personality, he is able, from the depths of his be- 
ing, to sound the depths of our souls, when he has 
encouraged and inspired the prayer he proposes 
to answer? 

Or yet again : this question of the probability 



THE PROBABILITY OF PRAYER. 3 1 

of answered petition can be approached from the 
physical side. We can begin at the other end of 
the line and come in toward the centre. It adds 
to the force of the argument to recall the con- 
ceded physical fact that even the words spoken 
by man, in oath as well as in prayer, make for 
themselves an imperishable record. Prayer is 
thus a part of the ever-written literature of the 
universe, remaining visible for the inspection of 
God and for the review of other moral beings 
with finer perceptions — perhaps for the continu- 
ous reading of man himself in superior states of 
development. Says another, " The air is one vast 
library, on whose pages are forever written all 
that man has ever said, or woman ever whispered." 
" The earth and the sea give up their dead " in 
ways beyond those in which our interpretation 
may have understood the words. What we have 
written we have written. And the voice of prayer 
can be no exception, for even its words are not 
lost. Addressed, prayer goes to its destination. 
The petition of the devout heart has clothed it- 
self in words; those wprds take their place among 
the facts that cannot be changed or lost. The 
universe is like one of those old-time palimpsests, 
or manuscripts covered over with successive lay- 
ers of writing, which now, by our modern skill, 
are taken off separately and read out in the au- 



32 TRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

dience of the world, and whosoever cares may 
listen. There is an instrument into which you 
may speak, and, instantly, on a cylinder, not only 
your words, but your tones, your stress and ac- 
centuation, are all preserved, and the cylinder 
will give it all back again with absolute fidelity 
and startling distinctness; and that not once or 
twice, but an unknown number of times. The 
universe may be considered as one vast and in- 
destructible graphophone, which records all that 
man has ever said, and returns all the utterances 
he has ever made, even the most secret prayer 
that has ever left his lips in the chamber of his de- 
votion. To ask is to answer the poet's question : 

" Do the elements subtle reflection give? 
Do pictures of all ages live 
On nature's infinite negative ?" 

In a universe with a recording system so per- 
fect, a telegraphic system so carefully arranged 
and reaching so far with every word entrusted to 
its care, can a single sentence of human suppli- 
cation get out of the range of God's eye or ear ? 
Can he be the kind of a being who is not likely to 
listen kindly and answer fully the petition which is 
a perpetual fact ? It rises from an earnest soul, it 
bursts the bounds of the lips and breaks into a 
vocal prayer, which thenceforth becomes an im- 
perishable fact in the universe of God. It must 



THE PROBABILITY OF PRAYER. 33 

« 

be so, or prayer is the great exception. If united 
to the words there is also the glowing thought, so 
that the soul as well as the body of the prayer 
is to come up and stand before God, and if he is 
then to shut his ear, surely that separate and un- 
related fact should be shown. Then, and only t 
then, will we admit, however reluctantly, that 
though the trend of all things else is toward the 
belief in answered prayer, yet for some good 
reason deeply hid in the heart of God, he does 
not listen and will not respond to our cry. But 
we are not forced to any such painful conclusion. 
There is no proof that prayer is the sad excep- 
tion. It cannot be that while an oath is recorded, 
a prayer makes such slight record'as to be quickly 
obliterated. The Omniscient must know when 
we pray. He will not vacate his omniscience by 
refusing to regard any such fact as prayer. God 
cannot, being God, but hear, even if he did not 
wish to listen. He is in the room where you pray. 
He could not possibly be absent. He holds up 
the earth beneath you. Each object in the room, 
the floor on which you kneel, the chair, table, or 
bed against which your hand rests, are all kept 
in existence and in form by him. " By him all 
things consist ; " u e., stand as they stand. It is 
his present energy, there and then exercised, 
that keeps all things in being and works all laws. 
3 



34 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

He must at least hear, if he does not answer. 
But the immense probability is that, going so far 
as to hear, he will take the one step more, that of 
choosing to answer the suppliant's petition. 

Further: such an arrangement for hearing 
would obviously be a good arrangement. It 
would provide for God's manifestation of himself 
and for man's development in the highest lines 
of religious living. It certainly would not be dis- 
honorable to God, and as certainly would be 
helpful to man. It would seem to open a way 
for God to disclose his will and direct our mortal 
life, which would not be omitted by one who, as 
a worker on the same moral plane, must care for 
our welfare in 'caring for himself and his own 
plans. 

It is true that a crude interpretation of some 
few texts of Scripture, under pretence of magni- 
fying prayer, has really left God no room to 
answer. Under the effort to exalt God's promise, 
it has really discrowned God himself. Good men, 
pleading that the words "whatsoever ye shall 
ask " are unlimited — an error which would have 
been avoided by study of the context — have 
made God vacate sovereignty in their behalf ; have 
not even left him the poor liberty to deny them 
any wish or whim ; have regarded him as yielding 
to them, through his unlimited promise, the con- 



THE PROBABILITY OF PRAYER. 35 

trol of events. If their view is correct, they are 
sovereigns, and he is the subject who is to do 
what they may say when they ask anything in 
prayer. But we are not told that we may mount 
the throne in our " whatsoever ye ask ; " only 
that this is the liberty we have, to ask what we 
will of strength and direction for work in which 
we seek that " the Father may be glorified in the 
Son." * Prayer is not human whim, but holy de- 
sire offered up for things according to the will of 
God. It is not a man imposing his test on God, 
but God proposing the line along which, in his 
promises, we may prove him. Prayer sees him 
always on the throne to grant or to deny, answer- 
ing equally in either case. It never discrowns 
the God it addresses. Let no man think the less 
of true prayer for that rashness of interpretation 
which, under color of honoring prayer, is really 
dishonorable to God. 

On the other hand, could one imagine any ex- 
ercise more adapted to ennoble man than this of 
true prayer ? It would promote that genuine 
humility Which consists well with the highest ex- 
altation. It lifts mind and heart toward him who 
is the sum of all excellence. We imitate whom 
we worship. We grow like him whom we adore. 
We are ourselves exalted in exalting him. It 

* See John, xiv. 13, 14. 



36 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

stands to reason that no man can be a worse man, 
but on the contrary a better man, for entering 
daily his closef and praying to his Father and his 
God. Prayer tends to make the relations we sus- 
tain to God more definite. It is an act that is 
between himself and our central selves. It is 
called " drawing near to God." The sense of the 
Divine Being as one ever present may grow dull 
elsewhere, but it becomes sharp again in the 
closet. Prayer vitalizes the best truths. It re- 
fines the ore of Christian doctrine and leaves be- 
hind the true gold. Truth that can be prayed is 
truth that is newly tested and minted. The 
creed that ministers to true prayer is thereby the 
proven creed. We see further into spiritual truth 
on our knees than when standing highest on 
our feet. Heart then leads head, as it was made 
to do. If God has an arrangement for hearing 
and answering prayer, it must tend to vitalize 
all his best truths for us. In this way he can get 
himself believed with a profound and living faith. 
It would be, if he has chosen prayer as a fact in 
his universe, a sort of continuous authentication 
of revelation ; not indeed by way of adding new 
truths, but by vivifying those that are already 
known. For if prayer and its answer are corre- 
lated facts, they are also related facts to other 
things in the supernatural realm of God and souls. 



THE PROBABILITY OF PRAYER. 37 

The great facts of revelation go well with this 
exercise of prayer. They do indeed bear on 
themselves the brand of miraculous signature and 
indorsement. But they are centuries away from 
us. They cannot be repeated ; since, if frequent, 
the miracles attesting them would cease to be 
authentications. And they are in danger, be- 
cause of their infrequence, less of being denied 
than unused as proofs of divine utterances. 
They and the truths indorsed by them, are in 
danger of lying useless on the surface of one's be- 
lief, the spiritual side of the miracles neglected, 
and their moral worth as divine object lessons not 
duly estimated. What is needed is some such 
exercise as prayer which shall put a man's soul 
into moral mood, so that the Christian facts shall 
have a fair chance in their double appeal to heart 
and to head ; so that from the vantage ground 
of a profound moral sympathy these facts shall 
have the kind of reception to which they are en- 
titled. The separating centuries will depart and 
the full force of these truths not be weakened by 
distance in time. We need to be put into close 
communion with them. Prayer would do this 
thing for those generations of men which, like 
our own, are necessarily separated from those 
occurrences. Prayer would find these facts at 
their due strength. It would bring them back in 



38 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

their hallowed freshness. In that case the Bible 
would feed the flame of prayer, and prayer give 
new vividness to the Bible. There would be 
the " threefold cord not easily broken." There 
would be the Bible received on its own "evidence ; 
next, prayer as a matter of testimony from pray- 
ing men ; and then there would be also the agree- 
ment of the two, as a third evidence to be added 
to the others. 

So that for his own glory as well as for our 
good, for the interests of truth as well as of 
righteousness, God may be considered as not 
likely to have omitted to furnish an arrangement 
for answering human prayer; as not likely to 
have made no provision for what would be of 
such obvious and inestimable worth to himself 
and to all that moral realm over which he is sov- 
ereign, and the success of which he has charged 
himself to secure. Prayer would seem to be a fit 
thing to be included in his original scheme of 
things, a holy and wise fore-ordination of God. 

These growing probabilities approach very near 
the edge of certainty. Starting from so many 
points in the circumference, they run always in 
such a direction that we cannot but know what 
is the centre of the circle. 



PERSONALITY AS A LAW. 39 



CHAPTER III. 

PERSONALITY AS A LAW. 

It is a fine remark of Stirling that " a man is 
free because he obeys motives." This leaves the 
person behind the motive, who selects and acts 
upon it, as the chief factor. There is a law of per- 
sonality. Individual force is a fact and a power 
in the universe, as really as is gravity. Men in- 
quire how natural laws can be used or can be set 
aside in the answering of prayer. But personality 
is a consideration quite as important as physical 
law or material fact. For a large part of human 
life consists in matching human will against ma- 
terial obstacles. We manage to have our way, 
and practically to override physical law a thou- 
sand times a day. Law would keep a man's foot 
fast to the earth where it is set. But his will is 
thrust in as the new superior and personal force, 
and he lifts the foot, accomplishing thereby what 
amounts to the same thing, in result, as a suspen- 
sion of the law of gravity. Every voluntary move- 
ment of the body tramples on the law. We over- 
work it. We combine the law of gravity with 



40 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

other laws, and so come inventions that save ex- 
penditure of human force. The law is there, 
but we are its masters, coercing it, managing 
it, combining it, opposing it. It is stable, and 
therefore we depend upon it. In a universe with 
unstable laws the human will could do nothing at 
all. Says Prof. Momrie in his work on " Person- 
ality," " Our life is spent in using, adapting, com- 
bining, and controlling the forces of the material 
world. And all this we achieve not in spite of, but 
because of, the inviolability of law." If man can 
do all this, cannot God do more ? If he shall fail 
to do more in order to make room for answering 
prayer, will he not put himself down to a posi- 
tion lower than that taken by man ? We must 
ourselves, in our thinking, make room for God's 
personality in all else; and why not then in 
prayer ? The argument here and now grounds 
itself on this very inviolability of nature which 
makes these exercises of personality manifest in 
God as in man. " Consciousness," says Prof. 
Momrie, "is the knowledge which we have of 
ourselves, along with our states." This last clause 
is a very happy addition to the usual definition 
given by Bain, Hamilton, Spencer, and McCosh ; 
and it answers Mill and the whole Positivist 
school in a single member of a sentence. But 
this consciousness is aware of its own essential 



PERSONALITY AS A LAW. 4 1 

power. We know ourselves as sending out the 
energy of a personal will. We know that this is 
the volition of a free being. We act as out of 
self. How much more must God do so ! And 
hence his scope of activity in answering prayer. 

But personality has more to do than any other 
one thing that can be named in securing answers 
to requests. You ask a favor of a fellow-man. 
It is clearly within his power to grant it. The 
likelihood of his granting it depends almost en- 
tirely on his personality — on that assemblage of 
tastes and wishes and preferences which make up 
his disposition as a man ; on the individual element 
in him ; on the known ends he has in life ; on the 
request as one which such a man as he would be 
likely to consider ; on his friendship for you ; on 
the whole sum of your relations to him as he un- 
derstands them. And you, in view of all these 
personal considerations, form your judgment of 
his probable answer to your request. The per- 
sonal element controls. And why is it not so 
with God, as the one to whom we put up our 
, prayers ? We are warranted in giving very large 
room to this particular element. 

Nor is personality so uncertain a thing that 
we cannot count upon it. So far from this, we 
estimate personality at a given worth every day 
of our lives in dealing with others. So far from 



42 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

unreliable, it is a matter of. exact calculation — as 
much so as any physical law. For what we call 
the laws of material nature depend for their cer- 
tainty solely on the firm personal will of God. He 
keeps them as they are. If we can rely on them, 
it is only because there is a reliable mind back of 
them. But even freedom has its law, and may 
be duly estimated. Personality has its force, on 
which we can reckon. Individuality has its mode 
of action, which can be ascertained. The free 
will works under its own law, and it is as is the 
mind and heart of the actor. Its law is unlike 
that in the material world ; but it is as capable of 
being ascertained and tabulated as is gravity. 
An infinite mind could make no mistake in fore- 
casting what a man or a whole race of men would 
do under given circumstances. And a finite mind 
would approximate to correctness just in pro- 
portion to its knowledge of facts and of men and 
the balance of its judgment. There is a philoso- 
phy of history ; and this because we have learned 
that we can depend upon the free action of free 
agents in a given condition. 

Only notice very carefully that this is not the 
kind of certainty which comes from the equal 
and even pressure of physical law upon material 
atoms. For there is a kind of bound and rebound 
in the free human will, which, however, is also 



J 



PERSONALITY AS A LAW. 43 

in turn a thing for calculation. So that we can 
sit down with the history of man, exactly as does 
the scientist with his materials in the laboratory, 
and we can compute the volume and direction of 
united or contrasted personalities. French char- 
acteristics being what they are, we are fairly sure 
that in a given set of circumstances Frenchmen 
will do this or that thing. Englishmen, having 
definite traits of character, will act out their 
united personality, and we reckon definitely on 
their conduct. Not chemical affinity is more sure 
to act in nature than these traits of nationality 
to secure action of a definite social, political, or 
religious kind. Such laws of personality over- 
ride all others, and the disposition of a people 
is a stronger factor, within its proper sphere, than 
is that physical environment of which naturalists 
have so much to say. 

Where personality has room to act there is 
shown the wide difference between physical " ne- 
cessity " and moral " certainty." Two remarkable 
lines of intervention are manifest in human his- 
tory, both showing the superiority of rank in the 
moral sphere. One is the rise and sweep of 
forces, social, political, and religious, across the 
sea of human thought and feeling; the other is 
the rise of single personalities here and there 
which sway men almost regally — a single great 



44 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

soul affecting profoundly millions of other souls. 
Of the former class are those great tidal waves 
of feeling that roll over the moral ocean and dash 
themselves against every shore. There have been 
the uprisings of a great people in favor of free- 
dom ; the singular incitement to better forms of 
public manners and morals ; the sudden revivals of 
temperance,- of thrift, of prudential saving, of com- 
mercial enterprise, and of spiritual religion. And 
these great movements in human thought have 
shown the difference between steady mechanical 
law and that spiritual force which is generated in 
the higher sphere. The Infinite Mind can rouse 
these tides on this wide sea and direct their 
movement, or can calm these surges at will. 
Personality in God can act through these moral 
forces that so sway nations ; and, inciting a peo- 
ple to pray, he can so guide these consenting per- 
sonalities that not only great masses of men, but 
the most retired human souls, shall be prepared 
for auspicious answers. Prayer may thus be 
God's breath alike in petition and response ; and 
God's sway of these mighty forces will sometimes 
seem to men so unlike those he uses in the ma- 
terial world, that thinking men shall feel more 
certain of an answer to prayer than if it came 
only through the working of physical law. 
And the appearance here and there on the 



PERSONALITY AS A LAW. 45 

wide theatre of human events of some great soul 
whose personality sways other personalities, yet 
without destroying at all their individual freedom, 
is another of those striking facts which show how 
unlike are the physical and the moral, realms. 
They indicate the whole wide world of influences 
amid which God also, by his will, can work with- 
out hindrance from material law. They give us 
a glimpse of the wide scope in which the Divine 
Personality can accomplish desired results. They 
show how, his hand on all things, he can make a 
way for the answer of prayer. If man can do so 
much in securing moral results, what cannot God 
accomplish amid these free agents, who, doing 
their own will, are often unconsciously bringing 
about his purposes ? The rise of such a man as 
Cyrus, whose career is the standing marvel of his- 
tory ; of Alexander, whose sword was a plough- 
share, turning the world-furrow into which there 
dropped the swiftly springing seeds of Greek 
thought; of Napoleon in these later years, the 
man whose conquests and whose code changed 
the map of Europe and the jurisprudence of its 
nations — these are instances of the prodigious 
force of personality. Nor are all the stars that 
dot this firmament of disastrous portent. There 
are those of happy omen and blessed light. 
Think of .that greatest man of the olden time — 



46 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A TACT. 

a praying soul was his — that Moses, who stamped 
his image and superscription upon his people so 
deeply that though they are without a king or a 
capital, wandering evermore in the wilderness of 
the world, they remain a nation separated from all 
others. The birth-mark of the Hebrew Moses is 
ineffaceable. But if this man was the select soul, 
more potent in influence than any other in the 
olden centuries, who can be named to match him 
in the Christian era for moral impression and 
leadership ? There is one man, just within the 
boundary lines of the new dispensation. He too 
is a praying man. The great apostle has so 
shaped the thought and action of men that some 
have been tempted to call our religion less that 
of Jesus and more that of Paul. If Moses was 
the great legislator whose system of jurisprudence 
rules, in its essential principles, the civilized world 
to-day, none the less must we claim for Paul that 
he set his mark through his Epistles so distinctly 
on the Christian world that the creeds of Chris- 
tendom can ask nothing higher than to be called 
" Pauline " in theology. But this man Paul 
claimed in turn for himself that he was simply 
an apostle of the risen Son of God. Each of 
these men, Moses and Paul, had it for a charac- 
teristic that he was a praying man. The great 
lawgiver fell on his face before God, and the 



PERSONALITY AS A LAW. 47 

apostle bows his knee to the Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ. And so these two men, not only 
by genius of a higher order, but by devotion rapt 
and intelligent, became the two most influential 
men who have ever trod the planet. Now comes 
the simple question: Can men sway souls like 
this, and is God excepted from doing as much as 
they ? Can they do masterful deeds, sway men 
who are still free agents so amazingly, and is 
God to act less royally ? They heard the words 
of human call and answered in potent language ; 
and shall not God hear the cry of men, and sway 
the race in reply thereto ? Of all personalities, 
that of God must be most pronounced. Paul uses 
a word which has in it the divine personality. It 
is the word "grace." It means that profound 
kindness which is in the heart of God toward men, 
and is exhibited in the gift and gospel of his Son 
Jesus Christ. God's "grace" is the beating 
heart, the overflow of the divine yearning for 
man's welfare. It is his peculiar personality in 
its exercise toward the human race. Human 
love can conquer vast obstacles. It is wonderful 
in its working. But " God so loved the world 
that he gave his only-begotten Son." " Don't 
you think it was wonderful that God so loved us? " 
said one in the presence of a little child. " I 
think it was just like him," replied the little the- 



48 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

ologian. God is indeed Ruler, and he will be our 
final Judge. The judicial element in every man 
is a part of his moral personality. It must exist 
also in God. But he is the merciful and forbear- 
ing Ruler and Judge. By his deepest nature he 
is loath to condemn. By disposition he is in- 
clined to mercy. He delights in love. Even a 
kindly judge will speak out in answer to an ap- 
pealing word; and though sometimes he must 
decline to answer favorably a request, he will at 
least answer. A kindly father will not pass by 
the cry of his child in silence. I argue prayer 
from the heart of God ; from the deepest thing 
in the disposition of God ; from all the revelations 
of the personality of God ; from the liberty and 
the love of God. 

If it were worth while to press the argument 
from probability further, there might be named 
the law of sympathetic environment. Souls very 
far apart in volume may yet be like-minded. The 
same atmosphere may be vital to each. The na- 
tive Christian air is one in which desires soar, as 
birds with wings. The life in the lung draws the 
vital air, and then in turn is vitalized thereby. 
The soul's humble breathings of desire find an 
ear that hears them, since they gratify its own 
longings. The asking soul and the answering 
Lord are both in the same kingdom — the one as 



PERSONALITY AS A LAW. 49 

a subject, the other as a sovereign. The kingdom 
of God is a kingdom of thought. " His thoughts 
are great to us-ward." But thought seeks its ex- 
pression; the speaker his hearer; the God his 
man; the man his God. To meet environment 
is the craving of mind. There is room for mutual 
communication of thought. The Bible speaks of 
" my thoughts " and of " your thoughts." There 
is room for this moral exchange, for this touch 
of moral personality, for this individualism in pe- 
tition and in response. "Ask — for every one 
that asketh receiveth," is simply the doctrine of 
moral response; or, put into the phrase of the 
physical realm, it is what bound and rebound are 
in material things. The one true, the other must 
be. Man's yearnings lifted God-ward meet the 
descending answer fresh from the opening heart 
of his God. Such environment involves moral 
exchange. The praying man and the responding 
God are seeking a common moral end. The king 
has subjects. But these subjects are "sons of 
God." Shall the members of a united household 
hold no intercourse ? What if we agree to desig- 
nate that intercourse as prayer and its answer ? 

A warranted inference from this immense 
probability of answered prayer is that of revela* 
tion. Convinced that prayer is a duty, the next 

thing is the desire to be taught how to pray. 
4 



50 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

The Bible and prayer are twin facts. The proba- 
bility of the one as the companion of the other 
is very great. The reasonableness of prayer, and, 
equally, the reasonableness of a divine revelation, 
are felt by millions of the race. It is plain that 
the religion that can hold the world in all coming 
centuries must be the religion of authentic docu- 
ments. It must be a book of former revelations, 
an Old Testament. But an Old Testament de- 
mands a New Testament. It must be a book of 
man's making, along the line of human literature, 
and yet on it, for authority, there must be set 
the seal of God's inspiration. Such a book goes 
well with the idea of prayer. And when such a 
book throws wide its pages, we find not only di- 
rect promises and specific examples, but the 
whole tone of the book, the key-note, to which 
all its song is pitched, is that of prayer offered and 
answer given. Its very praises are prayers ; its 
epistles are interrupted with outburst and over- 
flow of prayer; so that the Bible is the prayer- 
book of the world. 



SIN AS A FACTOR IN PRAYER. 5 1 



CHAPTER IV. 

SIN AS A FACTOR IN THE QUESTION OF PRAYER. 

So far we have considered man as man in his 
ethical nature. He craves God normally, as God 
him. 

But there muit come now into the discussion 
a new element — that of human sin; and we must 
inquire how this new factor affects the question 
of prayer as offered and as answered. Will sin 
shut God's ear ? On the other side, will sin hin- 
der man's prayer ? 

We must remember that our ethical nature re- 
mains, even though subjected now to a sinning 
heart. It is as when some royal personage has 
been seized upon and thrust down into a dun- 
geon, under the very palace in the throne-room 
of which he once reigned. Sin is the usurping 
servant who abides not by any right in the palace 
built" for the Son.* The glory of the ethical na- 
ture may be obscured, but never be destroyed, 
by the wrong voluntary nature. For the ethical 
nature, the nature that is shown in the possession 

* John, viii. 35. 



52 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

of conscience and right reason, is an imperishable 
part of ourselves. Its yearnings may be for a 
time, but only for a time, suppressed. They will 
find their utterance. The cry of the royal pris- 
oner is sometimes heard. It comes up into the 
court of the usurper, and the guilty soul must 
listen. The man in us is sometimes heard above 
the sinner. 

So, too, God's yearnings may be held in check, 

for a time, in view of human sin. As it throws 

the soul out of a holy sympathy with God, so it 

puts God just as far out of sympathy with the 

unholy man. And yet the yearning is deathless; 

for k is the outcome of his eternal nature. From 

this impulse springs the purpose to rescue the 

soul from the dominion of sin. The cry of the 

prisoner and the craving of God look alike for 

some way of deliverance. Very true, if we keep 

in mind only the one fact that sin offends God, 

' all not see either how man can pray or God 

him. That fact only in mind, God ought 

o hear the prayer. Prayer will the rather 

; rod that, rising above all else, draws down 

gh tnings of avenging displeasure. Indeed, 

he constant insistence of the Bible that God 

ot hear the sinner's prayer while he lives in 

And equally true is it that hiding from God, 

; Bible represents Adam as doing, is instinc- 



SIN AS A FACTOR IN PRAYER. 53 

tive. The man can no more pray than God can 
hear. The promptings of the ethical are beat 
back by the whole force of the voluntary nature, 
which actually and always rules the personality. 

Before the man can truly pray there must be 
the advent in him of a new spirit. And on the 
other hand, before God can give favorable answer 
there must be an ethical satisfaction for himself; 
a sufficient reason, before his own sense of what 
is just and right, for his new attitude toward 
this new suppliant. And equally to man's ethi- 
cal nature there is call for satisfaction. Man 
needs atonement as well as God. Each severed 
factor needs to be made one again, the two sep- 
arated personalities conjoined. 

And here comes in on us the rising glory of di- 
vine intervention. It is rescue for the wrecked 
mariner. The vessel sinks ; the mariner is trans- 
ferred to the rescuing bark. The fact of rescue 
by intervention, when taken into one's mind and 
heart, opens to the man a wholly new kitigdom — 
that of divine grace in the Gospel. And in this 
new Kingdom of God prayer now comes to be 
vastly other than it was in sinless Eden. It is far 
more than the natural breathing of human desire 
into the ear of God. This whole kingdom of grace, 
grounding itself indeed on the fact that prayer is, 
an original instinct, and communion with God an 



54 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

old ethical craving, receives now a new direction 
and impetus; it has now a new atmosphere in 
which to live and breathe and have its being. It 
is now no more the old way of the Eden garden, 
but it is " the new and living way opened for us 
through Jesus Christ." For the idea of human 
rescue through divine redemption has in it, by 
especial divine ordination, a place for the peculiar 
prayer which these facts evoke. Prayer is to do 
a work along the whole line of the new kingdom, 
as men are to become intercessors on earth for 
others, in some sense matching the intercession 
that goes on in heaven. Human prayer is to be, 
in the new system, a grandly honored means of 
grace. It is called into a new position, clothed 
with new power, and given new scope in the new 
kingdom. And the man first is to be rescued 
himself, and then through prayer and those 
things that go naturally with it he is to touch 
other men savingly. And whether one considers 
the men* to be rescued in all the multiplicity of 
their interests, or the whole divine arrangement 
for doing this thing, there comes out the fact of 
prayer made more prominent and its answer 
more assured. Its scope is grandly broadened, 
and its flight has larger range, and its wing is 
swifter and surer. 

And in this new spiritual kingdom are a whole 



SIN AS A FACTOR IN PRAYER. 55 

series of facts that sustain the life of prayer. 
What material things are to these bodily senses, 
these things of God's kingdom are to the soul. 
In this sacred realm we have the Christ of God, 
human and divine ; the Word of God, also human 
and divine ; the Spirit of God, the indwelling of 
whom in the human soul evokes the spirit of 
prayer. The kingdom of God touches all our 
nature, renewing all the moral faculties, quicken- 
ing and clearing the mental vision, and even fur- 
nishing further on, for our bodies, a "resurrec- 
tion of life." It is a kingdom world-wide in its 
scope, throwing over all our political, social, and 
religious life its new radiance and filling all events 
with its new meanings. Life can never be the same 
narrow thing, with its dull round of common-place, 
to a man who has " seen the kingdom of God." 
The whole great world of human interests is lifted 
and glorified. The kingdom has placQ and use 
and consecration for all the interests of art and 
science and learning and law. Nothing is there 
untouched ; and all it touches is ennobled there- 
by. It is the kingdom of kingdoms ; and at every 
point of its multitudinous contact with human 
affairs its King ordains that prayer shall be 
offered. Its establishment on earth as a kingdom, 
and every step toward its magnificent dominion 
over the human race, are linked not more certainly 



56 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

with God's promise than with man's prayer. God 
and man are the factors, and the answering is in- 
terwoven with the asking. In the strange and 
startling scheme the action of God and man are 
made interdependent. The prophet of Israel rep- 
resents God as determined to do a definite thing, 
and yet it is added that he " will be inquired of " 
in prayer to do it ; and if the prayer be restrained, 
the thing will not be done. This interweaving of 
the divine and the human is the unsolved mys- 
tery of God's kingdom. But this at least is clear, 
that by the impulse of their new nature and of 
the Holy Spirit of God there is the ceaseless cry 
of God's redeemed millions, who are praying 
" Thy kingdom come " — a prayer from the range 
of which nothing can be hidden. 

It were far too much to say that sin as a fact 
in the world calls out more prayer than sinlqss- 
ness would have done. But surely the range of 
prayer in Eden was exceedingly narrow. Its 
themes were few. It might adore, and within a 
limited range might ask. It could bring thanks- 
giving, but it could hardly remain prayer long, 
for it would find itself engaged in praise. It 
would be just the instinctive worship of a pure 
soul. That were indeed most fit and beautiful. 
Who does not wish he had heard an Eden prayer, 
had himself offered the simple prayer of the sin- 



SIN AS A FACTOR IN PRAYER. $7 

less state ? But how little of all the wide truth 
it must have had which now we are at liberty to 
use in our Christian prayer. Adam's prayer 
could have had no high fervor. It was never a 
man praying as for his life. It had no confession 
of sin, no plea for forgiveness, no trust in a Sa- 
viour, no cry for guidance when the way was 
dark, no struggle for victory in the battle with 
wrong, no thankfulness for the intervention of 
divine grace, no intercession for a world that 
needed rescue, no tears Over a Redeemer's cross, 
no sweet asking for dear ones by Christ's permis- 
sion and " in his name." But, on the other hand, 
exactly so far as our soul is restored to God by the 
Holy Spirit we get back all the best things in 
Adam's prayer of innocence, while we lose noth- 
ing that it is our own privilege to ask as disciples 
of Christ. There come hours in one's Christian 
praying when all the suppressed longings of years 
gain the freedom of prayer and the liberty of 
praise. Eden comes back in its primitive glory, 
the bondage for the hour is lifted, and the soul's 
native aspirations find vent in Christian worship. 
But our Christian facts are larger and more won- 
derful than those of Eden. Our world, with the 
second Adam, is a thousand-fold broader in 
manifestation of God than was that of Adam in 
his inexperienced innocency. The redemptive 



58 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

idea in the soul bursts naturally into grateful and 
adoring prayer. In the midst of the grandest 
arguments about Christian doctrine in the apos- 
tolic Epistles the writer interrupts himself with 
his own doxologies of mingled praise and prayer. 
There are devotional hours when the great Chris- 
tian facts rise grandly on the soul. 

11 1 saw a vessel, which the waves did spare, 
Lie sadly stranded on a sandy beach 
Beyond the tide's kind reach; 
Within its murmur of lamenting speech 

Long she lay there, 

Until at length 
A mighty sea arose in all its strength 
And launched her lovingly. 
And thus, alas! our race 
Lay stranded on the beach of human sin 

And misery, 
Beyond all help, until God's glorious grace — 

A mighty tide, 

All crimson dyed — 

Swept grandly in 

And set us free." 

