by
For the sake of completeness,
Chapters V and VI are reprinted from another little book
Parts have also appeared in the
London Quarterly Review, and I gladly acknowledge the
complaisance of its Editor.
TO
MRS. WATERHOUSE
Lomberdale Hall, in the High Peak
There is, high among the hills, a
garden with a walk--a terraced walk. The moors lie round it, and
the heights face it; and below the village drowses; while far, far
afield, the world agonizes in a solemn tragedy of righteousness
(where you, too, have your sepulchres)--a tragedy not quite
divorced from the war in heaven, nor all unworthy of the glorious
cusp of sky that roofs the riot of the hills.
The walk begins with a conservatory
of flowers and it ends in an old Gothic arch--rising, as it were,
from beauty natural and frail to beauty spiritual and eternal. And
it curves and twines between rocky plants, as if to suggest how
arduous the passage from the natural to the spiritual is. And it
has, half-way, a little hermitage on it, like a wayside chapel, of
old carved and inscribed stones. And the music and the pictures!
Close by, the mowers whir upon the lawn, and the thrust flutes in
the birch hedge; beyond, in the gash of the valley, the stream
purrs up through the steep woods; still farther, the limestone
rocks rise fantastic, like castles in the air; and, over all, the
lark still soars and sings in the sun (as he does even in
Flanders), and makes melody in his heart to the Lord.
That terrace was made with a purpose
and a welcome at will. And it is good to pace the Italian paving,
to tread the fragrance from the alyssum in the seams, to brood upon
the horizons of the far, long wolds, with their thread of road
rising and vanishing into busy Craven, and all the time to think
greatly of God and kindly of men--faithfully of the past, lovingly
of the present, and hopefully of the future.
So in our soul let us make a cornice
road for God to come when He will, and walk upon our high places.
And a little lodge and shelter let us have on it, of sacred stones,
a shrine of ancient writ and churchly memories. Let us make an
eyrie there of large vision and humane, a retreat of rest and
refitting for a dreadful world. May He show us, up there apart,
transfigured things in a noble light. May He prepare us for the
sorrows of the valley by a glorious peace, and for the action of
life by a fellowship gracious, warm, and noble (as even earthly
friendships may be). So may we face all the harsh realisms of Time
in the reality, power, and kindness of the Eternal, whose Mercy is
as His Majesty for ever.
It is difficult and even formidable
thing to write on prayer, and one fears to touch the Ark. Perhaps
no one ought to undertake it unless he has spent more toil in the
practice of prayer than on its principle. But perhaps also the
effort to look into its principle may be graciously regarded by Him
who ever liveth to make intercession as itself a prayer to know
better how to pray. All progress in prayer is an answer to
prayer--our own or another's. And all true prayer promotes its own
progress and increases our power to pray.
The worst sin is prayerlessness.
Overt sin, or crime, or the glaring inconsistencies which often
surprise us in Christian people are the effect of this, or its
punishment. We are left by God for lack of seeking Him. The history
of the saints shows often that their lapses were the fruit and
nemesis of slackness or neglect in prayer. Their life, at seasons,
also tended to become inhuman by their spiritual solitude. They
left men, and were left by men, because they did not in their
contemplation find God; they found but the thought or the
atmosphere of God. Only living prayer keeps loneliness humane. It
is the great producer of sympathy. Trusting the God of Christ, and
transacting with Him, we come into tune with men. Our egoism
retires before the coming of God, and into the clearance there
comes with our Father our brother. We realize man as he is in God
and for God, his Lover. When God fills our heart He makes more room
for man than the humanist heart can find. Prayer is an act, indeed
the act, of fellowship. We cannot truly pray even for
ourselves without passing beyond ourselves and our individual
experience. If we should begin with these the nature of prayer
carries us beyond them, both to God and to man. Even private prayer
is common prayer--the more so, possibly, as it retires from being
public prayer.
Not to want to pray, then, is the sin
behind sin. And it ends in not being able to pray. That is its
punishment--spiritual dumbness, or at least aphasia, and
starvation. We do not take our spiritual food, and so we falter,
dwindle, and die. "In the sweat of your brow ye shall eat your
bread." That has been said to be true both of physical and
spiritual labour. It is true both of the life of bread and of the
bread of life.
Prayer brings with it, as food does,
a new sense of power and health. We are driven to it by hunger,
and, having eaten, we are refreshed and strengthened for the battle
which even our physical life involves. For heart and flesh cry out
for the living God. God's gift is free; it is, therefore, a gift to
our freedom, i.e. renewal to our moral strength, to what makes men
of us. Without this gift always renewed, our very freedom can
enslave us. The life of every organism is but the constant victory
of a higher energy, constantly fed, over lower and more elementary
forces. Prayer is the assimilation of a holy God's moral
strength.