In the presence of such facts prayer is less a 
duty than a joy. And the words " continue in- 
stant in prayer " are less the command of author- 
ity and more the privilege of affection. The 
redemptive facts are always opening anew to 
the praying man. The discoveries we make in 
religion are among its most delightful experi- 
ences. They tell of a botanist who had met w T ith 
a rare and beautiful flower, that he fell on his 



SIN AS A FACTOR IN PRAYER. 59 

knees, carefully examined its stalk and leaf and 
blossom, and then raising his eyes to heaven he 
devoutly thanked God that he had so adorned 
and enriched the earth. So a man has sometimes 
felt in the presence of a text of sacred Scripture 
as it has burst into blossom before his delighted 
vision. Some verse, like that in which Jesus tells 
of God's great love, has stirred the soul to its 
greatest depths. " God so loved the world that 
he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever 
believeth on him should not perish, but have eter- 
nal life." In view of .such a text the whole spir- 
itual nature has been roused, and devout thank- 
fulness has found expression in prayer which is 
as natural as is breath. Nor is the ecstasy un- 
warranted by facts. A praying man has some- 
times been obliged . to stop in his prayer, and 
there, on his knees, assure himself by argument 
that it was all really true that God gave the Only- 
Begotten ; and when recalling the certain historic 
fact, and the divine warrant for prayer, he has 
resumed his petition and gone on exultingly " in 
His name " to the reverent and tender and clos- 
ing " Amen." 

And Jesus Christ is not only the medium 
through whom we pray, but our example of 
prayer. His earthly life teaches us that even a 
perfect human soul must pray. The King in the 



60 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

• 

kingdom of grace bows the knee and shows his 
followers how to offer their hopeful "petition. So 
that prayer is for persons of highest moral grade 
as well as for others. It is the spontaneous act 
of the loftiest type of manhood. The better the 
man the stronger the impulse to pray. Our Lord 
is found, not only using hours in communion with 
God, but fortifying himself for wonderful deeds 
on busiest days by spending whole nights in 
prayer. On him as a man came the Holy Spirit. 
Even the associated divinity did not give him 
the kind of preparation needed for his peculiar 
mission. He must be like his people in this, that 
he is, while on earth, in that branch of the king- 
dom of God ruled over by the Spirit, whose work 
is especially to influence human souls and put 
them into the receptive mood toward the truth 
God has to reveal. Were we as pure as Christ 
we should still need a peculiar enduement of the 
Spirit of God to fit us for our place in the spirit- 
ual kingdom. And this blessing comes through 
prayer. Of our Lord it is said that " as he prayed 
the fashion of his countenance was altered." It 
was transformation by beholding. We too are 
changed in our prayer, " as by the Spirit of the 
Lord," so that we become anointed and ap- 
pointed to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable 
to God. 



SIN AS A FACTOR IN PRAYER. 6 1 

But out of the closet, as well as in it, we are to 
pray. Set periods of devotion are not inconsist- 
ent with continuous prayerfulness. There is an 
insect which possesses, it is said, the power of sur- 
rounding itself with a globule of air within which 
it floats unwetted by any wave. And there is a 
devotional mood which sometimes abides for 
years, as God's special gift to a human soul. 
Then one is, as it were, ensphered in the moral 
calm, and undisturbed by any storm ever known 
on any sea. 

Nor protection from evil only, but happy im- 
pulse along the lines of Christian activity; for 
never is there a path to tread, a load to lift, a 
work to do, that is not better done for this exer- 
cise of prayer. For the common labor and joy 
of life are connected with our spiritual career. 



41 



Hast thou within a care so deep 
It chases from thine eyelids sleep ? 
To thy Redeemer take that care, 
And change anxiety to prayer. 

' '' Hast thou a hope with which thy heart 
Would almost feel it death to part ? 
Entreat thy God that hope to crown, 
Or give thee strength to lay it down." 

There is a natural relief to an overburdened 
soul in the act of prayer. It brings the burden 
and lays it down and leaves it. But God sees the 
act. What of his response ? Is it not an answer- 



62 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. ". 

ing act to our act in prayer? The answer is 
" abundantly above what we ask or think." God 
can no more be indifferent than he can be igno- 
rant with respect to this prayerful mood of a hu- 
man soul. And as he has a whole wide heaven 
of reserved blessing, we may believe that he will 
not fail to send out therefrom to such a soul 
some token of his remembrance. 

The fact of human sin calls for peculiar provi- 
dential dealing with man. And these providential 
events open fresh occasion on our part for sup- 
plication, and on God's part for the answer of in- 
tervention. It is a scheme in which all things can 
be made to work together for good to those that 
love God. Whatever may be true about penalty 
as necessary, even in providence, for bad men, 
it is sure that peculiar overrulings are alike the 
promise and performance of God in behalf of his 
people. Calamity has driven men to their knees. 
Trouble has extorted prayer, and the new and 
superior use of sorrow, not seen on the lower 
plane of even moral law, is shown on the higher 
plane of a gracious gospel. Evil has no tendency 
to righteousness, nor is it the object of penalty, 
as penalty, to do other than inflict deserved sor- 
row. But higher than this natural use of trouble 
is the overruling by which the divine chemistry 
of grace is shown. The trouble brings joy in the 



SIN AS A FACTOR IN PRAYER. 63 

end ; the sin opens the way to a possible salva- 
tion. Blind Bartimaeus had been only a common 
Jew, with perhaps a special sneer for Christ on 
his lips, apart from his lifelong affliction. Had 
he been the favored child of wealth or learning, 
the question of personal bodily want, which held 
in it the germ of his spiritual want, would never 
have been so pressed on his notice. But he is 
blind. He is a beggar. His ear is quicker for 
the loss of his eye. He overhears the crowd talk 
of a miracle-worker. That is his need. All 
needs are akin. In his soul the man needs light 
as well as in his body. Jesus manages the inter- 
view so as to make the man pray. Then comes 
the answer of sight alike for the inner and outer 
eye. In such a probationary world there is the 
constant management of providence. God ex- 
torts prayer where he cannot persuade it. Life 
is now crowded with joys which are intended to 
evoke the grateful prayer of our favored hours ; 
and now, again, life has its sorrows that press 
prayers from trembling lips, and we can only 
struggle toward saying, " Thy will be done." 

Milton mourned his blindness in a sonnet which 
all the world knows by heart. 



<t 



Seasons return, but not to me returns 
The sight of vernal bloom or summer rose, 
But cloud, instead, and ever-during dark 
Surround me, from the cheerful ways of men 



64 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair, 
Presented with a universal blank." 

He, however, lived to regard his physical blind- 
ness as sent of God for the purpose of opening 
the eyes of his soul. 

11 On my bended knee 

I recognize Thy purpose, clearly shown ; 
My vision Thou hast dimmed that I may see Thyself, Thyself 
alone." 

It is as true of our home life as of our personal 
that it abounds in providences that evoke prayer. 
How fit that the common joys and sorrows of the 
household should all be spread out before God ; 
that the family devotion should pour itself out 
in entreaty for divine guidance in the days of per- 
plexity and trial ; that mercies, too, as they come 
and go, should be recounted at the altar of the 
home. In grief there is the prayer of submission ; 
in joy, the thanksgiving of a happy heart. Burns' 
" Cotter's Saturday Night " has for its chief gem 
the stanza which describes the household worship, 
and Wordsworth finds homes of prayer amid the 
English hills. 

Nor is public prayer to be overlooked. The 
instinct of worship, as universal as is the race, 
calls for its recognition in public services of de- 
votion. Man's earliest recorded structure was an 
altar, and his most finished work on the planet, 



SIN AS A FACTOR IN PRAYER. 65 

hitherto, has been the temple of religion. To 
deny this instinct its place, the sanctuary, and 
its time, the Sabbath, is to hinder if not to 
quench a human sentiment vital alike to civiliza- 
tion and religion. We read of a " place where 
prayer was wont to be made." Creatures of t 
habit, we are to get wonted to times and places 
for exercise of devotion. And so closet prayer 
and family prayer and public prayer are all to be 
used by the man who would do his full duty to 
God and self and his fellow-man. For it is one's 
duty to others to do them all the good he can. 
And how can one do this except as he is in that 
moral mood in which he can supplicate God for 
all blessing in behalf of his fellows ? It is as much 
one's duty to pray for men as to deal honestly 
with them ; to give them an example in the mat- 
ter of devotion as well as in every other line of 
human duty. 

And so the range of prayer, widened by men's 
sinful necessities, is very great, and is growing in 
size as men see and feel the pressure of human 
want. And the volume of prayer is daily getting 
to be larger, since every rising and setting sun 
sees more men who are praying men. Says an- 
other, " There arises from all parts of the world 
at the morning and the evening, and through the 

labors of the day, a perpetual incense of adora- 
5 



66 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

tion and of petition ; it contains the sum of the 
deepest wants of the human race in its fears and 
hopes, its anguish and thankfulness; it is laden 
with sighs, with tears, with penitence, with faith, 
with submission ; the broken heart, the bruised 
spirit, the stifled murmur, the ardent hope, the 
haunting fear, the mother's darling wish, the 
child's simple prayer — all the burdens of the soul, 
all wants and desires, nowhere else uttered, meet 
together in that sound of many voices which as- 
cends into the ears of the Lord God of Hosts. 
And mingled with all these cravings and utter- 
ances is one other voice, one other prayer, their 
symphony, their melody, their accord — deeper 
than all these, tenderer than all these, mightier 
than all these — the tones of One who knows us 
better than we know ourselves, and who loves us 
better than we love ourselves, and who brings all 
these myriad fragile petitions with one prevalent 
intercession, purified by His own holiness and 
the hallowing power of his work." And these 
praying men, though all confessing to weakness 
and sin, give witness — and their witness is that of 
men who have no moral superiors on the planet 
— that God, for Christ's sake, has heard and does 
hear their petitions and send them answers ; that 
answers are yet to come, since some of their pe- 
titions are reserved in those golden vials which 



SIN AS A FACTOR IN PRAYER. 6j 

contain " the prayers of the saints : " and, when 
the best time for the reserved answers shall come, 
they believe that these also shall be added to the 
great and greatly accumulating mass of testimony 
that God " is the rewarder of them that diligently 
seek him." 

To quote from the many volumes of authentic 
and of personal witness, as to remarkable answer, 
is needless when every praying man testifies that 
along the lines of a vital and personal experience 
God has heard his supplication. Is there any 
other proverb so common and so confidently used 
in praying circles as this, that " praying breath 
was never spent in vain " ? 



68 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS RELATED TO PRAYER. 

Spiritual faculties are dominant by virtue of 
their nature. "The moral sense," says Mr. Dar- 
win, " is the most important of all the differences 
between man and the lower animals." 

Conscience is regal. It holds sceptre over 
everything done in any part of our complex na- 
ture. Considered then as a personal experience 
in a man's soul, " the kingdom of God within us " 
must use for its own purposes not only the soul 
itself, but the body and the mind as well. 

In like manner, if we think of the " kingdom 
of God " as a world-wide reality, it must be regal. 
It can be nothing unless dominant. The final 
ends of all things must be moral ends. And the 
greatest of all realities, this moral " kingdom of 
God," may be expected to employ in its own 
advancement all mental and physical faculties. 
Natural laws do not work out of their own plane; 
but it is the mission of spiritual laws, /. <?., the 
laws of " the kingdom of God," to seek suprem- 
acy everywhere. Spiritual facts will then always 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 69 

be seeking to incarnate themselves in physical 
facts. Moral ideas will always tend to break 
through into their fit and visible expression. 
This is the true genesis of the creation. Natural 
facts are intended, more or less truly, to express 
spiritual ideas ; they are more or less fitted to do 
it, and they are capable of being employed of 
God both in usual and unusual ways for his 
moral ends. There is thus room for providence 
and for grace, room for ordinary working and for 
extraordinary intervention. Things are worked 
in the interests of something higher than things. 
" Science is classified knowledge." The writer 
of Genesis, an adept in both Egyptian and He- 
brew lore, asserts the primal law for plant and 
bird and beast : it was to bring forth " after its 
kind." The recognition of laws of nature is thus 
as old as the record of natural fact, though the 
name " law," used in this sense, is modern. The 
more facts we know, and the more we know the 
laws of them, the closer we bring # personal God, 
not only to the physical world, but to the moral 
world as well. Law is method. And the divine 
method of steady working in nature and of steady 
obligation in the moral world of things induces 
"confidence" or "belief" or " trust," which, 
needed everywhere, culminates in the New Testa- 
ment, with its specific demand of " faith in the 



70 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

Lord Jesus Christ " as the vital condition of the 
spiritual life. And a very direct expression of 
this faith is through prayer ; and hence the decla- 
ration " Whosoever shall call upon the name of 
the Lord shall be saved; for with the heart 
man believeth." 

In marking the progress of this spiritual king- 
dom we shall see, first, that God uses times of 
great physical want to make men prayerful. We 
shall see, second, that he employs general laws 
in the processes of his kingdom — a fact awaking 
grateful prayer. And we shall also see, further 
on in the discussion, that at definite eras God 
has given the evidential miracle, in connection 
with prayer. 

(i) The very wants and woes which come out 
of human sin have been pressed into use in ex- 
tending God's kingdom. Sorrows are not bless- 
ings in themselves. Physical pain is not the 
award for right-doing. But by the wonderful 
overruling power of God those penalties which 
follow sin as shadow follows substance are made 
of spiritual use. Physical want has evoked prayer. 
Nature in agony is not atheistic. The soul's 
prayers are sometimes extorted from unwilling 
lips at the outset of a new life. Afflictions are 
used as God's angels. He compels recognition. 
The marshalling of events, now in the personal life 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 7 1 

and again in the national history, has made men 
say, " That is the finger of God." Now and then 
the drapery falls off the arm, and God bares it, 
so that men see him interfering at the exact time 
with some remarkable providence which changes 
the fate of a nation. Then men are called to 
stand still and see the glory ©f God. Then the 
usual calm of indifference is broken and God 
speaks and all men listen. And a nation some- 
times adds the reverent "Amen," while prayerful 
disciples lead a waiting host in their supplication 
or their thanksgiving. 

It may be urged that such hours are hours of 
excitement. Granted. But why not here the 
excitements of noble feeling as elsewhere men 
yield to baser impulses ? Such elevated hours are 
most honorable and the experience of them most 
trustworthy. We are made glad that our human 
nature is capable of such excitement. We are 
nearer in them to our normal state. The image 
of God shows then fairest in men. The deeper 
down goes the plummet in these deep-sea sound- 
ings, the more profound is the conviction it 
touches that man, in the essential nature in which 
God originally made him, was meant to pray and 
was a being made to receive divine answer. In 
our truest moments, when the great emergencies 
of being are on us, and we are stripped of the 



72 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

conventionalisms that clothe so much of our 
outer life, and we get back to our real selves and 
look upon our deeper wants, we find that we 
cannot do without a God to whom we may speak, 
and who will speak to us in turn. 

And spiritual as well as physical want has 
drawn men to look away from self to God in 
prayer. In numberless cases men have. sought 
God separately, and then have come out of the 
closet to find men all about them led in the same 
way. Men have prayed singly and then prayed 
in companies, and the place has seemed almost 
to be shaken; and even nations have shared in 
the impulse to call on God in times of broad 
and profound reformation. So that national 
distress has played its part in starting the soul's 
cry for its God. The dark days of personal and 
national life have been those in which the divine 
visitation has been especially sought. " In their 
affliction they will seek Me." 

(2) God's use of general laws in the physical 
world has been in the interests of religion, and 
so has helped men's faith in prayer. 

As to what are popularly called the " laws of 
nature," some strong thinkers contend that the 
phrase simply voices a conception that exists only 
in our own minds. It is, they claim, only a mere 
phrase that covers our ignorance ; at most, that it 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 73 

is but our poor human method of conceiving God's 
way of doing things. A law of nature is our 
statement, they say, of God's ordinary procedure 
so far as known to us. So that a miracle would 
be his activity in unusual ways. Thus laws of 
nature, it is said, exist for us and not for Him. 

But others claim that God's regularity in doing 
certain things can be nothing else or other than 
the result of a definite plan that he will so do 
them. And, thus, a law of nature would be the 
expression of his orderliness in acts. All hangs 
on his will or plan. It is even possible to con- 
ceive of the laws of nature as being very different. 
There was no necessity for creating at all ; none for 
arranging these great general laws ; none for this 
evolution by fixed laws working out a series of 
results. And careful scientists are pointing out 
the fact that as the physical universe, with its 
objects and the laws of them, began to be in time, 
so in time it and its laws will end ; and they have 
it for a problem of actual calculation to discover 
when the physical energy will have expended 
itself. They are asking, What then, when this 
form of things shall have passed away ? It is said 
that the system of general laws, admirable for 
many purposes, has such lack of adaptation to 
other ends as to show it to be a dispensation not 
always to endure. It was introduced to super- 



74 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

sede a former system, and it will be abrogated in 
behalf of one that is to follow. And so it is 
claimed to be not impossible that Infinite Wis- 
dom should put it aside at will, in the interests 
of the spiritual kingdom. We do not need to 
claim that any such suspension has ever occurred. 
Great enough to manage all physical laws in the 
interests of his kingdom, we may mark with de- 
light God's method of holding himself to his fixed 
law, and yet so working events that, as a whole, 
they accomplish his final ends. The material 
system hangs on his will, is supported by his arm, 
and lasts as long as he shall choose. Here is the 
place for devout ascriptions of glory to him who 
formed this wide system of fixed physical law. 
All things are included in his plan. Let him be 
thanked. All his works praise him. No thought- 
ful man may be mute. We will magnify and laud 
his name. All orderly and beautiful things, all 
evolutions of his vast and comprehensive system 
as they come out into view, shall not only wake 
our delight but stir our devotion. It is for his 
honor and for our good that we daily perceive 
and acknowledge his method of ruling the world 
by law. So that this benignant aspect of nature 
shall be a source of our spiritual comfort in God. 
The bow of promise thrown across the retreating 
tempest-cloud, a thing occurring indeed under 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 75 

natural law, is ordained of God as a sort of natu- 
ral sacrament. It is to be associated evermore 
in human history with the divine promise that 
seed-time and harvest shall not fail. The bow 
spanned an altar. And to primitive man there 
was taught the alphabet of that great literature 
which the more advanced centuries must learn, 
viz., that all physical things, seen with anointed 
eyes, are the visible symbols of spiritual facts. 
They are intended to stir the heart to prayer and 
the lip to praise. 

(3) The kingdom of God has had eras calling 
for special intervention ; and these have been 
times of especial movement in prayer. 

So far as we know, there was no intervention 
upon the established order of nature for twenty- 
five hundred years. The primitive ages must 
learn to trust the stability of nature, and see in it 
token of the stability of God. But a lesson over- 
learned may be as injurious as one unlearned. 
The danger to the nations in Moses* time was not 
of non-belief, but of over-belief ; not of thinking 
that God was not, but that there was nothing save 
God. From the stability of nature men have 
deduced Pantheism— -the belief that God is all. 
And the opening words of Moses* story of crea- 
tion are a protest against this misreading of the 
universe : " In the beginning, God." There was a 



76 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

personal being distinct from the world. " In the 
beginning God created." Then matter is not 
God, nor the universe an emanation from his 
substance, but simply a work of his hand. " In 
the beginning God created the heavens and the 
earth." Then the world is not eternal nor nec- 
essary, but a created fact in time, and standing 
in the will of the Creator. The historian, looking 
back from the days of the exodus, wrote as if a 
spectator of the genesis. He sees the creation 
of plant and bird and beast. He recognizes the 
law of " after its kind " as the method of develop- 
ment. Science started there, in the recognition 
of fixed general law. But religion started also in 
the same great Theistic fact. And the worship 
of the unchangeable Creator was the unchange- 
able duty clearly seen by ipan. Only this is to be 
noted: that the steady gaze of a man on this 
form of the fact has always the danger on the one 
side of falling off into the scepticism that says 
" law is enough without a personal God," or else, 
on the other side, into the pantheism which says 
41 all is God." Universal materialism or universal 
spiritism were the two equal dangers of the 
world when Moses wrote his Genesis. The first 
would tend to atheistic denial, the second to pan- 
theistic indifference. The latter was the tendency 
of Egyptian thought as felt by the Hebrews in 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER, J 7 

Goshen. And against it Moses would guard his 
people, and the whole wide world which should 
read the story of creation from his pen. 

But the Hebrew was to find his trial in the 
monotony of fixed law. He longed for interven- 
tion during the dreary years of Egyptian bond- 
age. There had been no notable interference 
with the regular routine of nature for centuries. 
If God did not come in some new way, then his 
promise would fail. The era at length dawned. 
The hour struck. The prayer was heard. The 
cry of the slave moved the arm of Jehovah. The 
cycle had come round. Creative power had in- 
tervened once on what was an older order, and 
saving power might intervene to keep the crea- 
tive work from moral failure. Ruin stared them 
in the face. Salvation was the only hope from 
annihilation. The ever-present idea of a spiritual 
salvation bursts through into the realm of the 
physical; and supernatural deliverance is God's 
object lesson. The salvation of the people of 
Israel is to be a teaching for all time. It shall 
teach the world, as each individual looks, at some 
period of his life, upon the question of personal 
and spiritual salvation. Millions of men shall 
learn, each for himself, of God's spiritual inter- 
vention in the hour of the soul's struggle with 
the bondage of sin. We do not read this thing 



78 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

into the story; God put it there. His deeper 
thoughts are always striking through the shell of 
the outward world. There is a transparent dial 
on the watch-tower of human history, and God is 
the light behind that makes it an illuminated dial 
which gets the gaze of men in the darkest night. 
And the man who led his people to salvation, 
and through whom the deliverances at the Sea 
and in the Wilderness were wrought, was himself 
a praying man. He lived and walked and talked 
with God as a friend. In that march, more cele- 
brated than any other in history, in which he led 
an undisciplined horde through unparalleled diffi- 
culties to a splendid success, at every turn he 
called on God. Next after our Lord's interces- 
sory prayer for his disciples, the grandest instance 
of that kind of petition the world ever saw came 
from the heart and lip of this man Moses. Every 
miracle of his is born in prayer. He is clearly 
the greatest genius of his time, and yet in noth- 
ing more remarkable than in what, if one may 
reverently say it, may be called his genius for 
prayer. One of his odes — or shall we call it his 
prayer? — sounds down through the centuries, and 
is read to-day at the grave of our dead. " Lord, 
thou hast been our dwelling place in all genera- 
tions" is still the funeral march of the world. 
Its tread is stately. Its music, touching widest 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 79 

extremes, has nowhere a false note. From the 
serene heaven where God sits from everlasting to 
everlasting in solemn enthronement, the song 
comes down to the earth and finds man in his 
three-score years and ten, and these years are 
labor and sorrow and he returns to the dust. 
And the organ tone is steady. The amazing 
transition has no jar. The song is sustained in 
all its variations. The man who made this song 
or offered this prayer had been much alone with 
God. He is priest as well as prince. 

If we examine closely the miracles of the De- 
liverance, we shall find them so wrought as to 
put honor on natural laws. The Nile at times 
even now is red; but it is made to run actual 
blood. The lice and frogs at certain seasons are 
a natural plague ; but they are made intolerable. 
Diseases of the skin, always the pest of Egypt, 
are made absolutely unendurable. First-born 
sons have died before ; but a first-born child dead 
in every Egyptian and not one in a Hebrew home, 
on a given night, was a form of dealing about which 
neither stupidity nor perversity could possibly 
make a mistake. Not in one case was a law of 
nature repealed or even suspended. Just the op- 
posite of that was what was done. The laws 
were used intensely, with greater energy. They 
were worked with supernatural might. Any- 



80 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

thing like suspension would have meant atheism 
to the Egyptian, would have made him cry out 
the rather, "There is no God." This intense 
working of law until it amounts to miracle is the 
thing that makes the Egyptian say, " There is a 
God; and that God is Jehovah/' The whole 
transaction honored law and honored God. The 
great mark was set on those events, so that in all 
ages we can see the difference between the false 
and true miracle. The true sign from God uses 
law for all it is worth ; it frequently obtains its 
results by infusing superior energy into natural 
law ; while the false miracle has no basis in nature 
and no use for law. The " east wind " at the Red 
Sea has its place as well as the rod of Moses. 
The " few loaves " and the " small fishes " have a 
place in the feeding of the thousands. Miracle 
is always, in part, natural. It is never entirely 
outside of physical fact and law. If it were an 
outside thing, it would be only a " lying wonder." 
Its rank would be that of the "ghost story." 
True miracle is never without its material basis. 
God honors natural law in the Biblical miracles 
in every case. 

The separation of Israel from Egypt, their 
transportation to the Sinaitic peninsula, their na- 
tional organization, and their religious vitaliza- 
tion, are all miraculous in a peculiar result, never 



THE KINGDOM OF COD AND PRAYER. 8 1 

before sought and obtained. That new national 
and religious life is the miracle of history. For, 
starting there in that Arabian desert, there have 
gone forth to the world certain ideas of right- 
eousness that differ, by the whole diameter of hu- 
man thought, from any other ideas the older na- 
tions had ever known. Hints of the idea of 
righteousness, of the clear whiteness of the divine 
nature, the reality of holiness, had been given to 
wandering patriarch and scattered tribe. But 
they had died out of memory, if indeed they had 
ever been given into its charge. 

Among these conceptions was»the peculiar one 
of prayer to the Holy God through a Holy Pro- 
pitiator. There had been unholy gods and un- 
holy propitiations, unholy sacrifices and offer- 
ings for unholy ends. But this Hebrew idea 
was unlike any other the world had known. 
There had been, in these mistaken propitiations, 
the expression of a craving after God through 
some mediation. It was a blind instinct, and in 
that form working mischief. Now, for the first 
time on any large scale, the conception was to 
be rid of superstition, and the idea of a holy pro- 
pitiation was to find its fit form. That whole 
Jewish ritual worship was simply a visible prayer. 
It was man, the separated, drawing near to God 

in a kind of literal and visible way. And the wor- 
6 



82 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

shipper came always through a ceremonially clean 
bird or beast. The first offering, the smoke of 
which ascended each morning to heaven, was that 
of a lamb sacrificed — a lamb, the emblem of pu- 
rity. But the lamb was slain — the emblem of 
purity making by its death, representatively, a 
propitiation for man the sinner. And the last 
sacrifice, when the sun was sinking into the Med- 
iterranean, was the same offering of purity for 
sinfulness, that man might be accounted pure for 
the sake of the great Propitiator, whose coming 
was the fulfilment of the law and the hope of 
Israel and the salvation of the Gentiles. It was 
objective, tangible prayer. It was addressed to 
the eye of God. It was prayer done rather than 
uttered, made rather than said. It was God 
teaching man to pray by material things and by 
external objects. It was the use of the physical 
for the spiritual. It was indeed a form of pri- 
mary instruction ; but the foremost scholars of the 
moral world were still in the primary class, and 
they needed to be grounded in those terms of the 
moral alphabet in which was to be written the 
gospel literature for the ages to come. 

In the march of Israel, when Sinai was left, we 
see the blending of law and miracle, and how 
both induced men to pray not only in the taber- 
nacle but by the wayside. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 83 

Take the wonder of the manna. From Egypt 
to Canaan was forty years. During that time 
the scanty valleys about Mount Seir yielded only 
a meagre supply to the numerous host. Their 
food was supplemented by the descending manna, 
which seems to have formed in the night under 
the clear sky. It was claimed that it fell from 
heaven. Suppose a Hebrew, born twenty years 
before the Exodus. With devout heart in Egypt 
he learns to worship the God who is Creator and 
Sustainer of all things. The regularity of day 
and night, of seed-time and harvest, impresses 
him. God is manifestly to be depended upon in 
all the world; and the spectacle calls forth his 
daily thanksgiving. This man enters the desert 
with his people. He sees the manna every morn- 
ing which had been deposited during the night. 
He recognizes the new wonder. It is a miracle 
from the hand of God for the support of Israel. 
God has intervened. This man is devoutly 
moved, prays with new gratitude, and begs that 
the miracle may be continued until the people 
can come to the land of promise. 

Another Hebrew was born twenty years after 
the Exodus. Six days of the seven he sees, 
from his earliest childhood, the manna lying on 
the ground. It is the expected thing. It occurs 
regularly. He never has known anything else 






84 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

on six days of the week. He is no more aston- 
ished than is the boy on a New Jersey peach 
farm to see once a year peaches on the trees. It 
is nature. It is exactly such an event as might 
be expected. There is some sort of law that 
brings it about. It is no more miraculous than 
the sunrise. It is no more a sign of anything pe- 
culiar than are the starry skies. It is plain that 
what was miraculous to the one man was only 
common to the other. What then, is there no 
line between the natural and the miraculous? 
Yes ; but it does not run along the line of what 
is more or less an exhibition of God's power. 
For, so far as we can see, it would take just as 
much power to have to-morrow's sun rise in the 
east as to have it hindered from rising. Nor does 
it depend upon the recognition of God's hand in 
one thing more than in another. For we are to 
see equally God's hand in the grain that waves in 
Egypt and the manna that falls in Arabia. Yet 
we call the one natural and the other miraculous. 
It is clear, then, that we cannot always draw the 
line at the time. The natural to the man born 
twenty years after the Exodus would be the su- 
pernatural to the man born twenty years before. 
But neither of them had the true perspective. 
They did not see God seeking one end in two 
widely different ways. They could not, as we 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 85 

can, take in the whole meaning of the era that 
called for the manna to come, and, equally, for it 
at a given point to cease. We are able to look 
back now and see that those forty years were the 
turning-point in the moral evolution of that race. 
Certain physical manifestations were demanded 
in order to accomplish moral ends. The miracu- 
lous is credible in its own time and incredible 
elsewhere. We, with wider vision than either of 
our two Hebrews, can praise the God who now by 
the regular course of nature, and anon by special 
intervention, was using nature for the moral ad- 
vancement of his kingdom. Miracles he does not 
scatter promiscuously. They have their hour. 
They meet the crisis and depart. God can use 
them here, and use natural law in its ordinary 
workings there. They can never for a long time 
be common. And when we are asked whether God 
cannot at will break through the physical order 
and give miraculous answer to prayer, we must 
always reply in the affirmative. But when asked 
whether he does do it, and is to be expected daily 
to do it, we must answer by denial. Whether 
he will do it or not seems, judging by all past 
history, to depend upon the particular position 
occupied at the time by his advancing kingdom. 
He works by eras. He has his " set times." And 
when these eras come round again, it is reasona- 



86 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

ble to believe that he will not fail in the needed 
miracle. The ordinary and the extraordinary 
are both at his hand and stand waiting his use. 
Nor can we tell when he will use special interven- 
tion. At times we men, in our impatience, feel 
that God must speak out ; that he cannot longer 
delay special manifestation; that the prevalent 
form of unbelief demands miraculous answer to 
prayer. How sometimes our human impatience 
must provoke the patience of God ! Men say, Let 
there be at least semi-miraculous things done in 
answer to prayer. As if there were no answers 
if no miracles. As if we men knew " the times 
and seasons." As if we rather than he had 
notched the calendar of the ages. As if we could 
instruct the Omniscient One. The largest and 
longest opportunities for spiritual progress must 
come in between these eras of miracle. For it 
must be with emergencies as it is with miracles ; 
they depend on their infrequency for their char- 
acter. As all extremity would be no extremity, 
so all miracle would be no miracle. 

And this is the reply that might be made to 
those who tell us that were there only faith 
enough in the church we should have miracles, at 
least in the form of bodily healing, on every day 
of the year. It is forgotten that in such a case 
the miracles would not be miracles at all. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 87 

Through their very commonness they would 
mean nothing as special intervention. In that 
case, let us remember that miracles would be 
most frequent when less needed. A very great 
measure of faith and prayerfulness might be able 
to dispense with them altogether. It is forgotten, 
too, by those who urge this view, that the Scrip- 
tures represent miracles as gifts of emergency, 
coming when faith in the great mass of God's 
people is low and prayer is slack on the part of 
good men. The undevoutest time in Hebrew 
history was the era of the miracles of the Exodus. 
Miracle is the resource of emergency. When 
Elijah's round of miracle came to the nation it 
was not because of the national prayer and faith, 
but the rather because of spiritual dearth. It was 
not the reward of great faith, but an incentive 
to it. And our Lord's miracles met an emer- 
gency when the national piety was at its lowest 
ebb. Miracle is interference for salvation ; and 
its eras are when love is cold and faith is weak in 
the people at large and only a few are waiting on 
God. It is the hand of God's intervention thrust 
in to secure the attention of a slumbering world. 
It comes not in hours of abounding faith. Such 
hours can do without miracle. Those who be- 
lieve most need miracle the least. It is intended 
to meet and counteract unbelief. An age of 



88 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

faith would be harmed by the distraction of too 
much physical manifestation. The time must be 
an evil time to call for such intervention in hu- 
man history. A few must pray in the present 
position of God's kingdom; but the era as a 
whole will be lacking in prayer. And this lack 
is the emergency which makes the miracle possi- 
ble and credible. 

When Israel had established themselves in 
Canaan there went by the regularly ordered years. 
Fixed law ruled the times. At length came an 
era threatening the national life. God, ever pres- 
ent to the few praying men, seemed far away 
from the many. There was call for the advent 
of " the Prophets." They were cometary men in 
their mission. They were sudden in. advent, rush- 
ing in from outside the regular order and work 
of the priesthood. They attracted attention by 
the abruptness with which they came and went. 
They speak and go. They are a " voice." They 
cry out. Looked for in the direction whence 
comes the cry, you do not see the man ; you only 
hear words. It is a message left, but the mes- 
senger has gone. " Hear the word of the Lord," 
is the summons of the " voice." The aim was to 
startle a careless age. With them was miracle. 
It was the second great era, as the time of the 
Exodus had been the first. A few praying souls 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 89 

had wept and fasted and wrestled for a manifes- 
tation of God's hand. Oh, that " he would bow 
the heavens and come down ! " And that was the 
very thing done in the cluster of prophetic mira- 
cles then exhibited to the nation. Those won- 
ders told men of no new God, but only this: 
that the One who had wrought wonders in Egypt 
was still God. The former cycle had disclosed 
an unknown Jehovah to the proud nation on the 
Nile. The new wonders in Palestine were the man- 
ifestation of the well-known God among his own 
people. It was the distant God now made near, 
the absent God made present. It was the mani- 
festation of a God vitally active and supreme. 
Idols should for once be counter-worked on their 
own plane. It was not a contest between a God 
and no God ; but one which should show the true 

• 

God superior to the powers of nature as repre- 
sented by heathen worship. Elijah at Carmel 
took the idol prophets on their own ground. 
But no one can imagine that scene on Carmel 
apart from Elijah's prayer. The ascending 
prayer and the descending altar-flame are parts 
of one grand transaction. 

Once more the ages go by. The nation again 
deteriorates. To a few waiting souls — " waiting 
for the consolation of Israel " is the happy phrase 
which describes their position — there comes the 



90 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

whispered secret of the nearness of the Messiah. 
He was born in the line of men royal in their 
prayers. His earthly mother was a praying 
maiden. His boyhood finds him in the " House 
of Prayer," hearing and asking questions, some 
of which may have been suggested by the visible 
prayer of the temple service. The new era 
dawns. 

A Christ without miracles would be incredible, 
for he would not have met the world's want. 
But in the most stupendous miracle of his career, 
the raising of Lazarus, he offers the word of prayer 
in the same breath with the word of command. 
Sometimes, indeed, virtue went out of him mys- 
teriously, though it were too much to say uncon- 
sciously. Sometimes the touch of the sacred hem 
of his garment was enough. But whenever there 
was need that men should specially recognize 

* 

God, with the miracle went the prayer. When 
he left the earth, he left ringing on its air words 
which warrant the expectation that there were 
miracles waiting still to be done. 

And here comes in a question up to which all 
these discussions on miracle and prayer steadily 
lead us. It is this : Do these promises of miracle 
hold good to-day ? Were they for our time ? or 
was there a restriction to apostolic days ? Es- 
pecially has it been claimed that " the healing of 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 9 1 

the sick " is a blessing granted for all time ; that 
" the prayer of faith " can bring bodily healings 
which differ in nothing from those done by the 
Lord or the apostles. And when it is claimed 
that the days of miraculous answer to prayer are 
not past, and that only lack of earnest faith and 
fervent supplication is the hindrance to miracle, 
the matter needs to be gravely considered. For 
if it be God's will that " bodily healings " should 
still be granted on the plane of those in Christ's 
time, and if the fault is ours that thousands of 
the sick languish who might be healed and saved 
from death by our faith and prayer, there would 
seem to be a most frightful charge of inhumanity 
against us. Nor inhumanity alone ; but we are 
holding back a demonstration of God's power 
which we were appointed to exhibit unto men. 
On the other hand, no innocency of intention can 
make it other than a most injurious mistake to 
expect, without warrant, a series of miracles to- 
day. The claims of wonderful results are indeed 
made. But, so far as can be ascertained, these 
alleged results are hardly miraculous. They 
scarcely exceed, if at all, those claimed by vari- 
ous specialists in the arts of wonderful cure. The 
advertised healings in the latter case are very 
numerous, and are often genuine. It is easy to 
use the word " miraculous " in a very loose and 



92 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

limited sense. But such a sense belittles the 
Biblical miracles and the moral truth that goes 
with them. A certain class of practitioners pub- 
lish their cures, but not their failures. One can 
only know of the latter by learning of the single 
instances in local circles. There are religious 
circles where the cure by the prayer of faith, 
attempted by very devout souls, under the mis- 
taken belief that miracles still remain, has not 
been a success, and in the terrible reaction a 
poor soul has lost all faith in prayer and in God 
for a time. To claim what God has not promised 
in the line of miracles is certainly dangerous. It 
may be as wrong to claim too much as to claim 
too little. It is not at all, here and now, a ques- 
tion about praying for the restoration of the sick 
as we pray for all other physical things that stand 
in any relation to our spiritual life. This is gra- 
ciously permitted, and many know what it is to 
receive answers to prayer for physical things. 
But the question now is of miraculous works of 
healing on the plane of those in the days of our 
Lord. The allegation by some good men is that 
such things were promised, and that faith and 
prayer would bring them to-day. 

The answer to these inquiries must depend 
upon the express words of the New Testament. 
These are to be interpreted by the laws which 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 93 

govern all language. They must be understood 
in their connection. And our idea of their mean- 
ing cannot but be affected by what we can learn 
of miracles in the past as pertaining, in their 
kind, to separate eras of the kingdom of God. 
The words will also be affected for us by the 
views which the study of the Bible has led us to 
form of miracles as outside evidences of religion, 
or as parts of the scheme of religion itself. 

The verses are these :* " These signs shall fol- 
low them that believe. They shall (1) cast out 
devils ; they shall (2) speak with new tongues ; 
they shall (3) take up serpents ; and (4) if they 
shall drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt 
them; they shall (5) lay hands on the sick and 
they shall recover." To these are added by our 
Lord elsewhere the words " heal the lepers," an 
act which comes under the class numbered (5). 
Also, they are (6) to " cast out devils ; " and they 
are (7) to "raise the dead/'f 

On these passages, it should be noted that the 
air and tone of them suggest the local and the 
temporary. They sound like their age. Their 
color is that of the transient. There is no hint 
of their extension beyond a narrow period. They 
were certainly the things for that time; nor is 
there, as in other things that were to endure, any 

♦Mark, xvi. 17, 18. fMatt., x. 8. 



94 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

hint of permanence. If they were to hold good 
during the centuries until Christ should come, it 
is more than strange that nothing is said about 
this kind of ministry as a permanent gift to Chris- 
tians. 

So, too, it is to be noticed that the words 
quoted from Matthew, viz. : " Heal the sick, 
cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils," 
were given midway in our Lord's life, when the 
disciples were sent out on a temporary mission. 
The whole affair was local. They were not " to 
go to Samaria, "nor to the Gentiles." It was a 
short preaching tour which they were to make,' 
and they did not do even that. Their mission 
was a temporary expedient, and, except that they 
found " the demons subject to them," it was a 
failure ; and this method of work was soon aban- 
doned. 

If it were true that the miraculous healing of 
the sick abides to-day, then, since the other gifts 
which are neither more noj- less miraculous are 
named in the same sentence, the one class ought 
not to be exercised more than the others. 
Asked to "cast out devils" to-day, it is some- 
times said that those "demoniacal possessions 
have ceased." But this is to own that one of the 
things commanded is local and is temporary. 
Asked to " raise the dead," which those disciples 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 95 

were told to do in the same breath in which they 
were told to "heal the sick," there is no other 
reply than that " Christians now have not faith 
enough to do it." But if it were a matter of 
faith, then the confession of its lack is most dam- 
aging to religion itself. An unbeliever has the 
right to say, " Raise a few dead men before you 
talk of saving any man's soul. For if your re- 
ligion cannot do the outward and easier thing, do 
not urge us to trust it for the soul's salvation." 
By putting our holy religion in such a position 
we do it an unutterable wrong and damage. By 
insisting that prayer shall do to-day what it never 
was intended it should do to-day, by encouraging 
men to expect now those things which were in- 
deed " signs " in their own age, we are injuring 
religion and are causing men to discredit the act- 
ual promises which belong to our own times. 
The reaction in many minds has been fearful. 
They have trusted promises that were not theirs, 
and in their disappointment have been spiritually 
paralyzed. 

So, too, the emphasis put upon the miraculous 
healing of sickness has obscured the view of the 
spiritual blessings actually offered to us to-day. 
"Ye shall do greater works than these." But 
greater physical miracle than raising the dead is 
impossible. We are to see in miracles the physi- 



96 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

cal scaffolding soon to be taken down, that the 
spiritual structure may be shown to the world. 
Moral results are to show "the power of God 
unto salvation ; " and these are the superior gift 
— the sun that hides those stars. These are the 
moral miracles that displace, through the grow- 
ing centuries, the crude but necessary displays of 
power in an era happily now gone by forever. 
Each era has its own kind of manifestation. The 
wonderful works which introduce it soon wane. 
Miracles come in cycles, serve their purpose, and 
depart. Some good men, who emphasize the 
Second Advent of the Lord, would see in " gifts 
of healing in answer to prayer " one of " the signs 
of the time " that the Lord's coming is near. But 
this is to mix strangely the peculiar " signs " of 
one era with the wholly unlike " signs " of another 
era. The " casting out of demons, the healing of 
the sick, the cleansing of the lepers, and the rais- 
ing of the dead " are expressly said to be the 
" signs " afforded at the First Coming, while 
such unlike things as wonders among the nations 
and signs in the heavens will betoken the other. 
We do not look or pray for a repetition of the 
miracle at the Red Sea. It would have been 
incredible in Christ's time. It betokens, in its 
kind of miracle, its own peculiar era. No more 
may we hope and pray for the repetition of the 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 97 

Bethany miracle. For the " raising of the dead " 
belonged to Christ's era, and not to the days of 
Moses nor to our day. The centuries do not go 
backward. The Red Sea is not to be divided 
again, nor Elijah's altar-fire be seen on Carmel, 
nor the sick miraculously healed, nor another 
dead man raised at Nain or at Bethany. We are 
past all that in our position in God's kingdom. 
We are looking for the "greater things than 
these " now, and awaiting another and very differ- 
ent class of miracles to come and close the dis- 
pensation. The field of right things for which to 
pray is so broad that we need not pray for the 
wrong things unto our own disappointment. 

Just here comes into view a very important in- 
quiry. Are miracles simply evidential, the outside 
confirmation ? Or, on the other hand, are they 
inside the system and a part of it ? 

Very much depends on the answer. For if the 
first view is correct, then it would seem to be 
desirable that we should pray for as many as we 
can get. 

The Roman Church has always held to mira- 
cles. It believes them continuous. It finds in 
them a token of God's constant favor to " the 
Church." It believes in them as special blessings 
to a holy person, or a holy thing or holy place. 

Hence nodding statues and sacred wells and heal- 

7 



98 TRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

ing charms blessed by church dignitaries. And 
if this be the true theory of the miracle, then its 
continuousness is one of the methods of convert- 
ing the world. In this case prayer is to rise for 
them. They are to be asked for daily, and we 
are to get as many and as vast miracles done for 
the church as possible, thereby crushing out un- 
belief in the world. That would seem to be the 
first duty, on this view of the miracle. 

But miracles, too frequent, cease to be evi- 
dential of anything special, and indeed cease to 
be miracles at all. On the Roman theory they 
are scattered over the whole dispensation, only 
with a growing frequency. There are to be more 
and more of them, and they are to be the fresh 
evidence granted to each age of a present God. It jf 

is forgotten that, even in the brief ministry of our 
Lord, miracles were so frequent as seriously to 
imperil the cause at one time. He must leave 
the crowd, or they would take him for a sacred 
magician. When his disciples came back from 
their preaching tour they showed themselves 
dazed by miracles. They cry out, "Lord, the 
devils are subject unto us!" But they say not 
one word about their preaching of the new gos- 
pel or its effect on men's souls. The cause was 
endangered by the constant demand for a " sign," 
which these disciples were so eager to exhibit. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 99 

Their hearers want wonder rather than truth, 
sign rather than salvation. If this was so be- 
cause of the necessary prominence of miracle 
during the three brief years of Christ's ministry, 
what would be the result of eighteen centuries of 
growing frequency in miracle ? Miracles were 
the needed authorization of the new dispensation. 
And they lingered awhile, the afterglow of the 
Lord's career. They did their work. They are 
still for our study. But as they slowly fade out 
before the better moral light of the established 
dispensation, we hear no apostolic voice praying 
for their continuance. Their work was done, and 
their glorious record remains to inspire us to 
pray for blessings now promised. 

The other view regards miracles not so much 
as directly evidential, not as outside evidences of 
the system, but as an inside part of the system it- 
self. They are indeed, incidentally, evidences. 
They are proofs, just as blessed and holy teach- 
ings are proofs. They come at eras, as the very 
overflow and outcome of God's manifestation of 
grace. They burst through and appear in visi- 
ble form, as truth incarnate in fact, as part and 
parcel of the system. Their spiritual meaning is 
far more important than their physical form. 
They are great moral object-lessons. Historical 
facts they are, indeed ; but they fill a moral niche. 






IOO PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

Credible deeds they are, timed to a moral end. 
They minister not to credulity, as they would do 
if promiscuous in character and timed mainly by 
the will of praying men. But they come in 
groups and are gathered into eras. They can- 
not come out of due order. Moses' miracles 
cannot change places with those of Jesus. The 
kind of " sign " befits the kind of era. And thus 
while they minister to faith, they rebuke credu- 
lity. Studied in their moral aspect, as an actual 
part of the moral system, they have wonderful 
helpfulness in them. They mean more when they 
are past than when they were present. But they 
abate not one jot from their evidential power as 
parts of a system because their chief use is moral 
impression. They minister still, and with increas- 
ing force through the ages, to the spirit of prayer. 
Nor does this view discourage prayer for phy- 
sical blessings. Shall we pray for nothing save 
the miraculous ? Are there no answers save mir- 
acles ? True, the most answers will come in that 
spiritual realm of things where are our deepest 
needs and whence most prayers arise. But we 
are authorized to pray in hope for temporal bless- 
ings as they stand connected with the spiritual 
life and the Christian work. Mr. Muller has ob- 
tained financial answers. Hardly less remarka- 
ble are those given Mr, Spurgeon in the matter 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. IOI 

of his Orphan Houses. Hundreds of cases have 
been assembled in many volumes, like that of Dr. 
Patton on "Answers to Prayer," or Whittle's 
" Wonders of Prayer." Perhaps, however, more 
answers have been obtained to prayers for the 
cure of the sick than for any other class of phy- 
sical blessings. And this not because of miracu- 
lous healings, nor a special ministry of healing for 
the body parallel with that of a ministry for the 
soul ; but because the sick are many and the ap- 
peal to prayer for them is constant, and because 
there are especial promises thereon, which are 
not indeed in the line of miracle, but in that of 
plentiful blessing. Dr. Cullis, of Boston, records 
in his published volumes many cases of cure 
through prayer; and these cures, never miracu- 
lous, are often very remarkable. That he uses 
mental therapeutics on those who elect to be 
healed by prayer may De true. He instructs 
them to believe themselves cured ; and it is cer- 
tain that this " mental medicine " in all diseases 
is helpful, and in some diseases it is all that is 
needed. In case any wish to try the therapeutic 
power of drugs rather than mental therapeutics, 
he is understood not to refuse them. But in 
neither case is there anything inconsistent with 
asking and receiving God's blessing, in which- 
ever one of the two methods the patient may 



102 TRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

elect. Mental and physical remedies are both 
open to us, and are to be used with prayer. And 
there is just as much answer when God blesses 
our wise means as when sometimes, in ways ut- 
terly beyond our knowledge, he turns aside the 
current of disease, and to the surprise of physi- 
cians the patient lives who they say ought to 
have died in the natural course of the sickness. 

It is at this point in the discussion that we may 
consider the very striking words of the apostle 
James about the healing of the sick. The words 
are as follows: "Is any sick among you, let him 
call for the elders of the church, and let them 
pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name 
of the Lord ; and the prayer of faith shall save 
the sick." 

If these words be held to refer to actual mira- 
cle, they must be relegated to that time when 
" signs " of that sort were rapidly waning in the 
apostolic days. If miraculous, they belong to 
the introduction of the Christian era, and they 
were local in their application. But, happily, we 
do not need, by making them such, to put them 
so far away from our own times. Is there neces- 
sarily anything miraculous in them ? Read them 
with the utmost care, and though they are pecu- 
liar, are they anything more than a large promise 
of abounding blessing in given cases ? There is 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND TRAYER. 103 

an absence in them of any one of the words the 
New Testament uses as equivalent to " miracle." 
Nor is the last clause, " shall save the sick," a 
more positive promise than many others from the 
lips of the Lord *and his apostles. The only 
phrase which suggests anything peculiar is that 
which names the use of " oil." That phrase want- 
ing, no one would have found in the verse the 
miraculous element. Excellent scholars see only 
the medicinal use of a single remedy. Others 
see here one remedy naming all the system of 
medicinal usage. Still others see in the presence 
of the elders and the solemn prayer and anoint- 
ing a kind of mental healing. And it is not at 
all improbable that to drug and mental thera- 
peutics there was also added the moral thera- 
peutic of a profound religious impression. So 
that when all these means for body, mind, and soul 
were used, and there was prayer offered, as the 
patient knew, by the whole church for him, he 
would be benefited, and God would add, over and 
above all, his divine favor in the answer of an en- 
tire cure.* The passage then would teach us to 

* In his " Notes on the Miracles," Trench, discussing the bodily- 
healings wrought by our Lord, says: "He links his power to 
forms in use among men. It was not otherwise when he bade his 
disciples anoint with oil the sick. Without the oil — one of the 
most esteemed helps for healing in the East — the disciples might 
have found it too hard to believe in the power which they were 






104 TRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

use all the means, and fail not also to pray in 
faith to God. So read, the passage agrees with 
that great class of Scriptural verses which cover 
all our wants ; which bid us bring all our inter- 
ests, personal and public, bodily and mental, so- 
cial and political, to our God in earnest prayer. 
" Men ought always to pray." " Ask and it shall 
be given you." 

And when we consider that sickness of body is 
so common, that its victim comes visibly nearer 
to the end of his probation, that it is often of 
immense importance to God's cause that a single 
life be prolonged, a given man be exempted for a 
time from death, we are moved upon by all these 
considerations to pray with earnestness and faith 
for healing mercies upon our sick. There are 
vast numbers of men now living who believe that 
along this line of prayer they have had God's 
answer. 

When a peculiar era is on the world, and the 
progress of God's cause demands it, he has an 
Elijah who can shut and can open heaven, as the 
divine will may be. But when the physical shall 

exerting, and those who through faith were to be healed, in the 
power which should heal them.'* Edersheim, in his charming 
volume on " Jewish Social Life in the Time of Our Lord," says, 
' The means used were medical or else sympathetic or even mag- 
ical. It was the custom to anoint the sick with a mixture of oil, 
wine, and water." 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND PRAYER. 105 

give glad place to the spiritual in the advancing 
cause, then the normal condition of daily spiritual 
answers shall resume its place. But Elijah's 
prayer on Carmel shall be all the more instructive 
because, instead of looking for a descending 
altar -fire, we are inspired to expect, on a vastly 
higher plane, the wonderful manifestations of a 
converting and consecrating Holy Spirit. And 
yet, whenever the physical shall stand in close 
relation to spiritual things, we will humbly but 
boldly ask for those temporal things which lie 
clearly within the range of our prorftises. And 
Elijah's example of fervent petition and God's 
answer on Carmel shall rouse us to believe that 
" the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man 
availeth much." 



I06 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 



CHAPTER VI. 

PRAYER AS RELATED TO NATURAL LAW. 

" How is prayer answered without violating 
natural law ? " asks a friend. 

Suppose we are not able to give the method. 
Suppose not one ray of light had been cast by all 
the investigations of six thousand years on the 
question of how God does this thing. The fact 
would not be disproved on that account. We 
should be on this matter just where we are about 
many another fact of God's universe, the exist- 
ence of which is plain while the reason for it 
is hidden. Then, too, the greatest number of 
answers to prayer are purely spiritual, are in 
the realm of the moral and not of the physical 
world ; so that they never touch the questions of 
material fact or force. 

Nor is it needful, when the answers impinge on 
the physical realm, to think of them as neces- 
sarily "special providences," in the sense that 
they have no connection with that vast "general 
providence " by which God manages the world. 
For we are not at liberty to consider God as car- 



PRAYER AS RELATED TO NATURAL LAW. 107 

ing for some things and careless of others. All 
his works praise him. The distinction is not that 
some things are left to mechanism and others 
handed over to will and sovereignty. Considered 
with reference to a special thing a providence is 
special. It is God's care for atoms that gives him 
control of worlds. 

But while the denial of prayer because its 
modus operandi is not understood is unreasona- 
ble, there are those whose faith has been con- 
firmed by many considerations which thoughtful 
men have suggested. 

It has been conceived by some strong thinkers 
that God, by the skilful use and the complete 
management of manifold combinations, can se- 
cure answers through known laws; so that by 
manipulations that are for the most part out of 
our sight he can obtain his results. Now and 
then the working of these laws, in less obscure 
instances, is held to give indication of what is al- 
ways going on just beyond the line of our vision. 
But to make this th'e only or even the prominent 
way of the divine procedure, is to take a me- 
chanical view of the matter. It would seem to 
narrow almost pitifully the range of God's work- 
ing. It would introduce a kind of causal con- 
nection that scarcely leaves the divine mind 
liberty or discretion. It shuts him up as mere 



108 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

manager among his laws and forces, and con- 
ceives of him as exercising a kind of mathemati- 
cal calculation in arriving at his ends. Not with- 
out some elements of truth, this view is felt to 
be too narrow to solve the problem. If indeed 
we were driven thereto, we might accept the 
theory, with the added view that the Omniscient 
God had provided for all from the outset ; had so 
planned events as to secure by physical means 
all needed physical results; had made original 
arrangement in which he had foreseen the volun- 
tary prayer and his own ordained answer, and 
had adjusted every law and assigned every force 
its due place ; so that not otherwise than with in- 
finite ease he works all things according to his 
will. And such a view must shut the mouth of 
every objector. And yet we are not so much 
concerned to remove difficulties as to discover, if 
possible, something of the method or methods 
God takes in gaining this result. There are many 
persons who, so far from feeling that the theory 
of management and combination of laws is derog- 
atory to the Divine Being, see in that conception 
much that is honorable to him. Administration 
is genius among men. To stand with one's hand 
on the springs that move a nation is kingly. The 
old conception of God as far away, looking al- 
most disdainfully upon the machine of the uni- 



PRAYER AS RELATED TO NATURAL LAW. IO9 

verse to see it run down, has gone forever. All 
who believe in any God to-day believe in him as 
near. The idea that God is not needed as one 
directly present amid the play of law and forces 
is an idea disputed by Carpenter, whose words in 
this matter deserve consideration. He says : " I 
deem it just as absurd and illogical to affirm that 
there is no place for a God in nature, originating 
and controlling its forces by his will, as it would 
be to assert that there is no place in man's body 
for his conscious mind." And he further urges 
that " the source of all power is mind." For God 
to be present and at work amid his own forces — 
for all forces are his — is to be where he can ad- 
just and combine them. And not only by their 
harmony, but by the contact and even the clash- 
ing of antagonist forces, he can secure his ends. 
If in no other way, in this at least, he is present 
to hear and answer prayer. 

And some have supposed a great hidden " law 
of miracle," and under it provision for answered 
prayer wherever miracle was needed. And as 
this cannot be disproved, if necessary, it may be 
assumed; exactly as our physicists assume the 
existence of the inter-stellar ether, the only argu- 
ment for the existence of which is its alleged 
necessity. To many, however, the need for such 
a "law of miracles" is not apparent; nor yet the 



IIO PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

need, if there were such a law, of placing under 
it this matter of answered prayer. And yet to 
some it is helpful to think that in this, or in some 
similar way, God works out the great problem ; 
and they are made glad in the belief that, either 
in this world or in that beyond, our sharper vision 
may at some distant period discern the principle 
by which, through the sweep of some law more 
vast than any we now know, God hears and 
answers prayer, even when the answer includes 
actual miracle. 

And yet if we could find out the method of 
God, the thing discovered must be only second- 
ary. And why need we spend ourselves on the 
question ? If a new physical law is now, or at any 
coming time shall be, necessary, it can certainly 
be enacted. For are we not speaking of- a God 
who has creative power? Bruce, in his " Miracu- 
lous Element in the Gospels," has well said : " We 
must hold ourselves open to the idea of a possi- 
ble exertion of the Divine Will in the direction 
either of creation or of control, adding to na- 
ture's sum of being or disposing her forces to 
new effects." And this plea for miracle is equally 
a plea for prayer when miracle may be demanded 
in its answer. For say what we may about phy- 
sical laws and forces, the spiritual beings in the 
universe are the greatest factors, and the way 



PRAYER AS RELATED TO NATURAL LAW. 1 1 1 

they are likely to act is the thing of far the most 
importance in our present inquiry. Laws wait 
always on executive volition. The force of 
gravity, as all other forces, is a minister in the 
hands of God. Personality is the mighty law. It 
rules, through God, all things. It is the basis, 
when we have said our all concerning ether pos- 
sible reasons, of our expectations as to prayer. 
Tyndall says, " It is a matter of experience that 
an earthly father listens to the requests of his chil- 
dren, and if they do not ask amiss takes pleasure 
in granting their requests. We know that this 
compliance extends to the alteration within cer- 
tain limits of the current events of earth. It is 
no departure from the scientific method to place 
behind natural phenomena a Universal Father, 
who, in answer to the prayers of his children 
alters the currents of those phenomena." Not 
asserting it to be proved that such a Father is 
there, he admits that the conception is according 
to the " Scientific Method." This individual voli- 
tion, this executive will in God and in man, dis- 
turbs not, so far as we can see, any existing laws. 
If needed, this could indeed be done. For God 
is their superior. Nor does law, at its last an- 
alysis, stand for anything save will. Fate and 
chance have no place in a universe that has in it 
a God. He, as an idea, excludes all thought of 



112 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

them. Law is a constant mode of divine volition. 
We see it in his plan. Plan never works itself. 
It is worked out by will. Indeed, there are those 
who conceive of all " laws of nature as immuta- 
ble only in tendencies and not in results." Law 
is considered as always trying to fulfil its tenden- 
cies. But these tendencies are always to be used, 
as far as may be by man, and in a sovereign way 
by God. The illustration of the view is the 
tendency of water to run down hill. The ten- 
dency is immutable. But God throws a mountain 
in the way, and forms the lake; and the water 
does not run down hill. And man builds his res- 
ervoir and puts in his pumping machinery ; and 
the result is that water runs up hill, its natural 
tendency not destroyed, but other laws are 
brought to bear, and so other results are obtained. 
No law is altered, none suspended. And this is a 
view not without worth as an answer to certain 
objections urged by those whose sole conception 
of law is. that of mechanical, or some other form 
of physical, force. For law is not force, but is 
simply a mode of exerting the only force in the 
universe, the force of mind. Plan can be exe- 
cuted only by will. 

And this leads up to that conception of the 
immanence of God in his universe which is just 
now attracting attention. It is simply the reviv- 



PRAYER AS RELATED TO NATURAL LAW. 1 1 3 

ing of an ancient conception, and its investiture 
in modern garb. It is true that this doctrine of 
the divine immanence may be held in such a form 
as to differ in nothing from the old Pantheism. 
The extreme of the view holds men as " tid-bits 
of God." And all truth and error, all right and * 
wrong, all things and beings, may be considered 
as having lost their separateness. They are bub- 
bles on the sea of general being. Individual ex- 
istences, at most, are considered as rising for a 
mftment to the surface, to be resolved back into 
a kind of protoplasmic God. But any single con- 
ception of this kind, unmodified by related con- 
ceptions, runs into extravagance. Duly held, 
with its correlative doctrine of the divine person- 
ality, this idea is not only helpful, but it is ex- 
planatory. It opens a wide field of most inter- 
esting inquiry. It is the best antidote to the 
merely mechanical conception of law and force, 
and of God as standing among them rather than 
working in them. It certainly relieves many 
minds perplexed about prayer, and that too at 
some points where current views have failed to 
satisfy them. It is a view that accords with 
some very remarkable verses of the Scripture, 
which teach not only overruling, but indwelling. 
Another shall give us the doctrine. He says : 
" All the forces which control the physical uni- 
8 



114 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

verse, all the feelings which move in the moral 
and emotional world, are but the manifestation 
of the indwelling power of God ; all the mysteries 
of the evening heavens, the relations of the ma- 
terial atoms and the unending miracles of organi- 
zation of life, are only the utterance of the wis- 
dom of God. Without him there is neither mat- 
ter nor force, neither thought nor feeling, neither 
life nor organization. His presence is the essen- 
tial existence of all things." * The conception is 
just, but it must not stand alone. " In him we 
live and move and have our being." " By him all 
things consist." But it is exactly as true that 
there is " One God who is over all," as well as 
"through all and in you all." Those who are 
pressing beyond its due bounds the doctrine of 
the immanence of God, are impatient of any 
words which describe God as working in any 
other way than in his universe. In their haste to 
make him immanent they make him impersonal. 
Immanence is only a part of the omnipresence 
which is as much without as within, as much over 
and above as in and through, as actual in super- 
intendence as in indwelling. While avoiding the 
one error of a too mechanical theory, we must 
equally refrain from the narrowness which would 
destroy immanence itself by denying any other 

*Roe, in "God Reigns." 



PRAYER AS RELATED TO NATURAL LAW. 1 1 5 

method of the divine presence. We must hold 
firmly to an actual and objective universe, itself 
separate, in existence, from the God who created 
it once and sustains it ever. We must maintain 
our belief in fixed law, in impersonal forces, and 
in personal will. Says Le Compt in his " Evolution 
in Relation to Religious Thought :" " We are com- 
pelled to acknowledge an infinite and immanent 
Deity behind phenomena, but manifested to us 
on the outside as an all-persuasive energy. If 
we could understand the relation of physical -phe- 
nomena to brain-changes, then we might hope to 
understand more perfectly than now the relation 
of God to nature." In such utterances there is 
no confusion of thought. For phenomena are 
approachable from within as well as from with- 
out. Mere physical science comes only in the 
latter way. A broader philosophy must take in 
the facts of mental science and of moral convic- 
tion. It must see that God startds related to all 
things, as man stands related to some things. 
The soul stands related to the body; so does the 
animal life — though they are not the body. 
Only we must be careful not to think of God as 
a mere all-pervading energy like gravitation. For 
the ever-present gravitation is due to his ever- 
present volition. The conception is still allowa- 
ble whereby we say " God is a mathematician." 



Il6 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

He looks dozvn from heaven, and we look up to 
him. But he is a " God afar off as well as nigh at 
hand." " His eyes behold the children of men." 
And yet we are "temples of the Holy Ghost," 
and " God dwelleth in us." He created, and he 
remains in his creation. Sustenation is the suc- 
cessive throb of creative energy. When in prayer 
we ask him to " come," we are not more correct 
than when we own him " who is and was." It is 
not less spiritual to think of him as presiding over 
his works, nor is it less gross, as some would have 
it, to think of him as working in them. Control 
is as essential as abiding. How grandly, in one 
of his loftiest moments of poetic insight and spir- 
itual feeling, does the Psalmist set forth his con- 
ception alike of the immanence and the superin- 
tendence of God, in the one hundred and thirty- 
ninth Psalm : " If I ascend into heaven, thou art 
there. If I make my bed in hell, behold thou 

art there." It is immanence. But he immedi- 
ately adds, "Thy hand shall lead me, and thy 
right hand shall hold me." It is control from 
without. There are those who feel the difficulty 
of prayer when they consider law as fixed and 
universal. Equally would some be hampered in 
prayer did they think only of the immanence of 
God. To whom pray ? To self, as " part and 
parcel of God ? " Hold even rein over both con- 



PRAYER AS RELATED TO NATURAL LAW. 1 1 7 

ceptions, let them draw together, and prayer can 
be seen both as inspired of God and answered by 
him. He is nearer than we to ourselves. He is 
sovereign of law, and its vitality, as well. God is 
within all, behind all, before all, above all. He 
is executive as well as legislative and judicial 
power. We have to ask and seek and knock in 
prayer. Our mood and our need require it. And 
there must be one to whom this mood and need 
is correlated. But we are also to remember that 
God is in the closet before we come, is the sus- 
taining energy of our souls while we pray, keeps 
up the beating of the heart and the coursing of 
the blood while we kneel, supplies, while we are 
at the exercise, the vigor to the mind as we think 
* and the ardor of the soul while we feel. What 
should hinder, then, that he, while leaving us free, 
should influence the thought and the words and 
guide the petition toward the answer ? We are 
not to think of him only as of a constantly equal 
presence, as is the air, but he is a person who is 
also spiritually nearer or more remote from our 
souls, who can " come " or " depart," who can 
give or withhold his favorable " presence " at will. 
It is an altogether mechanical conception of 
the Holy Spirit of God to think of him as a con- 
stant volume of presence, and of our wish and 
will as the only thing that regulates the measure 



Il8 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

actually bestowed. He is not like the gas or the 
water furnished to your dwelling with just so 
much pressure to the inch, the amount received 
depending upon the angle to which you turn the 
thumb-screw of the burner or the faucet. It is 
not the even pressure of a constant quantity. 
That the Holy Spirit was historically given at a 
definite point in human history " when Pentecost 
was fully come," is a dispensational truth. Nor 
do we pray, in asking now for the Holy Spirit, 
that a certain period promised in the Old Testa- . 
ment may arrive. In that sense the Spirit has 
come. But in the sense of personal nearness we 
do rightly pray that he may come to men. " If 
ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts 
unto your children, how much more shall your* 
heavenly Father give his Holy Spirit to them 
that ask Him." "God is a Spirit." A spirit is 
defined as " a supernatural intelligence conceived 
of as apart from any physical organization." 
The Infinite Spirit is everywhere, working differ- 
ently as now he creates and now he upholds the 
world; as here he frowns on sin and there he 
smiles on obedience; as he departs with his 
favor, though present with his notice, from the 
guilty, and as he fulfils to faithful souls the 
promise, " I will draw near unto you." The bear- 
ing of these views on the question of prayer as 



PRAYER AS RELATED TO NATURAL LAW. I Iy 

related to physical law is obvious. To many per- 
sons, some of these views are wonderfully help- 
ful and even inspiring. 

And yet we must always be on our guard, and 
make a sharp distinction between the fact and 
our theory of it. The fact of answered prayer 
would not be less credible if we were utterly un- 
able to construct even a proximate theory of 
God's method. We can have a working theory, 
even as do those who speak of "gravity" and 
" inertia," which are assumptions explaining so 
many facts that they are almost considered as 
proven. What is called " chemical law " is in the 
same list. And the so-called " laws of life " are 
largely names for our generalization. We talk 
of the plant and of the animal life. But we have 
as yet no undisputed definition of life, and know 
nothing of what it is save that it is. The fact 
does not depend on the definition or on the 
theory of it. And if we could have no theory at 
all of prayer but had only the fact, that fact 
would stand fast as irrefragable. And yet, to see 
here and there, as in other things, glimpses and 
drawings of divine method, is to many persons 
not a little helpful when they come to pray. 



120 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 



CHAPTER VII. 

NEGATIVE ANSWERS TO PRAYER, 

A FEW y^ars since, the praying men and women 
of this American nation were on their knees be- 
fore God. The President of the United States 
had been wounded by a shot fired by a miscreant 
hand. As the long, hot weeks went by, the inter- 
cession of Christians for his recovery became 
more and more earnest. If ever supplication 
could avail, it would seem to be when, from 
church and household, men of every party and 
every creed lifted up prayer that his life might 
be spared. Singularly enough, thousands of men, 
mistaking their eagerness for faith, made his re- 
covery a kind of prayer test. Looking back now, 
those of us who passed through the trial of the 
weary days find that we had begun to think that 
* there was in that case an opportunity for God to 
speak out, and the whole nation would own the 
fact that prayer was a power. We fondly hoped 
that for the strengthening of the godly and the 
confounding of the scoffer, he would do this 
thing. To us, the interests of religion seemed to 



NEGATIVE ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 121 

demand that God should restore the loved Presi- 
dent. But Garfield died; and the disappointed 
men who had prayed so long, at first felt that 
the prayer had been all in vain. Time has given 
us perspective ; let us look and see whether there 
was lack of answer. 

I. God's " no " is as really an answer as God's 
"yes" I deny my child ; telling him that he 
cannot have what he asks. Is not that as much 
a reply as when I give him what he wants ? Is 
not a negative answer an actual answer ? Must 
God always say " Yes " ? If so, we are the gods 
dictating to him, and he has dethroned himself 
in our behalf. How a child in your home 
shrieked when you took from his hand the razor 
he had seized ; and how unkind he thought you 
that you did not grant him his wish to retain it. 
But you denied him, for the best reasons. He 
doubted your fatherly heart at first. But, child 
though he was, he never thought that your denial 
of his wish was the same thing as taking no notice 
of his request. God must have room to say " no ; " 
and he must answer in that way a good many 
petitions. 

II. In saying "no" to some prayers God 
answers them more wisely, not to say more fully. 
By denying the prayer of a nation for the suffer- 
ing President, he taught us some truths this na- 



122 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

tion needed to consider. God's sovereignty, as 
we see it now, would have been put in peril in 
the minds of thousands, and the prayerfulness 
evoked would have never been so grand a moral 
exercise, but for those lingering, weary weeks. 

III. We sometimes ask out of the line on which 
God is acting. It is now known that from the 
first the wound was fatal, and that an absolute 
miracle would have been needed to restore Gar- 
field to health. It now transpires that the phy- 
sicians, after the first ten days, knew that recov- 
ery was impossible. Medical science never has 
recorded an instance of a ball piercing that ver- 
tebra, in which the result was other than fatal. 
It turns out now that we were praying for a thing 
as unlikely — had we known what now we know — 
as if we had asked for a second sun to rise in the 
east. 

But why did not God perform the miracle re- 
quired and raise up the wounded President ? To 
do so would have taken the world back 1800 
years, to the last great miraculous era, when God 
wrought miracles on men's bodies. It would 
have been to turn back human history as an on- 
ward development of God's plan : to set back the 
world's moral progress for eighteen centuries. 
-Was it worth his while to do that thing ? Would 
any man, seeing what that miracle involved, have 



NEGATIVE ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 1 23 

had God do that thing, even to save so precious 
a human life for a few years? The sufferer, had 
his paralysis allowed him to see all that it in- 
volved, would not have desired his life prolonged 
at such a price. Nor would we, knowing what 
now we know, though praying none the less for 
him, have asked that impossible thing of a re- 
covery. The ages must not retrograde. The 
kingdom goes forward to meet the new class of 
wonders yet to come, that shall suit the better 
time. As the burning bush of Moses and the de- 
scending altar flame of Elijah were the fit mira- 
cles in their age, but nothing like them could 
possibly occur in the New Testament day, so in 
our time, these wonders, in that grade in which 
the miraculous healing or even resurrection of 
Garfield might have occurred, are things of a 
past era. They are morally needless to-day. It 
was the peculiar stage of the kingdom of God 
that made them needful, credible, possible. They 
were epochal, not in Moses* time, but in Christ's 
time. In the one great epoch that remains, the 
old wonders are not to repeat themselves. The 
Mosaic miracles and those of the First Coming 
have each their specific character. The Second 
Coming is to be as distinctive. The eras do not 
repeat themselves in the evolution of God's 
thought. 



124 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

IV. Nor was the praying necessarily uninspired 
by the Divine Spirit because the specific thing 
was not to be granted. God wants us to be prac- 
tised in the using of our judgment. When in the 
" first commandment " we are taught to " love 
God with all the mind" the use of our intelligent 
nature is demanded. Mentality is to feed the 
flame of affection. Yet not a little of our men- 
tality is wrongly developed, and must be always 
liable to error. Nevertheless, "the mind" is re- 
quired, and it is " accepted according to what a 
man hath and not according to what he hath not." 
And praying for what, in its best judgment, a 
praying nation asked, its prayer was accepted as 
an act of devotion. Some prayers wait for years 
before they can get those answers which, when 
they come, are better than the things requested. 
John saw " golden vials filled with odors which 
are the prayers of the saints " — the unanswered 
petitions accepted as the requests of a piety that 
God holds precious. Who shall say what of pro- 
tection from harm, or what of magnificent bless- 
ing lies waiting in the treasures of God, and is 
yet to be bestowed in answer to a nation's 
prayers ? God has notched the calendar of his 
centuries, and keep3 mete and measure of the ri- 
pest hours for the largest answers of accumulated 
blessing. And though, sometimes, before they 



NEGATIVE ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 125 

call he hears, he may wait till a generation has 
gone before he brings the promised blessing to 
his Israel. When John Knox prayed " Give me 
Scotland or I die," it was a prayer that covered 
whole centuries; and answer still comes. When 
Judson had Burmah and Livingstone had Africa 
laid upon them as a burden, each praying for the 
country to which he gave his life, the prayer 
could not be answered in a day. The " golden 
vial " still has odor, and the prayer still rings in 
heaven, and the answer still comes as the years 
go by. There are prayers of long range, but the 
shot will strike the mark at length. Our prayers 
may go further than we think, as they may mean 
more than we realize when we ask. The near 
and specific thing involves so much this side of 
the possible answer that we think we are denied, 
though Omnipotence may be waiting on Omnis- 
cience to do the things that must precede and 
accompany the answer. 

V. The answer has sometimes come in ways 
that we did not expect. We looked for sudden, 
almost miraculous, reply. And a far-off spring 
was touched, and another and a distant event oc- 
curred. We did not see at the time that the two 
were related, or that they had anything like 
answer to our prayer in them. 

Never was more earnest petition than when 



126 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

Jacob, fugitive from home through his own folly, 
vowed his vow, " If God will be with me and will 
keep me in the way I go, and will give me bread 
to eat and raiment to put on, so that I come again 
to my father's house in peace, then the Lord 
shall be my God and this stone that I have set up 
for a pillar shall be God's house." Twenty years 
had gone by. Every petition had been granted. 
The exact things he had asked had been be- 
stowed. The exile had found a home, the starv- 
ing one bread, the hunted man a relief from his 
furious brother. Back he had come to his 
father's house in peace. Flocks and herds 
abounded. Not a form of prosperity could be im- 
agined that had not been given him. But it had 
all seemed to come so naturally that he had failed 
to mark the providential hand. Had some sud- 
den fortune not half so large fallen from the skies, 
that would have been an answer to be noted. 
But flocks increasing year by year, and wealth 
coming in steadily from his fields, and the troops 
of friends always gathering about him, and the 
prosperity so continuous and through such nat- 
ural avenues of increase, had seemed to him a 
matter of course and not an answer to his prayer. 
But there came a day when God reminded him 
of his overdue vow. And then it all flashed upon 
him. Not a thing had come, in all his fortunes, 



NEGATIVE ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 1 27 

by chance; not an item of his wondrously 
changed circumstances but had been ordered 'by 
his God, And he woke to see that this was an- 
swered prayer. He hastens to Bethel to fulfil 
his solemn promise, and at every step he recalls 
the fact that God has signally blessed his ways. 
From another quarter than he had expected, the 
deliverance came. He had limited God; had 
fixed on the spot in the heavens which must be 
parted ; but God had sent answers from the other 
side of the sky. How much that man lost 
by not watching for the mercies that had been 
falling on his path during every day of those 
prosperous years! How much more gladness, 
had he not mistaken nature for providence, or, 
rather, had he not forgotten that Providence 
uses nature in the answers of prayer ! He had 
had for years that for which he was daily pray- 
ing, and did not know it. And the answer he 
held to be negative was such only in his own 
failure to recognize its positive character and its 
gracious abundance. Perhaps it were neither un- 
, just nor uncharitable to affirm that much which 
goes under the name of prayer is not prayer at 
all. A prayer of Sir Samuel Romelly is on rec- 
ord, as follows : " Almighty God. Creator of all 
things, Source of all wisdom, goodness, and 
virtue, and happiness, I bow down before Thee — 



128 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

not to offer up prayers, for I dare not presume 
to think or hope that thy most just, unerring, and 
supreme will can in any degree be influenced by 
any supplication of mine; nor to pour forth 
praises and adorations, for I feel that I am un- 
worthy to offer them ; but in all humility and with 
a deep sense of my own insignificance to express 
the thanks of a happy and contented being for 
the innumerable benefits which he enjoys. . . . 
I cannot reflect on these things and not express 
my gratitude to Thee, O God, from whom all this 
good has flowed." The prayer from which this is 
taken is, every sentence of it, in exactly the tone of 
that here quoted. And the question occurs at 
once, " Is this prayer ? " The author of it says 
that he does " not offer up prayers." What then 
does he do ? He recounts blessings, and says he 
"expresses thanks," but immediately adds that 
he does not pray " to pour forth praises." He 
uses humble words, calls himself " unworthy," and 
calls God " source of all virtue and wisdom and 
happiness," and yet says he "does not. pour forth 
adorations." Again we ask, what does he do? 
The prayer asks nothing; not even its own ac- 
ceptance as a prayer. It is simply an " expres- 
sion," as he himself calls it. It is an utterance of 
self-relief, an expression of gratitude that does 
not even ask permission to " offer praises " to the 



NEGATIVE ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 1 29 

One from whom these things that stir the heart 
do come. Its drift is toward thankfulness. But 
it insists upon not offering "praises." Yet why 
a man should deprecate " praises " and then " ex- 
press thankfulness," except in hope that God 
would hear the expression of it, one cannot well 
see. If God can hear the thankfulness, then he 
can hear the "adorations," also the "prayers," 
also the " praises " — certainly the one as well as 
the other. The prayer looks like a studied at- 
tempt to do the thing and yet not to do it; to at- 
tempt to give vent to a natural impulse of fitness 
and gratitude; but the good impulse is beaten 
back by the bad theory, which is most inconsist- 
ently applied. He is uttering a monologue, 
which, though addressed to God, ought not to 
be, on his wrong theory of prayer. It will not 
be unjust, if we take the genial man at his word, 
and decline to call his " vocal musings " by the 
name of prayer. Let us hope, however, that in- 
consistent enough to address a prayer to "Al- 
mighty God," which he calls " not the offering of 
prayer," his heart got the better of his mistaken 
theory in the end, and that he came to God at 
length in prayer and praise and petition, all of 
them sweetened with his humility and gratitude. 
VI. So, too, prayer may not yet, in a given 
case, have got on beyond that general sense of 
9 



130 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

fitness and proper respectfulness in which so 
many stop. Men say " I hope and pray " that this 
or that may be granted. Some use words of 
opening and closing prayer much as one would 
write " Dear Sir " at the opening, and " Yours 
truly " at the close of a letter. The invocation 
and the closing ascription are the customary 
and decorous forms, to be as carefully employed 
as is any other formula of good breeding and 
polite address. We would not have men less 
careful for proper forms in which to open or 
close their prayers, especially when leading the 
devotion of others. But the devotional is more 
than the decorous, and prayer is more than the 
direction of an epistle. And there must be some- 
thing between the opening words and the conclu- 
sion. The petition should not be omitted from 
the prayer. What would be thought of a peti- 
tion that petitions for nothing ? He who addresses 
a letter " To the President, Executive Mansion," 
and signs his name to the letter at the close, but 
inserts nothing of moment between, is a trifler. 
He cannot be said to ask anything of the Presi- 
dent. Blank petition is next kin to blank prayer. 
Forms are well, though many a petition that was 
not in due form has received consideration from 
the Executive of the Nation. Even if a man who 
contents himself with a few moments of such 



NEGATIVE ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 131 

prayer morning and evening, may satisfy thereby 
an easy conscience, he cannot hope to obtain an 
actual answer to a petitionless prayer. One 
should not indeed fail to " enter the closet," as 
the Lord commanded ; but we should fill up the 
form with the fit words from an earnest heart. 
John Quincy Adams could say that never had 
he laid down at night without repeating the 
child's prayer his mother taught him, " Now I lay 
me down to sleep." Hundreds repeat regularly, 
at the bedside every night, the Lord's Prayer. 
Better the form of words than nothing. For, by- 
and-by, when there are inward movings toward 
real prayer, the strangeness felt by those who 
never kneel before their Maker will not be ex- 
perienced. Accustomed to use the language, 
they will not be affrighted at the exercise. And 
then, too, the form of fit words may catch and 
grapple with the genuine feeling, and the body of 
the prayer come to throb with actual life. 

It must be confessed also that some good men, 
afraid of forms, allow to themselves a kind of 
rambling in prayer which they would never em- 
ploy elsewhere. Word suggests word, and the 
prayer is without form and void. An address to 
man, as inconsequential, as incoherent, would be 
absurd. Such a prayer written out would amaze 
the man who offers it. A letter to a friend would 



132 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

have at least some general order. A conversa- 
tion in a parlor or by the wayside, would have 
some one theme pursued to its close before an- 
other topic was named. Shall we permit our- 
selves, in this miscellaneous address to God, 
rambling repetitions, sentences without connec- 
tion, words used because we have heard them em- 
ployed statedly in family or public prayer, with 
pauses in which one stops to think what next is 
to be said and fills up the gap by using some one 
of the many names of God, — are these the 
prayers that can claim answers ? Persons unused 
to the exercise are not indeed to be criticised 
unduly. The heart may be full when the vocab- 
ulary is scant. And a young Christian is to be 
encouraged to pray with others as well as in the 
closet. But when years have gone by, a Chris- 
tian, leading the devotions of his brethren, should 
school himself to orderliness and method and 
precision in prayer. Why not a Christian min- 
ister as careful about the public extemporaneous 
prayer as about his sermon ? Why not a solemn 
recalling, before a word is uttered, of the theme, 
the material, the adoration, the petition of his 
prayer ? For what is he to ask ? If for more 
things than one, let him seek that they have 
orderly presentation, not only for his own mental 
and moral helpfulness in the exercise, but that 



NEGATIVE ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 1 33 

his hearers may follow the order of his thought 
without distraction to their devotion. And, 
above all, the God to whom he speaks is the God 
of order. God knows and accepts us in our act 
of seeking out fit words, and mental as well as 
moral orderliness of thought and feeling, when 
we approach Him. For prayer is not a spasm of 
excited feeling that is careless of all words, — ex- 
cept indeed under those sudden occurrences when 
there is no time for thought. Then the cry of 
agony, or the appeal for help, bursts forth. 
" Lord save or I perish " is the cry of the sinking 
disciple. But the prayer of the closet, of the 
household or the sanctuary, is to be thoughtful as 
well as earnest, careful as well as devout, orderly 
as well as hearty. There is to be simplicity 
rather than that incoherence and overflow of 
stilted phrase sometimes heard. We are not to 
fling separate sentences at God as men discharge 
missiles into the air. And we cannot wonder 
that such petitions, so aimless and scattering, do 
not bring answers. When the man is more in 
earnest the prayer will be direct and specific: 
and then the suppliant may find that the answers 
which had seemed to be denied are really be- 
stowed, and the apparent refusal is reversed. 

And the prayer may wait an answer until it be- 
comes a genuinely Christian prayer. Prayer in 



134 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

the case of a man who has known little about 
Christ may be accepted. Many a devout Jew 
has been so situated in life that the proof of 
Christ as the Messiah has never come fairly be- 
fore him. In such cases acceptance may have been 
had through the Christ who was unrevealed to the 
soul. Says another, " The northern Aurora lights 
our midnight skies with scintillations emanating 
from magnetic vortices whose locality is unknown 
to us. So we can conceive of faith in a mercy 
without a known atonement and prayer without 
a revealed Saviour, as looming up in the radiant 
twilight to the eye of a heathen seer, because of 
the secret history of such prayer in its movement 
among the mediatorial councils of God." (Phelps* 
" Still Hour.") But for men of intelligence, liv- 
ing in this nineteenth Christian century, prayer 
that omits to take Christ as the way of access to 
God can 6nly do so in express neglect of his own 
words, " No man cometh to the Father but by 
me." Prayer has one avenue to the heart and 
heaven of God. Not now to discuss the relation 
of atonement to prayer, it may suffice to say that 
if the original right to pray is gone through sin, 
and if the original instinct of prayer is beaten 
back and overpowered by the stronger heart, the 
" new and living way " of access is the permitted, 
if not the necessary way. To refuse it would be 



NEGATIVE ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 1 35 

a slight and an offence. A guilty conscience 
craves a way for acceptance before an offended 
God ; a weak soul craves another's strength, an 
overpowering sense of one's unworthiness craves 
some other name that is worthy, as a plea. " Of 
what are you thinking; for you seem lost in 
thought, this morning ? " "I was thinking," said 
the carter to the merchant who had spoken so 
kindly to him, " that if I was only able, I would 
buy that cargo," pointing to a vessel just ready 
to discharge her freight. " What would you do 
with it ? " " Sell it for enough advance to clear 
off the mortgage on my little home." " Go and 
bid it off." " But they won't listen to my bid." 
" Tell them you bid in my name, and here is a 
check to bind the bargain." At first as he bid, 
no notice was taken of him. By-and-by, he made 
a bid, and shouted loud enough for all to hear, 

" I bid in the name of ; " and he mentioned 

the name of the great merchant. It was enough. 
The cargo was his. So we are permitted to come 
"in his name." It is a Christian privilege to 
name a name always heard by the Father. If 
nature shuts the door, grace in Jesus Christ opens 
it anew with a plea never refused. The Christian 
theory of prayer is perfect, and the Christian 
practice of it is warranted. And yet a man whose 
creed is right, may have overlooked in feeling, 



I36 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

and omitted in practice, the privilege of asking 
" in Christ's name." And the answer may be 
withheld until, presenting in our faith the great 
plea, we gain, through Christ, a Christian accept- 
ance. 

And the deferred answer may be connected 
with our failure to take in the related truths in- 
volved in prayer. If Cicero might say that there 
is no knowledge that is not of use to the orator, 
then we may say also, that there is no knowledge 
of religious truth that is not of use to the pray- 
ing man. And God may hold off the response 
until we take up the truth that is unused and yet 
so near at hand. If the Bible is the World's 
Prayer Book, not only in its formulas and exam- 
ples, but also in its promises and in the truths it 
gives us, all of which minister to our devotion, 
then can God do a more kindly service than by 
refraining to give what we ask, until we make 
use of his Word in securing what may be called 
the material of prayer? He may wish to*mcite 
diligence in discovering truth. Made to wait, 
we may be led to ask why the answer delays, and 
so may come to seek in the Scriptures the larger 
truth. 

And when one more thing is added, the series 
of reasons for deferred answer may be deemed 
sufficiently long. "Ye ask and receive not, be- 



NEGATIVE ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 1 37 

cause ye ask amiss." The remissness named by 
the apostle is lack of spiritual desire. The prayer 
must wait for its answer until some wrong is 
taken out of the way. The wrong feeling toward 
a brother man, the quarrel the bitterness of 
which remains, the transaction which we are not 
willing to review calmly because afraid we may 
have to say that there is sin in it, the plea where- 
by we justify conformity to the world — are all to 
be considered when we stand waiting for the 
answer that does not come. We are made fo ask 
whether the cause is not in something we have 
done or not done. It will not take a large sin. 
A small bit of iron will disturb the magnetic 
needle. A small grain of sand will grate harshly 
in the delicate mechanism of the eye. The sin 
may be one so long petted and excused that we 
hardly see it as a sin at all. It may have woven 
itself into all the fabric of our social, and our 
business, and even our religious, life. A praying 
man, finding "dryness in prayer," should stop 
and ask for the reason. It will not do to say 
that one cannot always expect to feel in the same 
mood in religious exercises; nor to attribute 
one's weakness in prayer to God's arbitrary 
" shutting up of the heavens." It were better to 
reserve those for final reasons, if after having ex- 
amined ourselves honestly there is found no 



I38 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

reason within our own souls, or in the practices 
of our own lives. As Faber sings, 

" Oh, for the times when on my heart 
Long prayer hath never palled ; 
Times when the ready thought of God 
Would come when it was called. 

" What can have locked these fountains up, 
Those visures what hath stayed, 
What sudden act hath thus transformed 
My sunshine into shade ? 

" One thing alone, dear Lord, I dread : 
To have a secret spot 
That separates my soul from Thee, 
And yet to know it not. 

" If it hath been a sin of mine. 
Then show that sin to me, 
Not to get back that sweetness lost, 
But to make peace with Thee." 

Baffled in life, prayer returning with shorn wings 
to the place whence it began, access denied, com- 
fort departed, the man is thrown back upon in- 
quiry. And there may come to him the words 
" if I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will 
not hear me." The sin put away, the prayer can 
proceed. And the number of instances in which 
this experience of delay has been of use to a man, 
almost justifies the paradox of saying that the 
delayed answer is the quickest possible response 
of God. 

Is it then so hard to get answers ? By no 



NEGATIVE ANSWERS TO PRAYER. 1 39 

means. What one thing now named as a wrong, 
would we have God overlook ? To the simple 
sincere soul, putting away sin and seeking all 
righteousness, willing to serve and busy in all 
duty, is prayer hard ? Is there the forbidding 
bar ? No, no, cry thousands. The way is opened 
into the Holy Place. They have fellowship, in 
prayer, with God. And some of them who spoke 
once of answers withheld, now bear witness that 
deferred answer is not denied prayer. 



140 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

REACTIONS LEADING TO PRAYER. 

Promise is not always and only verbal. When 
the storms of a dreary winter have spent them- 
selves, men are wont to find in the softer airs of 
spring as they sweep over the earth, the promise 
of better things. 

" Spring's real glory lies not in the meaning, 
Gracious though it be, of her blue hours ; 
But it is hidden in her tender leaning 
To summer's richer wealth of flowers." 

Promise is sometimes given to meet the instinc- 
tive reaction from unbelief, mistrust, and des- 
pondency. There are hours of depression, in 
which Shakespeare can write no play and Milton 
no poem. Into every life there come rainy days. 
Things go wrong. The world drifts and the 
skies are far off. It is even worse when, through 
erroneous views of life and destiny, a man loses 
hope. How easy then to misread all history ! 
Herod wears the purple and Christ hangs on a 
cross. The pendulum stays on the other side of 
the arc. Nothing is sure but ill, and that is not 



REACTIONS LEADING TO PRAYER. I4I 

an absolute certainty. There is no faith, but 
only dead negation ; and the hands made to reach 
out to others and to be open upward to God, 
hang listlessly at one's side. If this continues 
life is not worth living. Pessimism is death to 
hopeful view and earnest action. And God lets 
sometimes a man and sometimes an age work its 
way by storm into the smoother seas beyond. 
Only by reaction can some men and some cen- 
turies be reformed. For men, seeing where hope- 
lessness leads them, start back. The lightning 
flash does not create, it only discloses the danger. 
In those reactionary moments a life without posi- 
tive faith is seen as a mistake, and men rouse 
themselves to ask whether there is not some- 
where a promise to which hope can attach itself ; 
something positive, instead of those old nega- 
tions. For we men are made to believe. Doubt 
is left-handed and goes off in wrong ways. The 
capacity for faith has its correlative in truth on 
which faith can rest. No man, no age ever made 
progresses by doubt, except as doubt led to the 
reaction of faith. Doubt never made a discov- 
ery of worth to the world. Never by doubt was 
the domain of knowledge widened by a hair's 
breadth. God gave us, as our greatest capacity, 
the power of believing on testimony. It is not 
what we are in capacity of natural powers that 



142 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

forms the limit of either our efficiency or our re- 
sponsibility. It is our power of going out of self 
and receiving alike knowledge and potency from 
God — in one word, our aptitude for faith — that 
gives us our dignity as men. It is not so much 
what we have as what we borrow when the lender 
is God, that makes us of worth as men. The 
foot, made to " go," as if we were not where we 
should be — made to go to another — is a typical 
fact. And equally so, the hand, made to be up- 
lifted and reached out, as if it had not what it 
wanted, and must take it as a descending gift 
from God above us — our hand receiving from His 
hand — is, equally, a typical fact. We must en- 
large our schedule of man's powers, and add to 
his power of reasoning and to his power of im- 
agining, the power of believing. We have been 
prosecuting, as an age, our religious inquiries 
mainly by reason. We must see our mistake in 
the resulting disquietude. And as clearly must 
we see that our success will come along the line 
of faith — a mightier force, as toward God, than 
reason. 

God leads sometimes by reactions. It is to be 
noticed that a reaction has begun from the ag- 
nosticism so prevalent a few years since. No- 
where, except in the semireligious speculations 
of a limited class of scientists, does the agnostic 



REACTIONS LEADING TO PRAYER. ' I43 

creed " we do not know/* have any place. It is 
the boast of the century that we do know, so 
positively, and about so many things. Why in 
one department alone so reluctant to be positive ? 
Why not, as men are shouting out their joy over 
scientific truth — not indeed seen to be absolutely , 
demonstrated in nature, but only shown to be 
necessary — why not the same exultation here ? 
The atomic theory, the nebular theory of the 
worlds, the theory of an interstellar ether, the 
principle of gravitation, are all inferential. No 
man dares say they are proven. Yet no man 
says before them the agnostic words " we do not 
know," or the pessimistic words "we cannot 
know," and " it is all in vain to know, even if we 
could." We have had the phrases " Inscrutable 
Power," " Power that makes for righteousness," 
" Unknowable Power" and others of like import. 
Is it not strange that the word " God " is avoided, 
and that, too, when Tyndall says it is " scientific 
method to place behind natural phenomena a 
Universal Father " ? But the reaction from all 
this is making itself felt. Frederic Harrison, 
not indeed in the interests of Christianity, as yet, 
but in that of fair thought, insists that the nega- 
tion of religion in scientific statement is unwise, 
and is unphilosophical as well. He says "the 
net result of the whole negative attack on the 



144 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

Gospel has perhaps been to deepen the moral 
hold of Christianity on society." He claims that 
" men turn from this negative attack with weari- 
ness and disgust." He insists that the phrase 
used by Mr. Spencer is " obviously only the flour- 
ish of a man who has nothing to say and who 
wishes to say something." Mr. Harrison's so- 
called " worship of humanity " is far enough from 
the full demand of his own premises, but to wor- 
ship something is better than nothing. He insists 
that the agnostics must contrive some kind of 
faith, the pessimists get hold of some sort of 
hope, or retire from an attempt to lead the 
thought of the ages. The great human heart is 
in earnest. The trifling, scoffing, contemptuous 
mood has had its day. Religion is no more to be 
pitied. It, in turn, has pity to give to men whose 
cherishing of agnostic tendencies is coming to be 
seen, even by themselves, as mistaken leadership 
in an age, on the banners of which, in every army, 
alike of philosophic thought and religious insight, 
are inscribed the words, " this is the victory that 
overcometh — even your faith." 

When it is once recognized, as it is sure to be, 
that faith is an instrument of human progress 
having its place beside reason, then pessimism 
will be dethroned and agnosticism be no longer 
the strange boast of men who exalt human 



REACTIONS LEADING TO PRAYER, I45 

knowledge. It will be seen that as the most of 
our alleged laws and forces of nature are not 
quite logically proven, but are believed in be- 
cause it is logically necessary to hold to them, so 
in religion, when reason has done her utmost, 
there is room for believing in what a moral 
necessity compels us to insist upon as truth. 
Then comes the question of " to what staple the 
last link of this chain is fastened." Intellectual 
and moral necessity require a God and an immor- 
tality. Made to believe, there is some one to be 
believed. The one to be believed must have ut- 
tered some word of promise. Hence that name 
" the Word." He is the incarnate Promise. We 
are made to trust, and he is the one to be trusted. 
He who made all the links of the chain has fast- 
ened it to the staple. 

Here come into the discussion the manifold 
verbal promises of the Bible. Had we but one 
of them it were an inestimable treasure. What 
of the " unsearchable riches " ? What of promises 
for every hour and every occasion ? Quoting 
is impossible. The whole volume is fitly called 
" the Word of Promise." It is one great appeal to 
men, who in view of it " ought always to pray." 

Is there coming a reaction in which the thought 

of the age shall not only recognize the Father, but 

shall be also prayerful ? It is instructive to note 
10 



146 TRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

God's methods in the past. A fact or doctrine 
in religion had fallen into desuetude. By a kind 
of moral reaction God has brought it forward 
again, and it has been so thoroughly fixed in the 
Christian consciousness that it can never wane in 
its brightness. Such was the case with the doc- 
trine of " Justification by Faith " which had fallen 
into the background. There came a mighty re- 
action. For men's hearts needed an assurance 
as to their spiritual standing; and to wait for 
justification until the close of life or until the 
final judgment, was to consign men to a kind of 
spiritual bondage that ministered always to fear. 
The reaction changed all this ; and men took in 
the fact that when we believe we are completely 
justified. The great truth filled Germany with 
song, and all northern Europe added its voice 
to the swelling chorus that welcomed the era of 
a believing Church. So, too, afterward, when 
religion had become a formality in England, 
there came the reaction, under the lead of Whit- 
field and Wesley; and religion as a personal ex- 
perience stood forth before the world. It was 
claimed that a man should know that he had 
" passed from death to life," and the inward " wit- 
ness of the Spirit" was declared to be the privi- 
lege of every believer. It was the era of experi- 
mental religion. It has been claimed that there 



REACTIONS LEADING TO PRAYER. 147 

has been likewise a missionary era ; God bringing 
in upon men a new sense of responsibility to give 
the Gospel to the world. Is there to come also 
a praying era ? Is it to dawn on men that pray- 
ing for men is as much a duty as the giving of 
money for their necessities ; that the other phil- 
anthropies that dignify and adorn our century are 
to have an addition to their force and number, 
by a newly used instrumentality, that of prayer ? 
For, a force at all, it must be of no mean rank 
among those whereby men are to be moved for 
the better. Praying for men is equally a duty 
with the setting before them an example of hon- 
esty, sobriety, and of every religious virtue. 
Praying for men is a debt due them, to be paid 
like any other obligation. And when one reads 
the glowing words of the grand old trumpet- 
tongued prophets, about prayer being made 
among all nations, when one hears them declare 
that God will pour out on the nations the " spirit 
of grace and supplication," is not one warranted 
in the belief that, at some time, all human 
thought shall turn toward God, and that in the 
very desolateness of prayerlessness, men shall be 
ready for the grand reaction whereby the world 
shall stretch forth its waiting hands of supplication 
toward heaven. At some time there must come 
an age of prayer. 



I48 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

And as human thought, through the reaction 
born of its necessity, must seek God at length, so 
each soul must seek God by way of rebound. 

It were indeed a more beautiful theory that 
each man, drawn by an inward and natural 
affinity and affection, should turn to God, as 
spontaneously as he breathes. Would it were so. 
But we are compelled to acknowledge a strange 
reluctance to go beyond a bare recognition of 
God. Nor is the fact that the logical compulsion 
of the intellect toward Him is overbalanced by 
the reluctance of the heart, to be denied because 
it is so sad and unfortunate a thing. And yet 
here comes in the reaction. The prodigal is a 
king's son in the far-off land. He begins to be 
in want* Forbidden to eat even the swine's 
food, half naked, sore of foot, and sorer in heart, 
he recalls the old home. Bread enough there, 
while he is perishing with hunger. In thousands 
of hearts there is a sense of coming to one's 
self, as though one had been under a sad spell 
of some evil power. The moral nature asserts 
itself. There is in every man a sort of race 
memory. No man can distinctly recall Eden; 
but there is a kind of dim far-away impression of 
better days for the race — days that were left 
long, long ago. They tell of a Russian prince, 
that he had been in early childhood spirited away 



REACTIONS LEADING TO PRAYER. 1 49 

from his home and brought up among rude fisher- 
men. But always there was a difference between 
him and the fishers' boys; always a dim half- 
conscious memory as of a better condition and 
other surroundings. The human soul experiences 
this sense of strangeness, of absence, of degrada- 
tion, of yearning for the Father's heart and home. 
It evokes prayer. " Father, I have sinned," bursts 
out from a pent-up heart. Nature in deep spirit- 
ual trouble is not atheistic. It knows there is a 
God. It turns to his Word. The key fits the 
lock. The promise meets the prodigal state. 
The Father meets the wanderer when a great way 
off; and they go back together — that forgiving 
father and that forgiven son — to the old home. 
The son had proposed to ask a servant's place, 
and begins to pray for it ; but before he could 
get so far on in his prayer as to say " make me 
as thy hired servant," he is interrupted by the 
Father's call for robe and ring. There is to be 
no service of years as a menial. He is received 
in the palace as a son. The prayer of his subse- 
quent gratitude is not given. Perhaps no words 
could express it. But we may be sure that the 
" prayer that differs in nothing from praise " was 
offered and accepted. 

So too, by parallel experiences on other lines, 
God has wrought on men by these great reactions 



150 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

of the moral nature. Not that wickedness is 
preparation for godliness, but that its results in 
this world wake reflection. And a man who has 
stood face to face with ruin has reasoned back to 
the fact of his sin, and then has prayed for for- 
giveness. What is termed " conversion " is often 
reaction divinely directed. The conscience and 
reason and the soul itself, its native wants laid 
bare, cry out for God. Such a man has some- 
times seemed to be on an eminence and looking 
down, by an intellect keenly alive, upon his soul 
spiritually dead. It became an agony that there 
was no stir of right feeling. He was convicted 
of not being convicted as he should have been. 
There is a strange contradictory deadness, of 
which a man is yet conscious. The soul, alert 
enough elsewhere, is unresponsive to divine call, 
and unmoved except as with a dull ache that is 
hardly a pain, at its spiritual condition. The 
very desperateness of a man whose nature will 
not vibrate at all to the touch of God, evokes a 
cry of anguish. It is the returning sense of pain 
in a body that has been bitten by the frost, and 
numbness is giving way to sensibility. It is the 
first promise of life. It is proof that deadness 
has not gone on so far as to death. And when 
the reaction, divinely conducted, has completed 
itself, the throb and thrill of life is an exquisite 



REACTIONS LEADING TO PRAYER. 151 

sensation. Then prayer is no more a wail, but 
a welcome relief to the man whose burden of 
death has given way to the swift-bounding step 
of prayerful and obedient life. 

To others, there is a strong sense of being led. 
They were in an Egypt and knew no way to 
Canaan. There was a pillar of fire and cloud. 
They were the subjects of a divine guidance. By 
a conspiracy of circumstances, the way was 
opened. This book read, that interview enjoyed, 
the song that began to sing itself in the soul, the 
sharp sentence that had in it the portable wisdom 
of the ages, — by these myriad ways of environ- 
ment and guidance, God has opened the gate of 
life to them. In his wonderful allegory, Bunyan 
has made a human soul start on a pilgrimage. 
Through various experiences it passes, but there 
is always guidance over a prescribed road. And 
running through the whole conception is the idea 
of the wish and the will of the King, to which 
there must be submission. Even when we recog- 
nize not a little of the human instrumentality, 
there is an overruling, so that we are divinely led. 
It sometimes takes even the form of being " sent," 
of being called of God to a work or a mission. 
The sphere may be lowly or large. We are set 
in it to do a work. Life gets to be no more ac- 
cidental, because it is now providential. And 



152 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

the soul's inquiry, in deepest and most reverent 
prayer, is, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to 
do ? " Thenceforth life has had a dignity and a 
purpose ; and all this has been in exact moral re- 
action from the old unconcern. The new mission 
involves the idea of one who sends, and guides 
and gives success. Christ's words about a " Com- 
forter" whom he would send, become precious, 
and prayer rises from an earnest soul for the per- 
petual " Presence " who is to abide with us. 

But one of these more powerful personal reac- 
tions is found in those cases where the sin-con- 
sciousness compels prayer. To class one's self 
among sinners would have been as abhorrent as 
among criminals. Indeed, God had been not so 
much denied, as ignored as the standard of moral 
being. But there came to be the sense of sin. 
It was not the result of logical conceptions of 
God and duty. For the truest feelings of our 
human nature are often blind. They exist not as 
logical deduction from statements mathemati- 
cally precise concerning God and immortality. 
But they come in upon the soul, as love comes in 
to man or woman in the bond that ripens into 
marriage. So rise some of the strongest and * 
noblest emotions of the soul. The sense of the 
" I ought," than which nothing is more vital mor- 
ally, is at such hours singularly strengthened. It 



REACTIONS LEADING TO PRAYER. 1 53 

may carry all before it. It is revealed to the soul 
what that sense of the " I ought " involves. And 
there is guilt distinctly felt, in that, whereas 
other principles of our nature have had due play 
allowed them, this kingliest consciousness of 
them all has had no fit hearing and following. 
This is not only seen but felt as sin against self 
and toward the God whose nearness to the soul, 
and whose revelation in the soul, only half rec- 
ognized before, is' now discerned. All this has 
been more than a mistake. And the sin- con- 
sciousness is borne in upon the soul. Nor are 
these only ignorant men who are thus exercised. 
Some of the noblest men in every intellectual 
line of work, have been so moved upon. Plain 
men, too, whose testimony to the fact has been a 
thousand times given, are on the list of those 
who have felt this "sense of sin." They are 
neither on the one hand absolutely ignorant, nor 
on the other liable to urge an experience into a 
conformity to a theory. They make our best 
moral witnesses, when we appeal to the conscious- 
ness of human nature on any question where such 
testimony is desired. And it turns out that such 
men, in a reaction from a former state of indiffer- 
ence, have felt justly concerned ; have been, as 
they ought to be, burdened and distressed about 
this accumulated wrong. It has pressed prayer 



154 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

from lips that had not been used to pray. And 
when relief has come in conscious forgiveness, 
many have witnessed the moral phenomena and 
have said, " Behold, he prayeth." The result has 
been long years of clearer moral vision, a keener 
conscience has been established as the guardian 
of the soul from moral ills, and prayer has had 
its long record of gracious answer. The philo- 
sophy of this change comes, like all philosophy, 
after a recognition of the facts. It might be true 
if man were only an orderly machine, that all 
questions of God, Bible, duty, sin and salvation, 
have their logical settlement and precedence. 
But in fact man is more like a living organism 
than a machine. We love before we examine 
critically the emotion; we study after we feel. 
And in our human nature there are certain mov- 
ing principles on which we act before we can get 
material to study the action within. And the 
reality of moral change, and the rising of these 
moral feelings of sin forgiven, of death become 
life, of straying feet led along a loftier path of 
moral living, — all these are phenomena involving 
prayer at every step, the answers to which are 
recorded on the imperishable tablet of the soul 
itself. 

And this matter of prayer once established as 
a fact on one's experience, will throw a certain 



REACTIONS LEADING TO PRAYER. 1 55 

glow over all life. The prayerful mood is most 
beneficent — one might almost say munificent — 
for it enriches alike mind and heart. It opens, 
also, the vast treasure-house of God's word, and 
makes a man free to all its glorious surplus of 
spiritual wealth. The prayerful mood appropri- 
ates where the prayerless mood only speculates. 
It brings the treasure within one's grasp, and 
holds it as a personal possession. And one finds 
that there is no situation in life in which one 
cannot find, in God's Word, a promise to plead 
in prayer which exactly meets his need. The 
devout heart adores while it wonders at promises 
so pertinent that they seem written for one's own 
self — God's voice to one's own soul. And the 
Scripture tells us to " continue instant in prayer," 
to " watch unto prayer," and that " men ought al- 
ways to pray." " Prayer," says Jeremy Taylor, 
" is the peace of our spirit, the stillness of our 
thoughts, the evenness of our recollection, the 
rest of our cares, the calm of our tempest." And 
what are such words but the definition of that 
phrase, " a devout man that prays always." 

Nor, if we think of prayer as a state, rather 
than the act of pleading a promise, shall we have 
any view that is inconsistent with special seasons 
of peculiar prayerfulness. Sir Fowell Buxton 
writes, " I have always found my prayers an- 



156 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

swered, and in almost every instance I have re- 
ceived what I have asked for. Hence I feel per- 
mitted to offer up my prayers for everything that 
concerns me." But writing of that " division " in 
the Commons by which Emancipation was car- 
ried, he says, " If ever there was a subject which 
occupied our prayers it was this. Do you re- 
member how we desired that God would give me 
his Holy Spirit in that emergency? I kept that 
passage open in the Old Testament in which it is 
said, ' we have no might against this great com- 
pany, but our eyes are upon Thee.' I sincerely 
believe that prayer was the cause of that divi- 
sion." 

The history of great moral achievement 
abounds with these instances of men who do 
know that God hears and answers prayer. The 
usual praying mood was fanned into a flame," and 
want lent wing to petition. " The effectual ferv- 
ent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." 



THE CIRCULAR MOTION OF PRAYER. 1 57 



. CHAPTER IX. 

THE CIRCULAR MOTION OF PRAYER. 

Prayer, if we may use a word taken from phy- 
sics, is circular in its motion. It begins in God. 
It comes outward and onward and downward in 
its curve. It passes, in the lower point of the 
circumference of the circle, through our souls, 
taking up into its sweep our personality, employ- 
ing alike our wish and our want, our dependence 
and our freedom ; and, burdened with our adora- 
tion and petition, it rises again to him who is 
both its Author and Finisher. 

Mathematicians describe the curve as the line 
of beauty, and the circle as the perfection of 
curves. But naturalists are also claiming for the 
circle that all things in nature tend thereto. It 
is the type to which the tufted moss hidden away 
in lowliest dell and the grandest oak, monarch of 
the forest, are both trying evermore to conform 
themselves. Every plant, in stem, in leaf, in 
flower, tends, more or less, to the curve; and its 
whole orderly procession is also circular as it 
goes its round from root up through growth of 



158 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

fibre and comes on to seed. The year rings the 
trees with new wood and bark. The curved earth 
is swept by winds which, as they move on the line 
of curvature from equator to pole, have also, 
each storm for itself, the spiral motion. Each 
wave stirred by these winds rolls in a majestic 
curve, while the cyclones that sweep the plains 
are also rotary in their movements. That evolu- 
tion of nature, of which our philosophical natu- 
ralists have so much to say, is not claimed to be 
an advance along straight lines, but the advance 
is by circles that overlap each other ; their con- 
nection that of the links of a chain, each separate 
yet all attached. In the sky the planets have 
their vast swing in circles, and the comet, that 
seems a lawless intruder wandering at will, is 
formed to curve about the sun. In each human 
body there is the cycle by which we sleep and 
wake, adapting itself to the diurnal revolution 
of the earth. And as the earth never cuts exactly 
the same plane, but there is a slight variation 
that makes progress possible, so by a slight vari- 
ation from year to year, we get the growth of the 
human body, and by-and-by, its recession and 
degradation in death. Mental progress conies 
under the same law in the individual man, and we 
are being moulded and rounded by influences 
that press in one way at the beginning, and in an* 



THE CIRCULAR MOTION OF PRAYER. 1 59 

other in the ripeness of our intellectual life. The 
generations do their work of contributing to the 
world's progress in the same way, and all human 
thought grows because it swings. Yet the swing 
is so controlled that it endangers never the sta- 
bility of our humanity, and we have it for a pro- 
verb that " history repeats itself." Civilization, 
starting in the East, so illustrious as the cradle 
and earlier home, not only of man himself but of 
all those arts and sciences that dignify and adorn 
the race, has swept onward, itself a circle, until it 
passes about, the globe. But there has been the 
wheel within the wheel. For separate nations 
have risen and have run their round under the 
more vast sweep of the greater circle. Each 
nation in turn has touched the top, then the 
curve of retrocession has been observed, and then 
each has gone downward, often as rapidly as it 
rose. 

Surely there is something remarkable about all 
this. It is more than a hint. It is a teaching. 
It prepares us to find that in prayer also, the In- 
spirer and the Hearer are One, 

But the avoidance of the straight line is not 
more marked in mathematics and in nature than 
in morals. The motion of moral thought is es- 
pecially instructive. An Eden, if we had it not 
in historical document, might be argued from the 



l6o PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

moral powers of man as man. True he is now a 
sinner. Broken shaft and fallen capital and the 
glorious remnant of the ruin, all tell of what 
must have been in the palmy day of pristine 
magnificence. His body, naturalists tell us, is 
one which takes in all the types furnished by 
lower order; but it gives prophecy of no higher 
being to succeed him on earth. His mind has 
that kind of intelligence which works by reason, 
than which no higher kind can be conceived of 
by us. His soul is capable of moral sovereignty, 
of holding in the right hand the scqptre of right- 
eousness. He is a regal being in that he can, 
with God, rule over his sphere of being, putting 
all things in that sphere under the law of eternal 
right. Then there must have been a garden 
where, in the strong simplicity and vigor of ori- 
ental phrase, it may be said that " God walked 
with man in the cool of the day." " God created 
man upright." But he fell from his first estate, 
and there is not anywhere on earth a human soul 
that has not felt the result of that sin. But there 
was early promise, lest the race should lose heart. 
Schiller has said, " The fall was a giant stride 
in the history of the human race." And a great 
orator has said that " the fall was a fall upward." 
Both utterances, if always it is understood that 
we read into them God's plan of rescue through 



THE CIRCULAR MOTION OF PRAYER. l6l 

redemption, are less startling than they first ap- 
pear. The descending circle will, in the fulness 
of times, assume an upward curve. And the 
circle itself also circles about a higher purpose 
and "we rise to an elevation greater than that 
from which we had fallen. 

We talk of the moral progress of the human 
race; and rightly. Yet every gain has been by 
loss. And the survival of the fittest means the 
destruction of the unfit. So that in morals and 
religion we have the history of buried opinions 
out of whicl^ phoenix-like, come new and better 
manifestations. The grand old civilizations, with 
kingdoms in them monarchical in form, bearing 
the honored name of Egyptian, Assyrian, and 
Babylonian, held each a truth somewhat in ad- 
vance of all that preceded them. They were a 
grade higher than what they supplanted. But 
they could not live up to their own light. The 
retrograde motion always in sin brought each of 
these old nationalities down to death. The truth 
given them survived though they died. It is last 
year's leaf rotted to mould which ministers to this 
year's life. A nation inevitably recedes, left to 
itself. It climbs on the ascending curve only as 
it takes up God's thought. Nations always tend 
to run down. A force from the outside, some- 
times a little higher, sometimes vastly superior, 
ii 



1 62 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

must be thrust in to conserve them. Salt has 
perfect saltness only in the Gospel. But the 
saline power is felt before Christ comes, in the 
thought which God sends among the nations to 
"prepare the way of the Lord." The rise of 
Greek civilization and letters is a wonder and a 
mystery to those who do not see it as a provi- 
dence. It caught up and preserved all that it 
could carry and use. Plato taught at Athens 
because he first studied at Heliopolis on the Nile. 
Grateful at the theft that is never ignoble, Athens 
conserved and beautified as well as originated. 
At the height of her glory the strange and con- 
tradictory force of emigration set in, and the 
Greek swarmed the seaports of the Mediterra- 
nean, giving language, as Rome gave law, to the 
world. It is for a study to those whose curiosity 
is sanctified by religion, to trace out the evolu- 
tion of divine purpose, and tfie rich fruitfulness 
of national preparation for the Advent of Christ. 
All forms of thought gave tribute as they pre- 
pared the world for His coming who was to be 
the Second Adam, and to bring back a better 
Eden than that we had lost. The cycle came 
round, in the fulness of times. But if the prepa- 
ration was immense in one direction, the displace- 
ment was as great in another. The earlier home 
of the race was well-nigh deserted when the 



THE CIRCULAR MOTION OF PRAYER. 163 

Second Adam came. If the morning came to 
Western, it was because the night came to East- 
ern Asia. And when the Gospel, which gave the 
Asiatic the first opportunity, was by him rejected, 
its historic course was hurried on by the angel 
who sent the message from Europe, " come over 
into Macedonia and help us." And the disciples 
went, and the older continent relapsed into semi- 
barbarism ; and Africa, along the shores of which, 
in the earlier Christian centuries, the beacon fires 
of Christ's religion were lighted, but whose cen- 
tral nations rejected the rising light, became for 
centuries the Dark Continent. While, on the 
other hand, Gaul and Britain, formerly savage 
wilds of savage races, received the new light and 
came up to lead the world along the radiant path 
of these latter centuries. 

And here again we ask, is there not hint, sug- 
gestion, prophecy, in all this singular moral move- 
ment ? Would it not be strange if all other moral 
things working in these ways of revolution, prayer 
should be the grand exception, it alone having no 
part in what has been called so happily " these 
charmed circles of moral motion ? " 

The peculiar experience by which men become 
Christians shows the same great law. They are 
" convinced of sin." Led to consult the Bible, 
they find the command, " Repent, for the king- 



164 TRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

dom of heaven is at hand." Let us suppose a 
man to obey this command. He is ushered into 
the new moral sphere which involves a new set 
of facts, truths, and principles. In theory, a man 
should have first established each point of intel- 
lectual religion, and then proceeded to make each 
one of them vital to the soul. But in fact, the 
process is often reversed, and the man comes 
round to logical views through the processes of 
the heart. He has time to justify subsequently 
the fact of his mingled humility and manliness. 
For he finds law leading back to Gospel and the 
Gospel leading up to law. Sin he finds as the 
fact on which is posited salvation. To be 
wrecked is the condition of being saved. To be 
lost is the necessity unto being found. The 
whole system of things has these strange correla- 
tions. Moral truths go in pairs. The new regen- 
eration is of man and equally of God ; the utmost 
exertion of human powers is consistent with the 
utmost gift of God's Holy Spirit. And never are 
the highest powers of man exercised apart from 
the operation of that divine gift. Now all this 
experience involves corresponding religious truth. 
This going backward in repentance is unto a go- 
ing forward by faith; this going out of self is 
for the getting in under the sway of another, — all 
of which means that the entire moral system of 



THE CIRCULAR MOTION OF PRAYER. 165 

things is adapted to give to a man a change of 
heart and change of life. For the " repentance " 
is a turning of one's self away and the " conver- 
sion " is a turning directly about. The system in- 
volves a Christ who goes through a similar pro- 
cess of retrogression and then of exaltation. We 
learn of him as leaving heaven for earth, then 
leaving earth for heaven ; of his humbling of him- 
self that he might be exalted ; of his submission 
to all law when he was with us — law of which he 
himself was the Author. By suffering he re- 
deemed us from curse. And that phrase " a suf- 
fering Saviour " in itself were a contradiction, did 
it not span all the wide distance between the hu- 

• 

man and the divine nature in him. It shows, as 
well the depths of sorrow touched for us on the 
one hand, and the heights of glory to which we 
are lifted by him, on the other. Everywhere sal- 
vation is a circle; everywhere moral motion is 
revolution, is rotation. God works in cycles. 
The fall comes round to Paradise, the garden is 
primal in Genesis, the City of God is the finial in 
Revelation. The first words of John's Gospel are 
the complement of the first words of Moses' his- 
tory. What God the Father begins in the Old 
Testament, God the Son finishes in the New. 
Life commences in the fiat of God and completes 
itself in the incarnation of Jesus. If a writer on 



1 66 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

geology might happily say that the science of his 
love " presents itself with the magnificent specta- 
cle of immense creations travelling in a cycle and 
returning to the source of their being," how much 
more may a student of God's Word rejoice in the 
immense combinations of spiritual facts and the 
sweep of those procedures which show God fore- 
seeing the end from the beginning, and working all 
discoveries and achievements of man, and all his 
own special methods of grace and mercy as well, 
in vast circles, according to the purpose of his 
will which he purposed in Christ Jesus before the 
world began. 

If then prayer be an ordained factor toward 
such results, like all things else, it must have its 
cycle. Its sweep starts out from the firm hand 
of God, up to which it at length returns. 

In a wonderful passage of the Scripture we are ' 
taught "the Spirit helpeth our infirmities: for we 
know not what we should pray for as we ought; 
but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us 
with groanings which cannot be uttered. And 
he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the 
mind of the Spirit, because he maketh interces- 
sion for the saints according to the will of God." 

The passage is an argument. It claims that 
prayer has celestial beginning as well as ending ; 
that God cannot deny himself; that what the 



THE CIRCULAR MOTION OF PRAYER. 167 

Spirit incites the Father must hear; that what 
the Spirit puts into the heart of the praying man 
must be known to him to whom the prayer is ad- 
dressed ; that prayer is more than human petition, 
being prompted by God ; that the things asked, 
when we pray truly, are those which he incites 
us to ask in order that he may bestow them; 
that the soul submitting itself to the motions of 
the Spirit is guided in the things desired ; that 
man's voluntariness in prayer is not lessened be- 
cause there is also, equally, voluntariness on the 
part of God ; that the mind of a devout man and 
the mind of the Spirit work as one in the peti- 
tion, and that God cannot refuse what he inspires ; 
and that the mind of the Spirit and the mind of 
God work alike in the asking and in the answer. 
We can argue forward or backward; forward 
from the prayer, or backward from the answer ; 
and both results meet in God. 

If any man shall urge that the prayer of a man 
should not move the Great God, here is the an- 
swer; for God moves the prayer. If any say, 
man is too feeble, here is the answer ; for here is 
the might of God put first into petition and next 
into response. If any shall say that prayer pre- 
sumes, here is the proof that the presumption 
would be on the part of him who should urge 
that God could not or would not be as much the 



l68 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

inspirer as the hearer of man when he obeys the 
command, " thou, when thou prayest, enter thy 
closet and pray unto thy Father, and thy Father 
shall reward thee." 

Paul's wondrous circular argument not only 
meets all objections, but it grandly assures one 
to see that God must "know the mind of the 
Spirit " in " making intercession according to 
the will of God." So that the line of the poet is 
th$ best commentary on the verse of the apostle : 

11 Prayer is the breath of God in man 
Returning whence it came." 

And this conception of prayer as circular in its 
movement is confirmed by many a chosen text of 
the Word of God. The mechanism — to use a 
further word drawn from physics — of prayer is 
clearly set forth in the Book of Daniel. We see 
the circle at the point of its circumference where 
it touches and takes up the prophet's cry as a per- 
sonal force. He says "while I was yet speak- 
ing," in prayer, " Gabriel, being caused to fly 
swiftly, touched me and said, ' O Daniel, at the 
beginning of thy supplication the commandment 
came forth and I am come to show thee ; for thou 
art a man greatly beloved." Notice that the 
prayer, not at its ending alone, but at its starting, 
has celestial impetus. The commandment came 
forth with the prayer ; the answer begins with the 



THE CIRCULAR MOTION OF PRAYER. 169 

beginning of the petition, and the petition is itself 
a part of the answer. He has only knelt, and be- 
gun to adore. The waiting angel is there before 
a sentence is framed. Counsel, strength, direc- 
tion, and acceptance are all bestowed at outset as 
well as at close. His beginning and ending, his 
answer and petition, could almost have been re- 
versed in their order. So elsewhere we have it, 
"praying in the Holy Ghost;" and in another 
place, the opposite statement, " The Spirit maketh 
intercession for us." Never the man more active 
than in such hours. Never is it more his own 
true prayer than when " led by the Spirit " to 
pray. It is by His grace that we are delivered 
from the " spirit of bondage," and made free to 
pray, — the old suppressed instincts of the soul, 
liberated from the burden that oppressed them, 
and the deepest feelings of our real manhood gain- 
ing freedom to voice themselves unto God. 

Nor is the other side of the great fact less in- 
structive. Are we free so that the prayer is our 
choice, our will, our plea, offered in our utmost 
freedom ? None the less is God free to act upon 
us with an intensity that makes the prayer more 
than the inspiration of our own souls. The soul 
he is free to select for his consecrating energy, 
can be made by Him a "temple of the Holy 
Ghost." There are longings that cannot be 



170 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

clothed in human language. One is startled 
with the words which the Scriptures use about 
being " filled with the Spirit," " praying in the 
Spirit," " filled with the fulness of God." 

And so the happy circle completes itself. We 
are bidden to " ask and knock; " but it is just as 
true that God knocks and asks of us that we will 
" open the door " that he may " come in." " Then 
shalt thou call and the Lord shall answer ; thou 
shalt cry and he shall say ' here am I. 1 



i »» 



" Every inmost aspiration is God's angel undefiled ; 
And in every ' O My Father ' slumbers deep a ' Here, my child!' w 



THE LORD'S PRAYER THE MODEL. 171 



CHAPTER X. 

THE LORD'S PRAYER AS THE MODEL PRAYER. 

The prayer usually known as the Lord's 
Prayer is to be regarded rather as a generous 
model, than as a prescribed form from which it 
were a sin to deviate. It was the prayer for the 
hour. The disciples had asked to be taught to 
pray; for John had lectured to his immediate fol- 
lowers about true prayer. Jesus gives them the 
well-known words. Barely within the lines of the 
new dispensation, the prayer does not contain, 
except by implication, requests from God which 
Christians, farther on, were not only permitted 
but commanded to offer at the throne of grace. 
It even omits that which our Lord subsequently 
taught was so important, the asking "in his 
name." His own prayer with his disciples, just 
before he suffered, shows us larger ranges of 
prayer common to him and open to us, in which 
we are to imitate him ; and this last prayer could 
with greater propriety be called "The Lord's 
Prayer." 

As a model prayer suited to its time, it de- 



172 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

mands study, and the literature which has 
gathered about these few choice words is very 
large. It is not of that ejaculatory style of peti- 
tion in which Jesus himself, and his disciples, oc- 
casionally indulged. It is a deliberate, calm, and 
carefully arranged petition. It suits the morning 
hour when the mind is at its best working, and 
the soul is reverent, exalted, graceful, and ex- 
ultant. It is the prayer that surveys. It sees 
God and man, and self and sin, and grace and 
glory. It looks heavenward, but is not ecstatic ; 
and earthward it looks, but is not sordid. It is 
simple — the child's best prayer. It is compre- 
hensive — the range is all the way from heaven to 
earth, and all along thfc centuries of time. It is 
the unit of a circle in its motion, ending where it 
began ; for its last sentence, " Thine is the king- 
dom," might have been given next to *' Our 
Father in heaven " and the logical order of the 
thought would not have been disturbed. 

It opens with devout ascription. The first 
sentence is the prayer addressed. It says it is 
about to ask of God; and it recognizes Him not 
as immanent but as enthroned; as near, or we 
should not ask ; as far above us in the heavens, 
or we should not bring worship. The word 
" Father " conveyed to every oriental far more of 
the idea of sovereignty than of paternity. The 



THE LORD'S PRAYER THE MODEL. 1 73 

prayer is not in its opening word irreverently fa- 
miliar. Nor has it any new term to apply to 
God. The Jews, following their Scriptures, were 
wont to cail God their Father. But the name 
comprehended, for those disciples, all Old Testa- 
ment names ; and as they should recall the fact 
that he had used the word " Father," rather than 
any narrower word such as "Almighty" or 
"Eternal" or " Ruler " or " Judge," and as they 
should see the word he actually chose, in the 
fuller light of the ante-pentecostal days, the word 
would grow on them, and the relation in which 
they stood to God would not be the less reveren- 
tial that it is especially filial. 

The prayer does not rush forward our human 
wants into prominence. It stops awhile with 
God, to revere and adore. For, that his affairs 
should be made a success is infinitely more im- 
portant than that any of ours should be pros- 
pered. They make a mistake who think that 
prayer is only petition. True, there is no prayer 
without asking. But there is such a thing as ask- 
ing God to accept our reverence. They who 
criticise human prayers because " they tell God 
so much about Himself that He knows better 
than we do," are forgetful of the fact that even 
when we address a man of high official position, 
we employ words that recognize his station, and 



174 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

we remind him of that in his situation and rela- 
tions to us which makes it fitting for us to pre- 
sent our request. " Hallowed be thy name. Thy 
kingdom come. Thy will be done." These are 
not regarded, usually, so much as petition, as 
devout adoration of God in himself and his di- 
vine methods. It may be better, with many of 
the best scholars, to call them not petitions at 
all. It is reverent acknowledgment, asking leave 
to utter itself as best it may, and so to gain ac- 
ceptance as the soul's worship of its God. 

But those who hold the words "hallowed be 
Thy name " to be the only ascription, would see 
the first petition of the prayer in the phrase " Thy 
kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as 
in heaven." They find similar words elsewhere 
which are direct petition, and ask why they are 
not a supplication here also. Let us not stop 
the flow of devotional feeling by any contention. 
Let any man who will, " ask " in these words ; nor 
let him deny the right of others to find in them 
that thing higher than mere petition, the highest 
possible flight of devotion that is ever experi- 
enced on earth — a kind of prayer that meets and 
mingles with the angels' worship, — perhaps the 
first words of our first prayer when, just within 
the veil, our eyes " see God." 

But there can be no doubt that the words " give 



THE LORD'S PRAYER THE MODEL. . 175 

us this day our daily bread " are petition. Here, 
at least, we ask for something. And those who 
make it the earliest request in the prayer, are 
swift to point out its appropriateness. In 
Genesis, Moses does not put man's soul first, as 
an ancient Greek, or as a modern metaphysician, 
would have done, but describes man's body at 
the outset, because not only it was historically 
first, but because " our foundation is in the dust." 
So, here it is, in this prayer. The spiritual can 
wait awhile. God exalts the. human body and 
provides its " bread." Man's body is never vile 
and low in the Scriptures. The unfortunate 
translation in the Received, is corrected in the 
Revised, Version ; and we read, " the body of our 
humiliation." The Lord Jesus came in body, and 
knew bodily want. Super-spiritual men, whose 
only idea of religion makes it a thing of the soul, 
may well wonder how, on their theory, our Lord 
should have so stooped as to say one word about 
"our daily bread" in this great prayer. But 
God's view is wider than man's narrowness. In 
the era in which God made man, he made corn. 
It has no geological past. God charged himself 
with introducing the food for the newly created 
being. And he has cared for "seed time and 
harvest" ever since. Unlike the grasses, the 
grains are annuals. Corn never grows wild. It 



176 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

has no primitive type. It is abnormal, in that, in 
its useful state, it is not the product of cultiva- 
tion. It is the most transient of the things on 
which we depend for food. Never is there 
enough of it in store to last the world for any- 
succeeding year. God has it, as against more 
foes than would despoil anything else, in his own 
especial guardianship. The world's stated supply 
of it is always from hand to mouth, and has to 
be provided by an unslumbering providence, such 
as is exercised about nothing else ; or the world 
would starve. Nothing is so precarious ; yet, in- 
side the promise, nothing more certain than the 
corn " for the food of man." It is, then, the fit 
petition, " give us this day " — or, as in the other 
utterance of this prayer, " day by day " — our daily 
bread." The mistaken spirituality of a former 
century made nothing of the body, and would 
have put the clause in the Lord's prayer about 
" bread " into the background. The equally false 
naturalism of our time, has swung the pendulum 
just as far the other way, and made the body the 
all. God's truth recognizes the body as related 
to the soul. The child's body must grow, and 
the multitudinous youthful population of the 
planet need food for the body as the very first 
thing. But does not the ripened manhood of the 
world need, for its own sustenance, a body duly 



4 

1 



THE LORD'S PRAYER THE MODEL. 1 77 

sustained ? Can the man go forth to labor, of 
either hand or brain, except the body be first 
fed ? Insufficient nourishment of the body in- 
jures the mind and the soul as well. A man can 
think and pray better, if his body be put into 
good condition by good food, A new study of 
our Lord's discourse about " fasting " would not 
only correct some popular errors on that matter, 
but show that his teaching was not in conflict 
with the prayer "give us this day our daily 
bread." All supply of physical want is symbol- 
ized by the bread so needful for man. All 
bodily needs have a place in this prayer. Think 
of how the great populations of the world are 
stirring night and day to appease natural hun- 
ger! Think how the hard and horny hand of 
want is laid on the heads of the great toiling 
masses of the world ! The majority of the Asiatic 
and African peoples do not taste meat twice a 
year. The race, as a race, has had no plenty 
aside from severe toil. 

Then, too, what were food apart from appetite 
— appetite which may be weakened and lost by 
sickness ? So that the prayer for " bread " covers 
all physical health and disease, all questions of 
sanitation and medicine; all the husbandmen's 
labor, and all the traders' industry, and all lines 

of commerce, whereby men earn their daily food. 
12 



178 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

Nor can we wonder that the great social questions 
of wage and work, of " living and of letting live," 
the recognition of others' rights as well as our 
own, are seen, by our more careful Christian econ- 
omists, to get answer in the mood of mind in- 
volved when we offer this clause of the prayer. 
It is not "my Father "and "my bread." It is 
"our Father," "our bread," "our trespasses." 
The selection of the plural is remarkable. It 
cannot have been an accident. It was not in ac- 
cord with most of the Biblical prayers. Not so 
prayed Abraham, nor David, nor Isaiah. Jesus 
did not so pray himself, elsewhere. There is a 
purpose in it. The brotherhood idea is here. 
The race is a unit. Its wants are one. Its sor- 
rows are mutual. Its sins are alike. This is the 
prayer of men rather than of a man. Bread is 
sent to no one alone. " No man," in earning it, 
" liveth to himself." That other man, over the 
way, has the right to work for it, as he has to 
pray for it, with us. And God may send it to 
him so that he may share it with me, or to me so 
that I may share it with him. To work truly is 
to pray truly. "Give us this day our daily 
bread " is morning prayer to be offered before 
we go out to continue the prayer by our work. 
"Prayer," says the old monk, "is a trinity; for 
there is the prayer of the heart, the prayer of the 



THE LORD'S PRAYER THE MODEL. 1 79 

lips, and the prayer of the life. Either member 
of this trinity wanting, all the divinity is gone 
out of the prayer." 

Recall what has been urged about the corn of 
the earth, that it is abnormal among vegetables, 
needs not and cannot be developed from original 
wild types, as in the case of other useful plants, 
that it is always an annual and that it began to 
be at or near the time when man was ushered 
upon the planet, so that it is linked with him, — 
and, recalling all this, can we be surprised at the 
words u give us our daily bread " ? Man's toil in 
preparing the earth for corn, and in sowing and 
harvesting it, is a sort of mute prayer. And the 
waving fields of the glad autumnal time are a kind 
of divine answer to the world's supplication. 
Because it needs to be newly grown each year, 
because there is never enough left over to feed 
the race, the prayer for it is to be as constant as 
the divine care which is needed to preserve it. 
And when the golden ears glow in the ruddy 
October sunlight, each one of them is a distinct 
answer from God to human prayer. 

Some would have us see, in the prayer for our 
daily bread, a supplication also for our spiritual 
sustenance. But this is a mistake. We may no 
more crowd meaning into Christ's words than 
empty them of meaning. Let them stand as he 



l8o PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

set them — a prayer for the body and its food. 
But, then, it is not wrong to remember how al- 
ways common words had in them, for our Lord, 
the happy suggestion. The crowd one day spoke 
of the bread " Moses gave from heaven ; " and he 
spoke instantly of himself as " the Bread of Life." 
For the final ends must be moral ends. The 
earthly bread is help toward gaining the heav- 
enly. It is a very remarkable thing that Our 
Lord does not tell us here to be thankful for it, 
when he bestows our daily bread. And the 
reason would seem to be that he goes back of the 
time when it has been given ; starting in his con- j 

ception with the time when it is not yet granted ; I 

starting with the moment before we can ask it ; 
and telling us that back there, when God's hands 
are full but not yet opened, we may do our ask- 
ing before he his giving. But, when the man has 
asked and God has given, then the recipient may 
be depended upon to be grateful. It must not 
be that he shall depend in vain on our gratitude. 

The next clause of the wonderful prayer is 
connected with that about our daily bread by a 
copulative. "And forgive us our debts." Some 
one has happily said that all prayer can be com- 
pressed into two words, " Give " and " Forgive ; " 
" Give us our bread," and "forgive us our debts. 1 

That word " debts " — elsewhere given as " sins 



> 



THE LORD'S PRAYER THE MODEL. l8l 

—has troubled not a few good men. A little 
thought upon its derivation would reveal its 
singular fitness. A debt is what is due. It is that 
which is owed. We owe all dutifulness to God, 
but we are in terrible arrears. It should have 
been paid. It was not, and therein is the sin. 
This default in duty, this delinquency, ever ac- 
cumulating, becomes a debt to God which can 
never now be paid by us. 

No amount of guilty suffering can now expiate 
it. For a guilty being can never render holy 
atoning sorrow. He can only be punished. But 
his punishment, though owed for the penalty, can 
never pay the holy obligation of the obedience 
due. We cannot pay the just debt to God by 
any suffering or* future service. The sin must be 
forgiven. Some have wondered that there was 
not inserted after the word " forgive " some single 
phrase, such as " for Christ's sake." But this is 
to forget that the prayer was the prayer for that 
time, rather than for the time after the death of 
the Lord and the enlightening gift of the Holy 
Spirit. The word " forgive " is enough to start 
all thought and stir all inquiry. For the 
thinkers of the world, in all the great religions, 
have declared the impossibility of the forgive- 
ness of a sin. Judicial minds see the immense 
difficulties. It seems to many persons that, out- 



1 82 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

side of the Christian facts, the difficulties are ab- 
solutely insoluble. No ; Christ's word " forgive " 
is the very word for that stage of the dawning of 
the New Dispensation. If a human soul can- 
not see as yet — as those disciples could not at 
that time — the infinite reason that can justify 
God in forgiving sin, still let the seeking soul 
believe that unless Jesus had seen it, and had 
known that the reason availed with God, he 
would not have had a man cry " forgive us our 
sins." It is enough, in certain positions, to 
accept the bare facts on testimony, and to drop 
on our knees and ask believingly for God's for- 
giveness. 

And the added test of our asking rightly is " as 
we forgive," or, as some would render it, " as we 
have forgiven." If some see here the measure, 
others see, with better vision, the indispensable 
condition, not indeed so much with God, as with 
ourselves. Our forgiveness of others is not the 
infinite reason why God forgives us; but it is 
the proof that we rightly ask. If we ask, when 
living in the consciousness of any cherished sin, 
whether in feeling or act, against others, we are 
withholding a due, a debt, a wage, a work, a 
right, from others. In that case we ask amiss. 
And God, answering our prayer, would be par- 
taker of our sin. And therefore it is that the 



THE LORD'S PRAYER THE MODEL. 1 83 

phrase about " our bread " is joined by the cop- 
ulative " and " to the phrase " forgive us our 
debts." And there is added thereto the phrase 
" for we forgive ; " thus making out of the three 
phrases one sentence. So that it is everywhere 
a test of true asking that we shall never ask in the 
interests of wrong. Never, holding an unkind 
mood of mind to a brother man, can we ask God 
to be kind to us. Nor must we wait for an enemy 
to make reparation and atonement. For, what 
an Infinite God, acting in this capacity of right- 
eous Governor of the universe, may demand in 
the case of a subject, is one thing; and the duty 
of two men to each other, as brother men on the 
same plane of equality of being, both often sin- 
ners, is another thing. We are to forgive a falli- 
ble brother, as ourselves tempted, and as those 
in some other matter in need of forgiveness from 
our fellow-man. 

Note the careful order in which the petitions 
to " give " and to " forgive " are followed by the 
petition to " lead." " Lead us not into tempta- 
tion." It is the cry of weakness and fear lest we 
should, even when forgiven, be left to ourselves. 
If, at first glance, we are surprised that the peti- 
tion does not take the positive form, and ask to 
be " led by the Spirit," we have only to remem- 
ber again, the time when this prayer was put into 



1 84 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

the lips of the twelve, Pentecost had not yet 
shown its tongues of flame. The near thing was 
trial, and testing, which was by means of evil. 
The prayer is not for exemption from any con- 
tact with temptation. It does not ask that we 
may be delivered from the temptation, but from 
the actual evil of yielding to it. The testing is 
in a fallen world. The prayer recognizes the 
trend of a weak though forgiven soul. It is a 
prayer that we may be kept. It has been happily 
paraphrased in this way : " Suffer us not to be led 
into the temptation by which we shall fail, but 
lift us up out of the dominion of evil." Then 
comes the rounding up of the petition, which in- 
deed some would omit. But the omission makes 
the ending abrupt, while the ordinary version 
brings us again to the lofty mood where the 
prayer began. 

And so the prayer, singularly simple for infant 
lips, yet profound enough to be beyond all our 
measure, continues to be repeated the world 
round and the ages through. Now, in our want, 
* we emphasize the one part, and, anon, the other. 
At one time we revel in its devout ascriptions, at 
another rejoice in the requests it permits us to 
offer, at still another time we are almost over- 
whelmed in its wonderful comprehensiveness. 
There it stands, recognized by lisping childhood, 



THE LORD'S PRAYER THE MODEL. 1 85 

strong manhood, and ripened age. Its grand 
calmness, so unlike the fervent repetitions of the 
Hebrew prayers of its age, and its practical peti- 
tions that God would "give," "forgive," and 
" lead," its breadth covering all the distance from 
the Father on the throne to man in his weakness 
and want, spanning too the centuries from the 
beginning of " the kingdom " until its fulness shall 
" come," all these make it the model prayer of 
the Christian dispensation. 



1 86 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT: 



CHAPTER XL 

SUPPOSED LIMITATIONS OF PRAYER. 

THERE are some things about prayer which are 
thought to be its limitations, but which are really 
its extensions. 

These. limitations are supposed to come either 
from our human frailty on the one side, or from 
the divine perfection on the other. It may be 
said that, since man is always faulty, so he must 
be often in error in his prayers. And, also, it is 
said that, since God's will is perfect, and since 
we are to add to every prayer the codicil, " Thy 
will be done," we do in so far limit our prayers 
as to ask little or nothing that we really wish or 
want ; so that it were about as well not to ask at 
all, but only to take what is sent. 

Now, it is true that the praying man is faulty, 
and that he may "ask amiss." The perfect 
theory of prayer is that it is a voluntary human 
petition, to which one is moved by the Holy 
Spirit sent forth from the God who intends to 
answer the requests he has inspired. But the 
human factor introduces an element of imperfec- 



SUPPOSED LIMITATIONS OF PRAYER. 1 87 

tion. And this fact must modify the working of 
the theory. Hugh Miller complains of those 
" whose unscientific gunnery never takes into ac- 
count the parabolic curve of man's fallen nature." 
Our human wish mingles with God's Holy Spirit 
in shaping our prayer. And man may not al- 
ways be able to separate the two. A praying 
man may find the unexpected answer to his peti- 
tion in the sudden flash that comes to him on his 
knees, and shows him that his motives were too 
human. Infirmity has played too large a part 
in his petition. He may see with dismay his for- 
mer. motives as singularly mixed and unworthy. 
There has been more of self than of the Spirit. 
And this man shall pray now with cleaner heart. 
And the outcome shall be a purer supplication, 
and one more completely under the leadings of 
the divine Inspirer. The things desired, he was 
permitted to mention. And the result has been 
a lesson in self-knowledge. The specific thing 
has been denied. A child begged permission to 
handle the serpent. Its beauty had fascinated 
him as he saw* it glide so easily by, with its folds 
of green and brown, its keen eye glittering like a 
jewel. He begged. He prayed. He entreated. 
He became frantic. He charged his father with 
unkindness in not allowing him to seize the ser- 
pent. All the time the father refused. But 



1 88 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

when, in after-years, the story was told to the boy 
now grown to manhood, he thanked his father for 
the denial. God keeps away from men the shin- 
ing good they had so ardently desired. It seemed 
to them a real blessing. They prayed for it. The 
prayer seemed legitimate. The motive was not 
consciously unworthy. There was no mixture 
of evil present to the mind. But the earnestness 
of the petition was seen afterward to be mainly 
human fervor. And the answer was a restriction, 
in one way, but an enlargement in another. For 
the pitying God gave the suppliant wider vision ; 
and he was taught a lesson that could be learned ' 

in no other way. The nameless mother of Zebe- 
dee's children, modest for self, was ambitious in ' 

her request for her sons. She may have thought 
herself actuated by the best of motives. Her 
parental love mingled with her faith. She be- 
lieved in " the kingdom." A praying mother, she 
thought her boys would help the Lord's cause in 
their natural nobility. She had trusted them. 
She thought the Master needed about him trust- 
worthy men. But Christ's words, gently uttered, 
showed her herself. The answer was less re- 
stricted than the prayer. 

t So, too, there is a range of things about which 
there is no special promise. Men are not made 
infallible by the Holy Spirit. They are to ask to 



SUPPOSED LIMITATIONS OF PRAYER.. 1 89 

be guided. They may pray over the question of 
a trade to be learned, or an investment to be 
made. Not to pray in these cases would be a 
sin. They may ask God to indicate the profes- 
sion to be studied, the business to be undertaken ; 
to indicate the city or township in which to lo- 
cate. They may inquire of him whether their 
life-work is to be done on one continent or on 
another. There are surgeons who never make 
an incision in a dangerous case, without a lifted 
prayer for divine aid and blessing. There are 
men who would no more think of going into a 
new business without prayer than without capital. 
Sometimes, to be allowed to make a mistake may 
be the best possible answer to request for guid- 
ance. A man may learn more by a failure than 
by an immediate success. And as the ultimate 
ends of life are moral, it may be that a man, how- 
ever shrewd and however prayerful, shall be or- 
dained to God to fail in the temporal that he may 
gain in the spiritual life. Or there may be a mis- 
take made in interpreting providential indications. 
There is no infallibility. But this is not to say 
that there is no guiding response. A man may 
have learned the wrong lesson. The response 
may have been missed because answer comes 
from an unexpected quarter of the sky. The 
leading may not tally with the wish. For it is 



190 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

by no means the case of a blind man whose hand 
is grasped by another and he led onward not 
knowing himself a step of the way. God's lead- 
ings have in them, often, the recognition of the 
intelligence with which he has endowed a man. 
God may be educating the man's judgment. God 
may be making an appeal to him to employ his 
own faculties, to estimate facts, and use his own 
will in deciding the question of what is to be done. 
The man wanted an overmastering impression, 
but God gave him, instead, a clearer intellect 
and surer judgment. God was compelling an in- 
telligent decision. In place of the expected nar- 
rowness, there is breadth. Instead of restriction 
there is liberty and extension. A man's natural 
limitations and infirmities are used as an educa- 
tion for him. It is not only that better things 
are given than were asked, but that more is made 
of the asker. Larger moral manhood waits upon 
what seemed infirmity and restriction. The man 
who asked for blessings on himself finds blessings 
in himself. But there is another alleged limita- 
tion. It is said that the whole idea of prayer is 
that of interference and restriction. It is nar- 
rowness imposing its wish on the perfect large- 
ness of God. It is claimed that the conception 
of God as independent of prayer is the broader 
conception of the two : that it were better that 



SUPPOSED LIMITATIONS OF PRAYER. 191 

he should have his own perfect and immutable 
plan. And thus under the plea of honoring God 
the more, one would pray the less ; and prayer, 
less in volume, would be broad exactly as it be- 
came more a recognition than a petition ; more 
an acknowledgment of God's perfect arrange- 
ment rather than a request for him to introduce 
a change, which cannot be other than a restric- 
tion on his power as well as on his wisdom. 

The objection runs on this wise : " God has ar- 
ranged not only all events but all potencies. God 
has foreseen and provided for all things ; and we 
cannot, if we would, change unalterable fact by 
our feeble cries." But is not the legitimate infer- 
ence from these admitted premises very different 
from this? Nay, more; is not the fair and hon- 
est conclusion to be drawn from the fixedness of 
things, exactly the opposite of all this ? " God 
has arranged all events." Yes. And arranged, 
if that be so, for tfiis, as one of these events — 
that prayer shall be answered. To say the op- 
posite «is to allege that this is the event not in- 
cluded in the " all events " which " God has ar- 
ranged." " God has foreseen all." Yes. And 
this is also foreseen. " We cannot change an im- 
mutable fact." True ; and this fact of answered 
prayer is one of the immutable facts. A prayer 
offered is as immutable a fact as is the existence 



I92 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

of God. The reason for the prayer is the fixed 
and unalterable arrangement for the hearing of 
it. And so the reason for praying is precisely 
the reason for doing anything else in a universe 
governed by an Omniscient and Omnipotent God. 
The objector on the ground that freedom is de- 
stroyed by God's planning, contradicts himself in 
every voluntary act of his mortal life. He con- 
futes his own objection every time he lifts his 
hand in God's air or plants his foot on God's 
earth. If it be absurd to hope to gain anything 
in prayer on the ground of perfect divine pur- 
pose in all things, then it is exactly as absurd to 
hope to gain anything in any other sphere by 
aught that we can do. The objection, if valid at 
all on this principle, paralyzes all action in any 
line of human activity. If for this reason valid, 
it means that you should do nothing, for God 
does all ; plan nothing, for God plans all ; cease all 
diligence, for you can do nothing against the 
divine plan of things. It cuts the sinew r s of en- 
terprise outside as well as inside the closet of 
prayer. It makes man a puppet by denying him 
the freedom accorded him in the plan of his God. 
Now, it is plain that there must be some flaw in 
such an inference, yet the premises are certaiply 
right. God must be a Sovereign ; and any sub- 
traction from his sovereignty over the human 



SUPPOSED LIMITATIONS OF PRAYER. I93 

will is a mistake. The human will, exercising it- 
self in prayer, has its abundant freedom in that 
it is in abundant accord with God's will; and 
so it is in perfect voluntariness under that will, it 
is as free to ask as is his will to answer. The 
strictly logical conclusion is this, that by divine 
plan there is place for the prayer of man, exactly 
as for any other form of human exertion. In the 
natural world, the divine plan of things, in con- 
nection with our freedom, is the basis of all hu- 
man activity. We can depend on the sun to rise 
and set, on the procession of the seasons, on the 
ordination of seed-time and harvest, and therefore 
we labor. We see that laws are fixed, and there- 
fore we labor; and therefore we pray, as well. 
No law, there would be no prayer. Little law 
recognized, little prayer. Law recognized every- 
where, not only in its general aspects, but in 
special events which are every moment transpir- 
ing about us, and the man will pray the more. 
The nearer God in natural law, as the sustainer 
and upholder of all things, the more constantly 
the breath of prayer will form on the lips. It 
was a Christian poet who sang — 

" Teach us that not a leaf can grow 
Till life from Thee within it flow ; 
That not a blade of grass can be, 
O Fount of being, but by Thee." 

The more laws, the more proof of God; the 
13 



194 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

more laws recognized in their general sweep and 
in the minuteness of the providences which trans- 
pire under them, the more prayer. The nearer 
and the more active God, the more we act and 
the more we pray. It was he who saw not a 
sparrow fall without the Father's notice, who 
spent whole nights in prayer. It is God recog- 
nized in minutest events that enables a man to 
"pray always." The truth would seem to be 
that the man who objects to prayer because of 
" God's immutable plan " does not at all conceive 
the idea of God in his own mind. He says 
"God," but means "nature," or "law," or "mys- 
tic force," or " unknowable power." He is not a 
man who sees God's plan in daily providences, 
in the numbered hair and the falling sparrow. 
If he really believed in a God who was right 
there, in his room, where he was writing the words 
" God has arranged all and therefore man need 
not pray," he would stop midway in his sentence, 
the pen would drop, and he would fall upon his 
knees in instant prayer. God so near, so real to 
him as that — and yet if God is, he is there and is 
so near as that — his soul within him would pray 
despite himself. How quickly he would speak 
to an eminent stranger the instant his presence 
was perceived in the room where he was writing: 
He could not but pray if God were felt to be 



SUPPOSED LIMITATIONS OF PRAYER. I95 

near enough to plan and to execute his plan in 
the very chamber of one's most secret thought 
and study. Prayer is sometimes extorted from 
unwilling lips, — the prayer of recognition when 
not of affection, the prayer of compulsion, as 
from one's deepest conviction of its rightfulness, 
even when it is not the " Abba Father " of 
adopted sonship. A practical working faith in 
God's plan as to all minutest things is a marvel- 
lous incentive to prayer. And it is the undevout 
and not the devout soul that says " God is Om- 
niscient, therefore I need not pray." The devout 
man says " God is Omniscient ; therefore I pray 
with confidence to Him whose eye nothing can 
escape, and who can see what is the best answer 
and when the best time to grant it, and what the 
best measure of the gift I ask him to bestow." 
And we may put it without hesitation to any jury 
of fair-thinking men as to which man of the two 
is most philosophical as before the fact of an 
Omniscient God. For it is certain that the man 
who best and most thoroughly believes in an 
Omniscient God will best and most frequently 
do the philosophical act of praying. And while 
humblest souls may act from a holy instinct in 
supplicating the divine blessing, yet, on the other 
hand, there can be no more reasonable nor more 
thoughtful, nor loftier exercise of the human soul, 



I96 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

and none in which a calm and philsophical mood 
is more befitting and helpful, than in the solemn, 
tender act of prayer to God. There will be al- 
ways an unexplored remainder of mystery about 
prayer. Indeed, in all high exercise of the human 
soul there is mystery, and the mystery increases 
when it is the case of one soul moving another 
soul, and the mystery culminates when one of 
these persons is God. But it becomes one of 
that kind of mysteries which is helpful to the 
duty in the case of prayer. Every truth which 
has a Godward side runs back into a mystery 
that helps best the corresponding duty on the 
manward side. What more deep and impenetra- 
ble than the plans of God in relation to prayer? 
But what more simple on the human side than 
prayer as the cry of a child longing for the light? 
Let no man ask for full explanation of this or 
any other truth on its Godward side. Adoration 
of a wisdom that is necessarily hidden from us 
by its very breadth is our part. Confidence in 
him. that he is right and wise when working out 
of our sight, is a virtue impossible to us did 
we completely understand him. Trusting in the 
dark is nobler than trusting in the light. The 
unseen is by no means the useless in nature or in 
religion. Who ever saw gravity, or electricity, 
or heat ? In religion there is always a light from 



SUPPOSED LIMITATIONS OF PRAYER. I97 

the unseen and the unknown on the things about 
us. The cloud appearing in the sky was dull an 
hour ago. But see. From away and out of your 
sight, down beyond the western horizon where 
the sun is still shining, there comes up into that 
dull cloud a great glory and beauty of color. 
It flashes across to those other clouds in the east. 
It gives them its own warmth and glow. The 
earth, on its rivers and lakes and oceans, catches 
the reflection from that cloud, which, after all, is 
only a something seen shot through by a some- 
thing else that is unseen. So duty has its radi- 
ance from an unseen God, and human action, 
alike in prayer and work, is a better thing shot 
through with the divine glow of beauty and 
power. Man works better and prays better for 
God; feels larger and stronger and safer when 
the everlasting arms are about him, and is never 
so free as when God's blessed purpose enfolds 
and protects his freedom, nor so prayerful as 
when the glad mystery rises up over him and en- 
velopes him, and he cries with the wisest soul of 
the olden time, " And will God indeed dwell with 
men ! " A thing is not the less philosophical be- 
cause there is mystery exactly where mystery 
ought to be. The unphilosophical would be to 
expect it nowhere, and deny that to be truth 
which has place for mystery. Mystery is breadth 



I98 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

rather than limitation in any truth which runs up 

toward God, as does this truth of prayer. 

It should be noted that the Biblical writers 

never feel the pressure of these alleged limita- 
tions. They are Orientals. As such they also 

incline to fatalism. The Oriental loves to think 
that all events are fixed. " Fate rules." " What 
is to be, will be " is the Oriental creed. But the 
idea of God once introduced, there is an instant 
change. The Scripture writers do not simply 
use the word " God " where other Orientals used 
the word " Fate." That were as small gain as 
to have men in our day use the word " God " in- 
stead of the word "law." But the whole con- 
ception of God in the Scriptures is that of the 
Ever-living God. He is the God alive to human 
want and awake to human petition. The dead- 
ness of Pantheism disappears before the life of 
God, who sits not in solitary distance, but is 
closely concerned in human affairs. The Orien- 
tal, believing in God, is naturally and necessarily 
a praying man. And the Scripture writers do 
not so much as name a difficulty or objection to 
prayer. That there is a God seems to them the 
sufficient reason for offering to him prayer. 
Prayer is the natural thing because he is the All- 
Wise God. To any other being, whose plan was 
not perfect, they could not ascribe praise or offer 



SUPPOSED LIMITATIONS OF PRAYER. 1 99 

petition. Nor were those praying men of the 
Biblical times mere novices in thought. Not an 
objection to prayer but it must have been duly 
weighed and set down at its full worth by such a 
man as Moses — the most judicial mind of past 
centuries. Such a man went through all these 
difficulties, and did not sink like a weaker swim- 
mer, but came out safely and stands firm on the 
believing side. No difficulty can be really new, 
except in mere form of statement. These men 
prayed because they thought the matter through. 
Praying men are more sensitive to the difficulties 
of prayer than any other class of men. Those 
great souls of the grand centuries were not mere 
speculators upon the theme; they followed the 
light, and the farthing candle became a glow- 
ing sun. The limitations disappeared. The very 
hindrances, duly considered, became helps. For 
those souls, as for us, neither the weakness of 
man, nor the perfectness of God, is an obstacle. 
Both of these facts are rather the open doors 
swung wide by angel hands for liberating some 
imprisoned Peter. To those men the one fact 
stood forth that God, just because he is God, is 
 " the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him." 
So that the breadth which belongs always and 
necessarily to the idea of God, disperses com- 
pletely those mists of limitation that abide with 



200 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

the men who do not grasp it. Prayer as a con- 
ception does not narrow the idea of God. It 
enlarges our conception of him. It makes alike 
the mystery and the knowledge of God contrib- 
ute to its reverent and intelligent exercise. 

All the alleged limitations to prayer, when 
closely scanned, become its enlargements. The 
mistakes and misconceptions gone, prayer is as 
reasonable as it is righteous, is demanded by the 
head no less than by the heart, is justified in 
its theory and commended in its practice. The 
more it is understood and employed, the wider J 

appears to be its range, the swifter its wing, the ^ 

surer its basis in eternal purpose, the more im- 
perative its duty* the greater its worth to man, 
and the more delightful its privilege. The very 
study of prayer as a problem broadens one's hori- 
zon as its practice enlarges one's soul. 



i 

1 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 201 



CHAPTER XII. 

PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 

"Answered prayers," says Dr. Theodore L. 
Cuyler, " cover the field of providential history 
as flowers cover Western prairies." 

Another shall tell the story of Livingstone's 
death in the act of prayer that Africa might 
have life. " They laid him on a rough bed in the 
poor hut his faithful black followers had builded 
for him, where he spent the night. Next day he 
lay undisturbed. He asked a few wandering 
questions about the country. His faithful black 
followers knew that the end could not be far off. 
Nothing occurred to attract notice during the 
earlier part of the night ; but at four in the morn- 
ing, the black boy who lay at his door called in 
alarm. By the candle still burning, they saw 
; , him, not in bed, but kneeling at his bedside with 
' his head buried in his hands upon his pillow. He 
had passed away on the farthest of all journeys, 
and without a single attendant. But he had died 
in the act of prayer — prayer offered in that rev- 
erential attitude about which he was always so 



202 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT, 

particular, commending his own spirit, with all 
his dear ones as was his wont, into the hands of 
his Saviour ; and commending Africa with all her 
woes and sins and wrongs to the Avenger of the 
oppressed and the Redeemer of the lost. And 
so, though Livingstone died, he was Africa's vic- 
tor." * 

Among the " Resolves " of Jonathan Edwards 
was this: "Very much to exercise myself in 
prayer all my life long." Arnold of Rugby told 
his pupils that he should offer a prayer daily be- 
fore the first lesson. " Holy Samuel Ruther- 
ford," as he was called, had his out-of-doors place 
for prayer and said, " I prevailed ; as woods, 
trees, meadows, and hills are my witnesses." 
Prayer has been the strong tap-root from which 
have sprung the broadening branches of moral 
activity in the individual soul, as well as large 
fruitage for Christ's kingdom among men. That 
prayer has a natural fertility in a special kind of 
results is not only a reasonable belief but an ob- 
vious fact. That "things follow their tenden- 
cies " is a clearly defined moral principle. That 
they have actually done so is the declaration of 
all history. And therefore that they will con- 
tinue to do so, is a prophecy not without its sig- 
nificance in the matter of prayer. 

* " Along the Pilgrimage," by Dr. Wayland Hoyt. 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 203 

We have thus far studied the matter of prayer 
with reference to its divine answers. It remains, 
now, to look at the natural result of the praying 
mood in men. It moulds them. The moulding 
process is toward better ages for mankind, and 
toward preparation for heaven in the praying 
man. 

There is obviously a kind of charm about 
prayer, or men would never so uniformly, 
through all the centuries, have done so much 
praying. As the prayers of the race get to be 
better, and purer, and more voluminous, they 
tend to mould human nature. Prayer cannot be 
stopped by any force whatsoever ; but it can be 
ennobled, directed, and purified, and so become 
more forceful and beneficent in its natural effects 
on praying men. For prayer is both old and 
new. It is as old as Eden, as new as our last 
uplifting, in this present moment, of our own 
petition. It combines all the charm of antiquity 
with all the interest of novelty. Youth prays for 
wisdom, middle life for help, and age prays for 
heaven. Penitence prays, and faith prays, and 
hope prays, and joy prays. Success prays with 
thankfulness, disaster prays tremblingly; defeat 
prays, as its last resort, for one more trial this 
side of despair. Prayer is a crucible into which 
we cast those truths that are harsh and unwel- 



204 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

come in the creed, and find them capable of 
happy fusion ; and many a man who disputes a 
doctrinal point on his feet yields his assent on 
his knees before God. Prayer is a brook by the 
way, and a staff for the pilgrim weary on the 
march. Prayer is a lofty promontory pressing 
itself out into the ocean, its top unwetted by the 
spray of any storm that ever blew, and hurling 
back any wave the ocean can raise against it. 
Prayer is the seaman's best bower anchor, when 
his vessel rides over against the toothed rocks of a 
frowning shore — an anchor that never gives way, 
" that entereth within the veil." Prayer is a great 
rock in a weary land; and in under the cool 
shadow of its overhanging roof, where tiny 
streams issue from the sides green with the 
lichens, the hot and thirsty traveller finds shelter 
from the heat and pure water to moisten his 
noontide repast. "The Lord is my Shepherd; 
He leadeth me beside the still waters." Prayer 
has its devotional sweetness, its sacred calm, its 
great sense of God, its open-eyed vision, its pro- 
found stir of all the soul within us. It has, at 
times, its agony of desire, its pleading earnest- 
ness, its very argument with God. It grows jubi- 
lant in hope and it revels with a kind of sacred 
abandon in the promises. At times, it turns its 
glass toward the skies, and has a telescopic out- 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 205 

look and uplook. And yet again the nearer 
duties of daily Christian living are made radiant 
by the parallel light that flashes along the sur- 
face of the field where we do our work. Prayer 
is now lofty and anon lowly. It sometimes gets 
it victories by submission, as did Jacob at the 
brook and Jesus in the garden. At other times 
it bursts into doxologies of praise, as does Paul 
in the midst of mighty argument, where heart 
escaped from brain, and would not wait for the 
decorous close of careful discourse. But what- 
ever prayer may be at times, this is its chief 
thing, that it is a mood of mind, a spirit that 
takes on these various methods and manners. 
" I will pour out the spirit of supplication," 
i.e., the spirit or mood of prayer, the devotional 
spirit. 

Few gifts, perhaps none, can be named which 
can compare with this devotional mood of mind. 
It makes an atmosphere ; and all the truths of re- 
ligion are made transparent by the clarity of this 
medium. It is the light in which w T e see light. 

The influence of the affections upon the intel- 
lect is a well-known fact. You shall find, in so- 
cial life, persons not really lovely in a single fea- 
ture, but who are esteemed beautiful by those 
who see them with fond eyes ; and others, look- 
ing upon those whom we call beautiful through 



206 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

a prejudiced vision, declare them plain and 
graceless. But in moral judgments, the personal 
element of our own sympathy or dislike has even 
wider scope. Jesus spoke of men " who loved " 
— a word of the heart — "who loved darkness 
rather than light because their deeds were evil/' 
The inner nature and the prevalent mood and tone 
of the soul were so out of sympathy with our 
Lord that the honest opinions of such were mis- 
takes. They would not be convinced, even by 
the direct teachings of Jesus Christ. But when 
such men, under the deeper stir of their natures, 
have felt the desperateness of their need, and 
have been willing to pray, their difficulties have 
departed, and almost before they knew it they 
have accepted what they had denied. The secret 
is that they have come, by the processes of the 
heart, into Christ's kingdom. The trouble had 
been that they not only had looked out through 
colored glass, but with a diseased eye. The 
mist from the low-down heart has risen up into 
the head. The deeper nature made right, the 
brain works accurately and fairly. The eye re- 
stored to normal vision and the man standing out 
in God's pure sunlight, that brightness rather 
than the old darkness is now loved. In such a 
case the elemental steps are taken toward se- 
curing a devotional spirit. 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 207 

But the process must not be arrested. There 
are instances where the truth intellectually re- 
ceived is of little moral worth because of lack of 
continuous prayerfulness. True religion, in part, 
is a study, a science, a system. But devotion is 
more than study. Study piles up the materials, 
assorts them carefully, and assigns them to their 
place; here these bricks are to go, and there 
those boards; in this part of the structure the 
stone and the iron. But a heap of brick and lum- 
ber is not a house, a mere pile of material is not 
a dwelling for man. Brawny labor may collect 
these different things, but taste and skill and 
careful work must build the structure. The mere 
scholar in religion may do good service in the 
material he brings. But if not careful, the very 
criticalness of his mental habit may harm his own 
spiritual life. For piety, as well as learning, is 
needed in the application of truth to one's own 
soul, unto the best interpretation. Heart as well 
as head is required. The devotional mood is 
essential as well as the critical method. Not 
alone for plain people, but for scholarly men, it 
is written that he that enters the kingdom must 
come as a little child. The arrogance of scien- 
tific opinion, the pride of learning, the impatience 
of any dictation, the result of the great execu- 
tiveness needed and fostered in commercial sue- 



208 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

cess — all must go down in humble obeisance be- 
fore Christ's words. Receptiveness as toward 
Christ's offers to be Teacher and Saviour, the at- 
titude of the kneeling suppliant rather than that 
in which one stands on proudest tiptoe, is the 
demand. We may not patronize Christ's truth 
if it commends itself. We may not add to our 
stature in trying to reach higher than others; 

posing as orginal discoverers in religion, we are 

• 

tallest on our knees. There are truths meant 
more to impress us than to instruct us. Like 
God's thunder, their use is to awe the soul. In- 
genuity digs about them, but soon gives over the 
task; for it can do nothing with them. They 
can only be taken as God meant them to be, with 
a devotional spirit, that will trust where it can- 
not understand; that believes in them because 
God understands them and tells us the " what," 
but not the "why." All real truth in religion 
runs off into theJnfinite and so is beyond our ken. 
It is only the false that can be comprehended. 
When a party were struggling on toward the 
ocean, each man desirous to be the first to dis- 
cover it, a straggler from an eminence cried out 
to those below, " I see it." The leader of the 
party veiled his doubt in a question, " How wide 
is it ? " " About ten miles," was the reply. " Nay : 
that is not the true ocean : for no man can see 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 209 

across the ocean." No finite mind can see all 
about an infinite truth. And yet, every day, we 
have in religion to act in view of truth that reaches 
up to God and on into eternity. Salvation is 
through attachment of our interests to God's in- 
finite plans of grace and mercy. Christ obtained * 
" eternal redemption " for us. We accept the 
fact. The elevation of the devotional spirit is 
such that it can take, on trust, from God, the 
truths that the logical intellect can neither dis- 
cover nor understand. The devotional spirit is 
thus our broadest mood ; and so is our best pre- 
servation from that mere intellectual narrowness 
which would abridge the wideness of God's rev- 
elation to what our reason or intuition can de- 
termine. In such a scheme of things as those 
which environ a man in a gospel land, the devo- 
tional spirit is one of the best preservatives from 
religious error. 

And this prayerful spirit is, moreover, a cen- 
tral citadel against the assaults of temptation. 
The most of our temptations come up through 
the gateways of passion and desire. The as- 
sault is not so much upon our principles as upon 
our feelings. This kind of warfare aims to do 
as gunners do in war, when they send their hot 
shot into a beleaguered city, hoping to fire the 
buildings or to explode the magazines, and thus 



2IO PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A. FACT. 

induce surrender without assaulting the outer 
defences. Mere conscience and will are not 
enough. The heart must be guarded in its emo- 
tions. Men fall suddenly who had stood high 
for years under the protection of sentinels who 
guarded every outpost. But it was a sudden 
bombshell thrown over the guards on the walls, 
and coming in upon the affections, that made 
such havoc. Not those men who have most prin- 
ciple or most knowledge are the most secure, 
but those who possess in their hearts the most of 
the spirit of devotion. No amount of resolving 
will help a man, apart from the mood of mind 
that walks lovingly and truly with God in con- 
stant prayerfulness. We must guard the cen- 
tral magazine where is stored the powder which 
a spark may explode. Luther says, " The devil 
plagues and torments us in the place where we 
are the most tender and weak. In Paradise he 
fell not upon Adam, but upon Eve." # It is not 
sinful to be tempted. The sin is in the yielding. 
God's method of dealing is to allow us to be 
tempted, and then to sanctify us by giving us the 
strength to overcome it. The temptation may 
be stronger than our unaided will can meet. We 
are not matched against infernal wiles used by one 
who has hacLsix thousand years of all too skilful 
practice. The ordinary temptations of any man 



aB0S=«B 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY, 211 

are strong enough to ruin him : each one of them 
has overthrown millions as good and as firm as 
he. And the better a man the more his tempta- 
tions. Christ was tempted with kingdoms. None 
so suffer as those at whom Satan, because they 
stand so high, strikes his strongest blows. What 
need of tempting a wicked man ? He tempts 
himself. Satan is fairly sure of him. It were 
needless to spend time and art, and spread net 
and snare, and solicit and seduce such an one. 
But if Satan can get a really good man to fall, he 
is filled with his infernal joy. We will set our 
watch on the walls. We will guard every out- 
post. We will strengthen our resolves. We will 
bring in all holy fear. We will busy our hands 
with willing work. We will do our utmost at 
resistance. But the best thing to do is to pray 
and pray, until we get anointed from God with 
the "spirit of prayer;" until the whole mood of 
soul is devotional, until the whole tone and tem- 
per of mind is that of a life " hidden with Christ 
in God." 

Closely allied with the form of temptation just 
considered is that which comes from an unoccu- 
pied heart. The intellect may be full of truth, 
but the heart be desolate. Yet something must 
be loved. The tendrils must not grovel on the 
soil where the earthworm feeds upon them. The 



212 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

loves of the heart must be lifted into God's sun 
and air. The tender spiritual mood is needed; 
the loving nature must be maintained, the affec- 
tionate spirit be cherished. Forbidden things, 
painted in novel colors, will get the attention of 
a wandering and unoccupied eye. Golden temp- 
tations by their glitter will attract the soul un- 
filled with divine good. We cannot be empty- 
hearted. The baited hook is for the hungry 
mouth. How plainly a devotional spirit is one 
of the best shields against temptation. The de- 
fence, in this case will be just at the point of the 
attack. Feeling will be met by feeling; the 
lower by the higher, the evil spirit by the good 
spirit. The heart, full of these contemplations of 
God's grace gained through a prayerful study of 
God's Word, will be preoccupied. Other plea- 
sures will bar out the painted deceits of sin. Let 
once the devotional habit be established, and 
there will be a fear lest anything whatsoever 
should disturb the delicious joy. For habits are 
like ruts in the highway, and the heart goes easi- 
est in them. And these devotional habits, this 
constant life of communion with God, brings us 
into contact with a whole world of spiritual facts 
that are never exhausted. They are too wide in 
themselves, too largely related to human life here 
and the eternal life beyond, ever to grow stale 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 213 

and flat and unprofitable. We never do much 
more than just to dip beneath the surface of this 
ocean. We never work this mine so much and 
so long as to exhaust all its ore. The mere in- 
tellectual conception of truth may weary, but the 
moral side, discoverable to the man of prayerful 
spirit, rests and refreshes. 

It needs no argument to show that a human 
soul introduced, in this way, to the mind and 
heart of God, cannot lack for subjects of interest 
and impressiveness. Admitted to daily com- 
munion with " the God of all grace," it must be- 
come graciously inclined. Seeing into the bosom 
of God's love in its gospel manifestation, it mast 
grow loving. This divine preoccupation must be 
the armor within. It must be the central life 
which repels all which is antagonistic. It has 
something to give out of its fulness, and little to 
take from the scanty and fallacious joys that 
come as tempters. The room is taken. The 
heart has found its natural home in God's love 
and grace. The prodigal soul, come back to the 
Father's house, has had enough of wandering. 
We do not read that the restored son ever re- 
turned to the husks in the far-off land. There 
was enough, now, all about him, in the father's 
home, to charm him into staying there for a life- 
time. 



214 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

And the mood of true prayerfulness does not 
nourish the solitary to the harm of the social 
graces. One may begin by praying to "my 
Father;" but he soon comes to say "Our 
Father." All love that has God's love in it is 
holy. The life-blood of piety is the devotional 
spirit, and it comes to be tender and true to- 
ward man as beloved of God. Much is said 
about the culture of human affection, of brother- 
hood love. But as there would be no brother 
save for a father, so there is no brotherhood love 
which is holy that does not' stand in first loving 
the Father. Mere unsanctified affectionateness, 
the animal feeling for kind and kindred, we share 
with the brutes ; and there is no religion about 
it. Only as the natural instinct is shot through 
with holy love does it rise into a religious virtue. 
There is no holiness in the love of a lioness for 
her young. It is simply natural, instinctive, and 
non-moral. Another element than the natural 
must be thrust in to lift our human affection to 
the rank of sanctified affection. God's love in 
us not only enlarges love, but purifies its source. 
There are diseases which seize on some special 
member of the body. They affect the ear or the 
eye. The pain is manifested now here and now 
there. All local remedies are vain. At length 
the physician begins to look back among the vital 



PRAYER. IN ITS PROPHECY. 21 5 

organs for the cause. No more is he successful 
there in his treatment. Presently he discovers 
that there is a defect in the blood, the central 
fluid of life, and begins to comprehend the fact 
that only as that is purified, can he reach the dis- 
ease which showed itself in local troubles. All 
attention is now directed to this one central act ; 
and if he can succeed in pouring through the 
veins of the body a fuller and richer tide of vital 
blood, he has made his cure. There are evils that 
rectify themselves when the heart is right. And 
though the application to a local trouble may 
still be needed in some cases, the new nature is 
there, to which we can appeal, when we would 
make the outer conduct correspond with the in- 
ner life. The faults of a quick temper, a peevish 
mood, a petulant reply, are by none more clearly 
seen and earnestly deplored than by those who 
are striving, notwithstanding these infirmities, to 
subdue all things to the dominion of Christ. 
Never does a man see these imperfections so 
clearly as when they are remembered on his 
knees. Never does he struggle against them so 
earnestly as when he finds that they hinder his 
prayer. Never does he gain such victories over 
them as when the peculiar devotional mood has 
sway, and he lives daily in communion with God. 
This prayerful spirit takes out the hardness and 



2l6 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

harshness and censoriousness native to some men. 
It warms up the natural coldness and calculation 
and mathematical regularity of some men's 
virtues. It puts a man in the way of knowing the 
luxury of what has been called the " abandon of 
goodness;" the surrender of one's self to the 
sacred impulses of religion. An affectionate 
Christian, who is neither afraid nor ashamed to 
allow himself the delight of sanctified feeling, is 
a higher style of man than he who is statuesque 
in his piety. 

Among the habits of mind conducive to de- 
votion is that of connecting all things with God. 
It sees that the little things as weU as the large 
are under his eye. Our Lord told us that the 
falling sparrow and the numbered hair are held 
in mind by his Father. Never mind scoffers who 
call this childish. Never mind the extra-critical 
men who cry law here and law there. No matter 
now for your philosophical theory, whether you 
hold matter to have been originally endowed with 
potencies, or so made as to be acted upon, each 
instant, by direct forces which can be exercised 
only by mind. Let us not get befogged amid 
the question of first and of second causes. God 
is conceived of by the pious men of the Scripture 
as the present energy of the world. And human 
hearts, attuned to the divine harmonies of love, 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 2\J 

feel him near and own him the Sustainer as well 
as the Creator of the Universe, 

When Peter and John were forbidden to speak 
in the name of Jesus, the early Christians " lifted 
up their voices to God with one accord and said, 
' Lord, thou art God, which hast made heaven 
and earth and the sea and all that in them is.' " 
At first glance, such a petition seems like the 
stately words of a grand invocation at a great 
public service. But closely read, it is .just the 
opposite. These men were going to brave the 
wrath of their rulers by disobedience to their 
order. But there was a God, who was Sovereign 
of the visible universe. Their appeal was away 
from a human to a divine Ruler. Their hope of 
successfully doing what was their duty, was in 
the Almighty God who had macle "the heaven 
and earth and sea and all that in them is." It 
was the simplicity of their devotional mood that 
gave them such exaltation. Such a powerful, 
superaboundingly powerful, God was on their 
side. No idea had they, but that such a God, 
who so intimately controlled all things, would 
answer. The praying mood, in their case, con- 
nected all things with God. It even took in the 
will of their haughty rulers, since it made their 
arrogance the reason for God's supreme action. 
Those rulers were thought to be wise ; but God 



2l8 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

was all-wise. Those rulers declared their will; 
God would show what his hand and counsel had 
determined before to be done. It was will 
against will, plan against plan ; and the one who 
had bidden them speak had known the will of 
those who forbade them. Their God and Christ 
was intimately concerned in all things. These 
disciples were in no accidental position. Not a 
word do they say about " law " — or, if that name 
be new,— not a word about " the principles " of 
which all the thought and speech of their time 
was so full. It is all, God. They were em- 
bosomed with him. He is authority and appeal. 
His will, not their own, nor that of Jewish rulers, 
should be done by them. " Grant unto thy ser- 
vants that with all boldness they may speak thy 
word." And so these men were philosophical 
without knowing it. For the unphilosophic 
mood is that which restrains prayer. To refer 
our life in all its events to God's arrangements, 
is to find material in hourly providence for the 
devotional spirit. 

And thus is begotten a kind of moral intre- 
pidity which is a very illustrious Christian virtue. 
Prayer is pledged duty. There is often seen, 
when in the very act of prayer, some duty which 
once done, is God's answer through our own act. 
We are given of God to answer some of our own 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 219 

prayers. We are bound to do our utmost for 
gaining the ends for which we are praying. Some 
things go naturally with petition. They are the 
" Amen " in act, of the words of prayer. There 
are things that comport well with the earnestness 
with which we plead for divine blessing. We 
must work for what we pray for, or we shall soon 
cease to pray for it. And how it stirs us to 
heroic effort, when in close communion with God, 
we seem to get in among the gracio.us activities 
of the divine mind. God is the ceaseless worker, 
with amazing obstacles to confront Him. God 
is a man of war. John saw war in heaven, and 
victory over mighty foes won by him whose title 
was " King of Kings, and Lord of Lords." En- 
thronement in a universe, in which for reasons 
known only to God, evil is permitted to organize 
and do its worst, is not a place of ease. The in- 
tense personal activity of God is the constant idea 
of the Bible. He is a foe and he has foes. It is no 
easy work to counteract evil in free intelligences. 
It required the wisdom of God to lay the plan, 
the power of God to execute it, the love of God 
in the self-denial of the Calvary cross to accom- 
plish it, the gift of the Holy Spirit to each hu- 
man soul to secure* it. In some far-off eternity, 
when weakness, confined to the great prison-house 
of the universe, shall cease to rage because utterly 



220 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

hopeless, when not a finger shall be lifted because 
the final judgment day is come and gone, the 
placidness of God may be the theme of heavenly 
song. Isaac Taylor in his " Last Conflict of 
Great Principles," one of the finest prose poems 
in the language, sketches the final battle of these 
present antagonisms, and glances on to the time 
when God shall ." enter into his rest." But, until 
then, he has " girded his sword upon his thigh." 
Until then he is in the midst of the battle. And 
for a man to be admitted, through much of 
prayer and study of the Word, into " the Secret 
of the Lord," is to hear the clash of the resound- 
ing arms, and to ask a place in the fight " on the 
Lord's side." It is for a man to be strong in the 
faith of the final supremacy of Christ. And all 
this vigorous grasp of God's great thought is not 
only an interpretation of the universe, but it 
helps wondrously the individual soul to be strong 
and wax valiant in the fight. Such a man sees 
that evil is not a trifle, sin not a mere blemish, 
wrong not the unripe fruit of right. Evil is seen 
with mighty head and front. The kingdom of 
wickedness is a tremendous reality. It is organ- 
ized wrong, intensely active and immensely 
potent. And sometimes it makes such a praying 
man afraid. Even Christ "feared." He hadjiis 
hours of conflict with the power of darkness. 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 221 

But right over against the kingdom of evil with 
its Satanic head, and its allegiant spirits, and 
its willing subjects among men, is the " kingdom 
of God," Christ its head, its subjects redeemed 
and rescued and praying and believing souls. 
And the issue is joined. The praying man takes 
sides with God. And there is, as the direct re- 
sult of these views of Christ's kingdom — views, 
which if not born are yet widened by prayer — 
the most splendid moral intrepidity. 

It is this union of the soul with the great God 
in prayer, and this alliance of our interests with 
those of his great " kingdom," that rids many a 
man of an unutterable and horrible loneliness. 
There is hardly another oppression so great as 
that of being morally alone — the sense of being 
out of sympathy with God, and standing amid 
pitiless and destructive forces that can so easily 
wreck us. On a dark night, on some dreary 
moor, where the thick rain comes in frenzied 
swirls, and the earth trembles with the jar of the 
thunder, and the whole world seems at the sport 
of all mightiest agencies, stands a man, alone, 
fearfully, terribly alone, with all these adverse 
powers doing their worst about him. But about 
prayerless men, whether they see it or not, there 
is the gathering storm, the loosing of moral ele- 
ments that can affright the bravest man. Now 



222 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

and then a man's eyes are opened. He sees the 
danger and is awake to his frightful moral loneli- 
ness. Such a one may have another vision, that 
of God inviting the lonely soul to the compan- 
ionship of the forgiven and the saved ; and, bet- 
ter than all, to fellowship with the Father 
through Jesus Christ our Lord. To lonely souls 
comes the call, " draw nigh unto Me." And the 
one way is that of believing prayer. The new 
alliance with God is the end of spiritual loneli- 
ness. 

Prayer as an habitual mood is greatly pro- 
moted, again, by the use of set times and special 
places for its exercise. We are not told, happily, 
how often to pray. How formalism would then 
have seized on what is the freest of all things, 
this matter of prayer! How much of mechanical 
religion, had we been commanded as to the num- 
ber of times for prayer and as to its specific 
places ! The freedom left us by our Lord is not 
the freedom to omit, but the freedom to accept, 
frequently, the privilege. We are not left to use 
any place for our closet of prayer because place 
■is of no importance, but for the very opposite 
reason. Men find that they can do better work 
in manual labor, better work as students and ac- 
countants, when they have become wonted to 
places. The boy was almost a philosopher, who 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 223 

gave as a reason for missing the question, that he 
was not used to the new school-hfruse. We find 
that we must have a particular place for our daily 
devotions. When a lady told her pastor that 
her place for prayer was the large drawing-room 
where balls were field, he expressed surprise. 
But when she told him that neither at morning 
nor at night could she be alone even in her own 
room, but that by rising an hour earlier, the 
drawing-room could be made her closet, he not 
only ceased to wonder, but rejoiced at the deter- 
mination of a Christian woman to be alone at 
some time, and in some place, each day, with her 
God. " Enter into thy closet, and when thou 
hast ' shut the door, pray." It was the word 
that suited an age which made public worship 
the substitute for secret devotion. If there be 
no stated time and no special place, then this 
duty will be elbowed along by other duties, quite 
through the day. Habitual devotion is essential 
to maintaining the spirit of the exercise. It is 
only a transcendental delusion with which some 
meet Christ's demand for " entering the closet," 
by saying " if I am always in the praying mood 
why do I need set times and places?" Christ 
knew us best. He said it. That is enough. But 
men have asked, whether men should pray daily 
at the regular time, if they find themselves out 



224 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

of mood for the exercise. Will not such a prayer 

be merely formal ? But this is to make the ac- < 

i 

ceptableness of the prayer depend on our feeling ) 

about it. The prayer we may think little of, be- 
cause of its distractions, may be our best prayer. 
It had at least the outward form of obedience. 
We gave God the recognition. We gave him 
at least the words. We tried to pray. Bodily 
weariness may have been, just for that hour, al- 
most overpowering. But we would have prayed 
if we could. We obeyed our Lord. He accepted 
the attempt. Sometimes, too, a light surprises 
the praying man on his knees, and the listless be- 
ginning may have a joyous ending. If we please ' 
Satan by omitting the duty once, because not 
feeling as much in the mood to-day as yesterday, , 
he will see to it that we are more out of the 
mood to-morrow. By the time it has been twice 
or thrice omitted the habit of omission is formed, 
and stated prayer, as a regular exercise, has 
ceased. ! 

Besides these regular seasons, room must be 
made for special periods of supplication, the fre- 
quency of them depending upon our circum- 
stances, our feeling, and the burdens laid on us. 
There are gales of grace. The ship may have on 
board her cargo. Her clearance is made out. 
Her men stand in their places. She is out in the 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 22$ 

stream, and swings lazily with the changing tide. 
But all this is in vain until the spirits of the air 
begin to sing high up in her cordage. The flag 
lifts on the topmast. The sluggish sails, that 
hung close to the yards, begin to puff out their 
folds. The ripples run along the side. Every 
inch of the ship's white-winged canvas is now 
spread. The anchor is brought home, and the 
vessel begins to gather headway in the freshen- 
ing breeze; and by-and-by, under the favoring 
gale, she leaps from wave to wave, a thing of life 
and joy. Yet what has she done but use the 
glad breeze which God sent from the upper air ? 
There are breathings of God from the highest 
heavens. They incite in us corresponding breath- 
ings of desire to pray. They come to us in the 
midst of our work, while we walk the street, and 
in the waking hour of the night. There are instant 
petitions that spring to the lips, and they will utter 
themselves. The prayer prays itself. It is hardly 
ours; for it is not born of self, not offered by act 
of will. We cannot stop work to go to the 
closet, nor wait to bow the reverent knee. These 
"breathings of desire" come on week-days as 
well as on Sundays. Then it is a joy to pray, a 
relief to pray. It may be some special truth, — 
truth that is prayed out on its devotional side ; 
the soul revelling in it with a kind of joyous 



226 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

abandonment. The high solemn justice of God, 
it may be, awes us and subdues us. We love the 
white splendor of the throne and adore him that 
sitteth thereon. The glory of the attribute rises 
before us and fills the soul with a new sense of 
righteousness as the supreme thing in the uni- 
verse. Holiness is so grand and clear and beauti- 
ful in God that we are carried away with sacred 
delight. Or, again, the prayer gathers itself 
about God's mercy in Jesus Christ ; and we are 
lifted into a sphere of singular altitude, where 
the opened heart of God is disclosed in his un- 
speakable self-moved love for man. Or, some 
human soul going wrong and nearing the final 
precipice up which there is no climbing, arrests 
attention, and that man's case stands before us, 
and prayer is a plea; and, with a promise for an 
argument, we bring that soul to our prayer-hear- 
ing God. But how enumerate these words of 
prayer, these subjects that rouse its flame, these 
objects that stir its importunity ? The gales of 
grace blow fresh, and we spread wide every inch 
of the canvas and mean to make the most of the 
favored hour. Only it must be noted that these 
breezes come from above and do not always 
blow. You cannot set a time and say " now let 
the wind blow." God's "set times" are facts. 
" The wind bloweth where it listeth." We must 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 227 

be ready to take the gale. We cannot order up 
the wind at will. Always some blessing is ready 
in answer to prayer; but these special gales know 
no will but that of God. Expected and prayed 
for they are to be; but, above all, to be used 
when they begin to blow. A Christian, finding 
some special ease or access in prayer, surprised 
by more grace than had been sought, overjoyed 
at a manifestation that comes when he had reason 
to expect God's hidings because of his sins, is to 
take the utmost pains not to disturb the flow, 
not to check the leading, not to loiter at anchor 
when the wind is fair and fresh. For, rightly 
used, these winds waft one well on in the heaven- 
ward voyage. 

And now comes the question, whither does 
this praying mood naturally bring its possessor ? 
What will be the result on personal character of 
this spirit in a man ? That it broadens him for 
human work, that it achieves for him moral char- 
acter, that it lifts his thoughts into divinest 
realms, that it not only helps toward the passive 
Christian virtues, but gives a man moral intre- 
pidity, that it tends powerfully to mould one's 
whole moral being — these things are obvious. 
But they are none of them final ends. They are 
only preparations for something further on and 
higher up. They can only mean heaven is for 



228 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

such a soul. They are prophetic ; and no think- 
ing man can doubt that which such a prophecy 
declares. These things, wrought into the soul 
itself, are its " meetness for the inheritance of the 
saints in light." 

But what do the same facts prophesy for the 
future of the human race itself ? 

The stream of prayer is getting, as the ages go 
by, to be more full and clear. The river widens 
with the centuries. The sediment sinks out of 
sight. The waters steadily become more trans- 
parent. The early impurities from the soils of 
the far-away hills, from the defilements as the 
river ran past the old cities where men dwelt, no 
longer color so deeply the waters. The stream 
is working itself clear, and the healthful flow is a 
better omen. The banks are getting to be so far 
apart as to betoken the nearness of the ocean to 
which, naturally, such a river must run. That 
there is more praying as well as better praying, 
is certain. It is, indeed, sometimes asserted that, 
as men get intelligent they cease to think so 
much of prayer and to practise it so often. And 
it is, of course, true, that many a praying boy 
has become a prayerless man, because he has fed 
his intellect and starved his soul ; exactly as he 
may have become an invalid in health because he 
has neglected his body while developing his mind. 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 229 

This is brain at the expense of soul and of body. 
There are communities and ages of this sort of 
man. But nature has her revenges. She knows 
how to deai with such a man and such an age. 
Pugilistic families die out; so do merely intel- 
lectual families. Nature demands a balance, and 
gets it, in the long run. She insists that man is 
a tri-unity. Seen in single families, in single gen- 
erations, and even in single natures, the moral 
nature that demands prayer would seem to have 
a winter time, in which it dies down to the 
bracts. But spring comes again. The growth, 
ere it died down in winter, left in each joint a 
resurrection germ, and each germ has future 
fructifying power; so that there is more arrange- 
ment for life in the fact of apparent death than in 
any other way. The moral nature comes back to 
its prominence inevitably ; and the thrift of a moral 
nature is in its prayer. So that prayer is going 
to multiply. When you can have men's bodies 
without respiration, and men's minds without 
thought, you are going to get men born whose 
moral nature has no promptings to pray. True, 
some men may do so little with either part of 
their nature, that you may begin to question its 
existence. But it is there ; suppressed, misused, 
ignored, — but it is there. It would sometimes 
seem as if, here and there, a man, judging by his 



230 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

little care for its health, had no body; just as 
some men and some whole ages have had so little 
intellectual life, have thought so little, that we 
are half ready to question whether they have any 
mind of their own. And so there are some men 
and some ages, here whole communities, there 
great nations, which develop for a limited time the 
intellect at the expense of the soul, and we might 
almost think that they had none of the devotional 
cravings of a moral nature. But hybrid ages, like 
hybrid creatures, run out, by natural law. For 
moral law is natural law as really as is physical 
law, and the analogies of the two are striking and 
instructive. And yet, at certain points, it would 
seem as if now animalism and now mentalism 
were the main thing. Nowhere is intellect so 
flourishing, within its very narrow circle, as 
when it has almost run its round and come 
down to death. Seen at that point, it would 
look as if the more the intelligence the less the 
prayer. You may find an intellectual son of 
Anak ; but Anakim are sterile and die out. An 
age, intellectual at the expense of the moral na- 
ture, is sure to go under in the struggle for ex- 
istence ; exactly as an age when men have feebler 
bodies is sure to succumb. Small cycles show 
men intellectual here, and physically well devel- 
oped there, without the moral element that 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 23 1 

voices itself in prayer. But sweep with your 
glass the larger cycle, and you get indications 
sure and clear that the true cycle for man and 
age — the coming man and the ultimate age— is 
the cycle of the human trinity of body and mind 
and soul, each with clarified longings, each de- 
veloped in harmony with the other, all blending 
in a demand which includes praying as certainly 
as breathing and thinking. The ultimate man is 
religious. The ultimate age is prayerful. The 
final goal is a " sound mind in a sound body " and 
both dominated by a sound soul. Cycle will work 
• within cycle to the evolution of the prayer. The 
volume will swell until the river touches the 
ocean. 

And as prayer is more, so it is purer. It must 
come around, in the cycle, to Eden, — the better 
Eden of a gospel redemption. Prayer is increas- 
ing in quality as well as in quantity. Not, just at 
this point, are we asking whether there are not 
better answers to the better prayers of the race ; 
but here and now, the inquiry is concerning the 
reflex power of this purified body of augmented 
prayer upon praying men; and of what all this 
means upon the coming ages, in the moral 
quality of the men who are to do the ultimate 
praying of the race. The sanctifying power of 
prayer, as it comes to be a force for human de- 



232 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

velopment, is the present point of view. We 
can see its natural tendency on the individual 
man. Let any man come to be a thoroughly 
and an intelligently prayerful man, and it can- 
not be otherwise than that all his life is touched, 
even to its outer circumference, by this habit. 
He is wont to bring all his life into review before 
his holy God ; to mention to him his bodily wants, 
to ask for preservation when in health and restor- 
ation when he is sick ; to bring into his closet his 
chief trials in business, and his infirmities as a 
man ; his sins, asking their forgiveness and pledg- 
ing himself to struggle against their repetition; 
his social duties, his political relations, his work 
as a member of the household of faith, his duty 
to the ignorant millions at home and abroad — in 
short, all his relations to God and to man come 
into review, when he is alone in prayer with his 
Creator and his Sovereign. Can a man do this, 
and not be a morally elevated man thereby ? Can 
any considerable number of men do it, and the 
community not be benefited thereby ? Can there 
be a praying age that is not an approach to an 
ideal age ? Can the race have a great future that 
does not include prayer in its vast volume and in 
its clarifying power ? The " age to come " must 
needs be a praying age, if it is to be the age for 
which the best men hope. 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 233 

Among the reasons for believing that the race 
is to see a culminating era of prayer, may be 
mentioned : First, the yearning therefor, which 
seems to be a heritage from our old Eden. It is 
equally a memory and a prophecy; and which it 
is, at any given hour, depends on whether one is 
looking backward to Paradise lost, or looking for- 
ward to Paradise restored. No man has indi- 
vidual memories of Eden. Nevertheless no one 
fact in sociology is getting itself to be more uni- 
versally recognized than the unity of the human 
race. The facts of heredity show that the race 
is one as certainly as that every man is one. 
Heredity conjoined with personality is abun- 
dantly acknowledged to-day. The scorning of 
scorners at the words of the Scripture about the 
sin of fathers visited on the children, has gone 
by. Traits of body are transmitted because of 
the race-bond. Heredity can only be true of a 
race treated as one. Nor bodily traits only, but 
mental and moral as well, are transmitted. These 
inherited peculiarities are seen in the great na-t 
tions. And closer home, in our social life, who 
cannot discern them in the various households of 
our acquaintance ? These family markings may 
overleap one generation, only to reappear subse- 
quently in some individual, in peculiar intensity. 
Nor are these all evil traits. Some special firm- 



234 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

ness of conscience, some stalwart trait of charac- 
ter inherited from remote ancestry, stamps a whole 
series of descendants. You can trace the Hugue- 
not and the Pilgrim. These moral advantages 
bestowed on a child as the result of a Christian 
ancestry, are not a substitute for conversion, but 
they are a direct preparation therefor. In the 
great world-history, one ancient family, devel- 
oping afterward into the Hebrew nation, had 
special religious endowment. Its moral convic- 
tions were its strongest convictions. It had a 
genius for religion. It held the primal tradi- 
tions. It kept, in some fair measure, the primal 
beliefs. It was receptive of the truths given 
when Adam was created in " knowledge." It 
held in memory, more or less definitely, the origi- 
nal impressions with which God dowered Adam 
for transmission to the race. The broken plan 
necessitated a change in the teaching of man- 
kind. And the blur of the primal sin must have 
confused the subsequent impressions. But some 
of them were sure to come out along the ages of 
the progress of the race. Here and there, not 
only in Jew but in Gentile, some man would have 
the " vital eye ; " some man would snatch a 
glimpse of the meaning of the primal promise to 
Adam ; some bard would have prophetic vision. 
These primal impressions went into the stock of 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 235 

the race, and were sure to be revived. These 
old convictions and hopes, these echoes of Eden, 
would be transmitted and come to utterance in 
men of genius : — come not as the result of reason- 
ing, but as the reproduction of dim far-away feel- 
ings that craved utterance. They were inborn 
of the race, and must get voice through finer 
souls. It is only one form of the doctrine of he- 
redity to hold that the grander traditions, the 
primitive beliefs, have reappeared in seers and 
poets. There is no need of failing to recognize 
the highest flashes of human inspiration. For 
the Hebrew singers, we claim that over and above 
their native human inspiration, there was another 
inspiration, that of God's Holy Spirit. For other 
seers, we may not claim a divine impulse, but only 
that through heredity they were made heirs of 
the traditional hopes of the race. Whenever, on 
gifted wing, these souls have soared to their high- 
est flights, they have seen a better day for the 
race. Matthew Arnold's pinion broke when he 
sung his pessimistic lines. He has sung nothing 
since. Pessimism cannot sing. Poets are men of 
hope. The plainest of them can sing of "the 
good time coming." The loftier of them have a 
" golden age," an " Elysium " to be gained. " A 
grand far-off event " is the goal to which vision is 
turned. Just what it is, they cannot say; for, 



236 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

apart from the Christian faith, they can only see 
through a glass darkly. But these reminiscences 
from Paradise, these convictions that an Eden, 
better than that lost, shall come round again, are 
certainly noteworthy. They seem almost like 
" whispers dropt from the heavenly places : " like 
hints falling out of lips that need only in addition 
the divine inspiration to speak out concerning 
the " millennium glory." As the waxing moon 
draws forth the great waters that flow about all 
the continents of the world, so these presentient 
souls have carried about all the centuries of 
man's severer lot the tides of a better hope, lest 
the world's heart should break. Had God used 
reasonings, the world, which has never been a 
reasoning world, might have missed the teaching. 
But the oracle and the song, the flash of the 
loftier thought, the insight of the souls in which 
feeling is quick and strong, and, over against all 
these, the waiting of the great congregation of 
the world for the hopeful word, and its " amen " 
in the response of all who hear it uttered — these 
things are immensely significant. True, much of 
this impression is general in its idea of what the 
ripe age of the world will be. Absence of cer- 
tain ills is the glory of the coming age, with some. 
With others it is a better civilization. Men just 
out of the bondage of despotism make it consist 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 237 

largely in freedom. Sociologists think of better 
conditions in which labor and capital, the claims 
of the body and the soul, and the artificial and 
real distinctions of life, shall be better adjusted. 
Men think of a time when war shall cease, when 
equal rights shall be enjoyed, when intellectual 
and moral development shall reach the highest 
stages. They agree, however, in one thing, they 
look onward. Something better is to come. 
The ages wait. There is expectation. But when 
it is to be and in what way the coming crowning 
age is to be best and grandest, those men who 
are untouched by a higher than human inspira- 
tion cannot say. There is an instructive pro- 
phecy in human hearts, as Milton sings, " that 
time will run back and fetch the age of gold." 
Shelley calls it the age where "the Paradise 
Islands gleam." St. Simon has it "that the 
Golden age is not behind, but before us." Ten- 
nyson hopes for a far off time, at last, when 
peace will come, "and every winter change to 
spring." Pope will have it true that there comes 
an age when we shall see 



' Peace o'er the world her olive wand extend, 

And white-robed Innocence from heaven descend ; 



And Whittier adds, 



" I fold o'er wearied hands and wait, 
In calm assurance of the good." 



238 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

Cowper sings, 

11 The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks 
Shout to each other, and the mountain tops 
From distant mountains catch the flying joy ; 
Till, nation after nation taught the strain, 
Earth rolls the rapturous hosanna round." 

Only the age that is devotional as well as practi- 
cal in its piety, can fill out these yearnings in 
glad satisfaction. 

And, again, the ultimate age may be argued 
from the aspirations of praying men. Their better 
devotional moments have in them a kind of pro- 
phecy. Such men are led in their prayers. They 
feel that the Inspirer is the Answerer of their 
special petition. God has laid the world on 
some men as a burden. They note every fact 
that transpires in providence as a hindrance 
or a help to the final glory. Missionaries are 
asking that prayer may be concentrated now 
for this and now -for that special feature of 
their work. Temperance organizations, educa- 
tional societies, and Y. M. C. associations are 
requesting that some particular Sabbath or week 
day shall be devoted to prayer for their special- 
ties. The " Week of Prayer " has obtained a kind 
of recognition in the religious calendar of many 
churches. And a " day of prayer for Colleges " 
is observed by the more intelligent Christians of 
the nation. In the service of all these days, there 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 239 

is the onward glance, the prophetic hope. The 
nearer thing is the specific object, but always 
there is the reference to the larger aim and 
broader expectation of a redeemed world. 

This profound impression of praying men is 
not precisely what we should, at first, naturally 
expect. For, each of these men looks for final 
and personal salvation in heaven. He was con- 
sciously " saved " when converted. He has as- 
surance of " eternal life " for himself. He has 
put salvation just where our Lord places it, as the 
direct outcome of personal faith. He believed 
unto salvation. He took Christ as his own Saviour. 
He has grasped the promise, " He that believeth 
on the Son hath everlasting life;" and he sees 
that this means heaven, and does not at all re- 
quire a golden age for the human race on earth 
in the distant future. In point of fact some good 
men have either denied or ignored the world's 
conversion in the coming age ; so unlike are the 
spiritual salvation of a soul and the prevalence 
on earth of "Christ's kingdom." That the lat- 
ter should have been so pressed upon praying 
men in their best devotional hours, that some 
have so enjoyed the holy prospect of a time when 
the nations of the world shall be under the sway 
of Christ, must be looked upon as a kind of pro- 
phetic intimation given to those who live much in 



240 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

communion with God. Indeed, some good men 
do not know the full meaning of their own 
prayers. Keble sings, 

" And if some tone be false or low, 
What are all prayers beneath 
But cries of babes that cannot know 
Half the deep thought they breathe ? " 

And this intercessory prayer — prayer for 
others — which is used so often by the great be- 
lievers, in the Bible story, and which has been 
alike model and inspiration for good men in all 
ages, has nearly always the onward glance ; and 
it grows stronger for the special victory by the 
remembrance of the final conquest of God. 

There stands out on the sacred page as one of 
the grandest triumphs of Prayer, the case of 
Moses. God was about to destroy the people. 
Moses, type of the Great Intercessor, prays that 
he will not do it. " Blot me, also, out of thy 
book." He obtains mercy toward the people. 
But God said that he himself could not go as 
their Leader in the journey through the wilder- 
ness. He would send his angel in his stead. 
Moses is in agony. " If thou go not with me 
carry us not up hence." He had rather die than 
not have God with the people. And again and 
again in those long and weary years of the wan- 
dering, Moses prayed for the people, and pleaded 
for them the promise of God. But in urging, in 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 24 1 

prayer, what has been called the "great Rest 
Promise " of the Bible, he used but a part of it 
in his plea for Israel. It meant the " Rest " of 
the further ages. For the " Rest Promise " was 
repeated in David's time; it not having been ex- 
hausted when Joshua entered Canaan. It reap- 
peared in Paul's time. It comes out again in the 
" Revelation " of John. It finds its greatest ap- 
plication, of course, in the heavenly world. 
" There remaineth," i.e., it remaineth true, " there 
remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God." 
But while there is a heavenly, there is included 
in this unexpected rest-promise an earthly bless- 
ing. And in the great argument of his prayers, 
Moses uses the plea of what will the nations be 
likely to say if Israel is left of her God, and also 
the plea of God's own glory among all the people. 
Moses feels that he is acting on the theatre of 
the world, and the drama is to culminate in the 
further ages. Samuel was, likewise, an interces- 
sor, asking for the near, but having his eye on the 
cause of his God. Elijah was conspicuously a 
prophet of national life, and used his powers of 
intercession for results beyond the immediate 
surroundings of his personal career. Consciously 
or unconsciously he was acting in such a way 
that, far off, in New Testament times, he should 

be quoted as an example of a righteous man 
16 



242 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

whose prayer avails with God. David's prayers 
and songs have in them the foregleam. So, too, 
have the great prophets, as they see the glory of 
the Lord filling the whole earth. But it is in the 
Epistles of Paul that the thought culminates; 
and his broadening vision embraces not only sal- 
vation for the individual saint, but salvation for 
the ages as well. These great human intercessors 
lift prayers for the world that are to bring abun- 
dant answers. But the chief reason for looking for 
an age, one of the main characteristics of which is 
its happy prayerful communion with God, is the 
express declaration of the Sacred Scriptures. 

Let it be at once granted that a large number 
of Old Testament verses often quoted in support 
of this position, are not direct proof texts. Let 
us yield the point to the critics, that verses, like 
those in Isaiah, about the " Lord's House as es- 
tablished on the top of the mountains, and all 
nations shall flow unto it," had their literal fulfil- 
ment in the restoration from the Captivity and 
the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem ; and 
that they had the beginning of their spiritual ful* 
filment in the gospel day, at the Pentecostal 
gathering. But if this be granted, there is still a 
prophetic trend to the words. They have out- 
look. There is the vital glance in them. If it 
were too much to claim from such declarations a 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 243 

literal restoration of Jerusalem, it is not too much 
to see in them a glimpse of an age that shall be 
a better restoration than that would be. The full 
type shall be a restored Eden rather than a re- 
stored Jerusalem. But the old glory of Jerusalem 
rebuilt, shall help us by its suggestiveness. The 
great glory is not of a coming earthly city, but 
of a coming earthly age. As with one so with 
dozens of similar verses written before the Res- 
toration. For the historic view and the prophet- 
ic differ as do the two views of a mountain range. 
History stands before the range, counts the 
mountain heads and names them separately and 
gives the width of the valleys between them. 
Prophecy goes around to the end of the range 
and sees the hill tops only. From this point, the 
valleys disappear. The hills blend into one. 
They are in the same line of vision. To see the 
near is to see also the more distant. The trend 
of the events is the prophetic vision of them — 
their connection, not especially in point of time, 
but in similarity of character. Any doom seen, 
has a glance onward to the final doom ; any sal- 
vation has Christ's salvation in view; any res- 
toration sees also a restored age ; and the bless- 
ing of a " spirit of grace and supplication " sees 
also the final age of man's "communion with 
God." 



244 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

But the wonderful Second Psalm, a Sacred 
Drama, is a direct unfolding of God's plan of a 
final glory of the world. It is not, here, a 
prophet politically concerned for the fortunes of 
a single city, but a seer looking out on the ages. 
God is one of the dramatis persona. .He bids 
the Son, another of the persons, who is seated 
on a holy hill, to ask of him, according to an ar- 
rangement, the whole heathen world for a pos- 
session. God would dwell among the nations. 
If some will not let him rule, they are to be de- 
stroyed ; but there shall be vast multitudes who 
accept his reign. 

The ultimate ages shall be allegiant to God. 
Therefore, kings are exhorted to enter into the 
closest relation to Christ. And the drama closes 
with the words of blessing on the men of the ages 
to come who put their trust in the Lord. It is 
the Psalm that sees, through the nearer din, the 
peace of the final age of communion with Christ. 
Daniel saw the " Stone that filled the whole 
earth," and said that unto the Son of Man "was 
given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all 
people, nations, and languages should serve him." 
And the parables of the growth of "the king- 
dom " given by our Lord, have this far-away air. 
The grain of mustard seed has no end of expand- 
ing. The leaven leavens, at length, all the meal. 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 245 

And this has not been true of all individuals, and 
cannot be true of all the past members of the 
race. It can be argued as true only of those liv- 
ing in the final age. Or if it be understood as a 
"parable of trend rather than as a parable of 
result," there is no mistaking the direction of the 
trend. In that age, all nations are to serve the 
Lord and to come and worship before him. The 
same great fact of a coming age is to be held, 
whether one interprets the millennial utterances 
mathematically or metaphorically; whether one 
believes in a post-millennium or a pre-millennium, 
in any millennium or in no millennium at all. 
All that it is here necessary to maintain is that 
an age is coming to which so much of the world's 
prayer has looked, for which it has been a prep- 
aration and in which it culminates. But of all 
the glowing writers who have seen the better age 
and foretold its characteristic of happy devotion, 
none can equal in grasp of thought or swift- 
winged accuracy of word the apostle Paul. He 
revels "in the ages to come," or as his words 
might be given " in the ages that are coming on." 
The idea is of a grand succession, interrupted it 
may be here and there, but still on the whole ad- 
vancing toward the age of ages, when all will 
have " come on." It is " the dispensation of the 
fulness of times" toward which he is looking. 



246 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

He sees Christ the inheritor of the ages, as the 
older and dimmer prophets saw him as having an 
inheritance among the nations. The ages, in the 
glowing conception of the first part of his Epistle 
to the Ephesians, are Christ's heritage ; being a 
purchased possession. And all redeemed men 
then living, and all those who, at an earlier time 
than the Ephesians had first heard the gospel, 
constitute a part of the new redeemed age — an 
age which was to have such grand succession of 
ages when all things were to be summed up in 
Christ. And therefore it is that Paul says he 
" makes mention of them," in this age-relation, 
" in his prayers," so that they also may see more 
clearly the glory of Christ's inheritance in the 
ages. All this is not heaven ; it is earth. It is 
not the glory of the skies but of the " ages to 
come," "in the fulness of the dispensation of 
times." He sees, further on in the same Epistle, 
the Gentile world becoming " fellow -heirs." And 
he continues: "For this cause I bow my knees 
unto the Father." In other Epistles the same 
idea is always emerging. In some of them the 
fervor of his soul interrupts the flow of his argu- 
ment, and the broad, strong, victorious concep- 
tion of the ultimate age bursts forth here in dox- 
ology and there in glad and glowing prayer. 
"Now unto him that is able to do exceeding 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 247 

abundantly above all that we ask or think, ac- 
cording to the power that worketh in us, — unto 
him be the glory in the Church through all ages, 
world without end." Nor is this final clause a 
mere collection of synonomous words. It is 
given in the margin of the Revised Version, " age 
of ages." In such an " age of ages " the prayer 
may differ little, in many respects, from the 
praise. It may not be without petition, but it 
will abound in ascription and thanksgiving. 

It must be understood that the inquiry is not 
now about the victory of the Church; that is as- 
sured. Or about the success of organized Chris- 
tianity over all religions; that is guaranteed. 
Nor is it the question about a time when every 
man on the planet will be a Christian disciple. 
It is the rather a recognition of a trend, the cul- 
mination of prophetic feeling. and of Scripture 
intimation. It is the expectation of an " age to 
come," the age of the ages, when literature and 
law, the tone of human sentiment, the " spirit of 
the time," the lines of popular thought, the ac- 
tive convictions and the settled principles of men, 
shall be thoroughly, and therefore devotionally, 
Christian ; when the arts and sciences and habits 
of life, the employments and recreations of man- 
kind shall be ennobled by a consciousness of God 
above and eternity before them ; when thought 



1 



248 PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

shall be run in Christian moulds ; when faith in 
God and so in good men shall cast out doubt and 
distrust; when prayer to God shall be natural 
and universal ; when the human capacity for lov- 
ing shall be so enlarged by the loving of God that 
men shall love each other with holy love, thus 
lifting an instinct to the rank of a religious vir- 
tue ; when work shall be worship and the prayer 
of the lip in the closet shall act itself out all day 
long in the prayer of the life. That would be 
the age of prayer and of all else that goes natur- 
ally and happily therewith. For there is no duty 
of the state or the household, of the church or 
the school, of the public or the private life, that is 
not enriched by a devotional piety. And when 
such enrichment and enlargement become the 
persuasive and animating spirit of mankind, then 
will be shown the fact that the Christianity which 
can save an individual can save also an age. 

How this will be brought about we may not 
say. We simply mark the trend, and call atten- 
tion to the prophecy it holds in itself. This only 
is to be said : that nothing in the moral universe 
of God is so strong, so sure, so set upon reaching 
its final goal, as a moral trend. 

In some aspects of present moral movement, it 
would seem that the " age of ages " was very far 
off and very slow in coming on. Gigantic wrongs 



PRAYER IN ITS PROPHECY. 249 

still raise their head and are loud in their claim. 
Political and social and religious errors abound. 
The foes are able and unscrupulous. But God 
has all the forces of the world in his hands. He 
lets them at times do their worst. He manages 
them when they seem most free. He lets the 
eddy flow backward, but the law of the river is 
that it runs onward and downward ; its very vol- 
ume and direction is what makes the eddy near 
the shore. God keeps accounts. God times 
events. Just so many defeats of a wise measure, 
before it is possible to enact it. The defeats all 
count toward the result. Just so many drops 
of blood from a slave's back, the very last one of 
them necessary, and the time comes for Emanci- 
pation. Just one more turn of the screw of 
Roman despotism, and Christ is born. The pro- 
cess, from this point of view, seems steady and 
slow. It is the favorite 01^ of many because, 
just now, scientists are making prominent the 
facts that show development to be a law. But 
it is coming to be seen that there may be devel- 
opment through sudden introduction of forces 
sometimes destructive and sometimes saving. 
In nature we have the sun slowly rising and 
steadily mounting the sky, and we have, as well, 
the instant flash of the lightning splintering the 
oak that had used a century of the best sunshine. 



2 SO PRAYER AS A THEORY AND A FACT. 

Moral catastrophes and salvations are sometimes 
as strangely sudden for single souls, and for 
single ages. We read of nations to be morally 
"born in a day," as we see them sometimes 
politically springing up into life in an instant of 
time. What God has in reserve, what concen- 
tration of human prayer and effort, on which the 
power of mighty moral miracle is to rest, who 
can say ? All moral reformation heretofore has 
begun and culminated in prayer. The energy, 
pervasive as is the light that so many use always 
and seldom recognize", which enters into all Chris- 
tian effort and moulds it and brings it into har- 
mony with the will and work of God, is that of 
the prayers of 'prayerful men. 

** More things are wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice 
Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 
For what are men better than sheep or goats 
That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer, 
Both for themselves, and those who call them friend. 
For so the whole round world is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." 



INSTRUCTIVE VOLUMES. 

By that eminent author 
REV. B. F. BURR, D. D., U. D. 



ECCB CCELTJM. 12mo. 108 pp. $L 

"I have gotten a better Idea of Astronomy, as a whole, from It than I evef 
got before from all other sources."— Uorac* Bushnkll, 

PATER MUNDI % or Modern Science Testifying to the Heavenly 
Father. First Series. 12mo, 807 pp. $1 25. 

44 It discusses with masterly ability the testimonies of Modern Science to the 
being of a God."— Presbyterian Review. 

PATER MUNDI ; or The Doctrine of Evolution. Second Series. 
12mo. 370 pp. $1 25. 

M A complete and unanswerable reply to Evolutionism. "—Lutheran Quar- 
terly Review. 

AD FIDEM. 12mo. 888 pp. $1 SO. 

" One of the finest defences of the Christian religion that has been made la 
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TEMPTED TO' UNBELIEF. 12mo. 824 pp. $1. 

"We should lilce to see It circulating actively from house to house in every 

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CELESTIAL EMPIRES. 12mo. 802 pp. $1 50. 

" A very grand view of the revelations of science."— Prot James Dana. 

UNIVERSAL BELIEFS. 12mo. 312 pp. $1 25. 

m 

"An able and opportune volume, forcibly setting forth essential truths."— 
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LONG AGOs at Interpreted by the Nineteenth Century. 12mo. 
888 pp. Cloth, $1 60. 

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of the themes of highest importance— such as the Supreme Book, the Supreme 
Day, Institution, Evil, Good, etc. 

American Tract Society, 

150 Nassau St., New York; Boston, 54 Bromfleld St.; Philadelphia, 1512 Chestnut 
St.; Rochester, 03 State St.: Chicago, 122 Wabash Ave.; Cincinnati, 170 Elm St; 
San Francisco. 735 Market St. 



VOLUMES BY DR. ROBINSON. 



SABBATH EVENING SERMONS. 12mo. $1 25 

Discourses which might be read for services In churches without 
a pastor. 

SERMONS IN SONGS. 12mo. 125 

Sermons preached In the Memorial Church, New York city, the 
texts of which are chosen from the Songs of the Bible. 

CHURCH WORK. 12mo. 1 25 

Sermons neither occasional nor selected, but the actual rehearsal 
(once a week) of half a year's pastoral work. 

BETHEL AND PENUEL. 12mo. 1 25 

The remaining half-year's work in the same pulpit: founded upon 
the two incidents of Jacob's life at Bethel and Penuel. 

STUDIES OF NEGLECTED TEXTS. 12mo. , - 1 25 

Sermons peculiar in that the themes of discourse are chosen from 
texts somewhat rarely selected for pulpit use. 

STUDIES IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 12mo. 1 25 

Homiletic expositions with illustrations of consecutive passages in 
the Gospels, tne Epistles, and the Apocalypse. 

STUDIES IN MARE'S GOSPEL. 12mo. 1 25 

These discourses are constructed upon passages for study cbosen 
in the shortest and most vivid of the four Gospels. 

FROM SAMUEL TO SOLOMON. 12mo. 1 25 

Four histories— Samuel's and Saul's. David's and Solomon's— cross 
the highest lines of Israel's splendor as a kingdom. 

STUDIES IN LUKE'S GOSPEL. I. 12mo. - - 1 25 

These discourses are like the others in construction, being exposi- 
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STUDIES IN LUKE'S GOSPEL. II. 12mo - - 1 25 

A continuation of the above, treating selected passages from the 
second half of the third Gospel. 

SIMON PETER: His Early Life and Times. 12mo 1 25 

Sermons biographical and practical, picturesquely delineating the 
career of this misunderstood disciple of our Lord. 



FOR SALE BY THE 

AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 







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