We must work for this living. To feed
the soul we must toil at prayer. And what a labour it is! "He
prayed in an agony." We must pray even to tears if need be. Our
cooperation with God is our receptivity; but it is an active, a
laborious receptivity, an importunity that drains our strength away
if it do not tap the sources of the Strength Eternal. We work, we
slave, at receiving. To him that hath this laborious expectancy it
shall be given. Prayer is the powerful appropriation of power, of
divine power. It is therefore creative.
Prayer is not mere wishing. It is
asking--with a will. Our will goes into it. It is energy. Orare
est laborare. We turn to an active Giver; therefore we go into
action. For we could not pray without knowing and meeting Him in
kind. If God has a controversy with Israel, Israel must wrestle
with God. Moreover, He is the Giver not only of the answer, but
first of the prayer itself. His gift provokes ours. He beseeches
us, which makes us beseech Him. And what we ask for chiefly is the
power to ask more and to ask better. We pray for more prayer. The
true "gift of prayer" is God's grace before it is our facility.
Thus prayer is, for us,
paradoxically, both a gift and a conquest, a grace and a duty. But
does that not mean, is it not a special case of the truth, that all
duty is a gift, every call on us a blessing, and that the task we
often find a burden is really a boon? When we look up from under it
it is a load, but those who look down to it from God's side see it
as a blessing. It is like great wings--they increase the weight but
also the flight. If we have no duty to do God has shut Himself from
us. To be denied duty is to be denied God. No cross no Christ.
"When pain ends gain ends too."
We are so egoistically engrossed
about God's giving of the answer that we forget His gift of the
prayer itself. But it is not a question simply of willing to pray,
but of accepting and using as God's will the gift and the power to
pray. In every act of prayer we have already begun to do God's
will, for which above all things we pray. The prayer within all
prayer is "Thy will be done." And has that petition not a special
significance here? "My prayer is Thy Will. Thou didst create it in
me. It is Thine more than mine. Perfect Thine own will"--all that
is the paraphrase, from this viewpoint, of "Hear my prayer." "The
will to pray," we say, "is Thy will. Let that be done both in my
petition and in Thy perfecting of it." The petition is half God's
will. It is God's will inchoate. "Thy will" (in my prayer) "be done
(in Thy answer). It is Thine both to will and to do. Thy will be
done in heaven--in the answer, as it is done upon earth--in the
asking."
Prayer has its great end when it
lifts us to be more conscious and more sure of the gift than the
need, of the grace than the sin. As petition rises out of need or
sin, in our first prayer it comes first; but it may fall into a
subordinate place when, at the end and height of our worship, we
are filled with the fullness of God. "In that day ye shall ask Me
nothing." Inward sorrow is fulfilled in the prayer of petition;
inward joy in the prayer of thanksgiving. And this thought helps to
deal with the question as to the hearing of prayer, and especially
its answer. Or rather as to the place and kind of answer. We shall
come one day to a heaven where we shall gratefully know that God's
great refusals were sometimes the true answers to our truest
prayer. Our soul is fulfilled if our petition is not.
When we begin to pray we may catch
and surprise ourselves in a position like this. We feel to be
facing God from a position of independence. If He start from His
end we do from ours. We are His vis-a-vis; He is ours. He is
an object so far as we are concerned; and we are the like to Him.
Of course, He is an object of worship. We do not start on
equal terms, march up to Him, as it were, and put our case. We do
more than approach Him erect, with courteous self-respect shining
through our poverty. We bow down to Him. We worship. But still it
is a voluntary, an independent, submission and tribute, so to say.
It is a reverence which we make an offer. We present something
which is ours to give. If we ask Him to give we feel that we begin
the giving in our worship. We are outside each other; and we call,
and He graciously comes.
But this is not Christian idea, it is
only a crude stage of it (if the New Testament is to guide us). We
are there taught that only those things are perfected in God which
He begins, that we seek only because He found, we beseech Him
because He first besought us (
We feel this especially as prayer
passes upwards into praise. When the mercy we besought comes home
to us its movement is reversed in us, and it returns upon itself as
thanksgiving. "Great blessings which we won with prayer are worn
with thankfulness." Praise is the converted consecration of the
egoism that may have moved our prayer. Prayer may spring from
self-love, and be so far natural; for nature is all of the craving
and taking kind. But praise is supernatural. It is of pure grace.
And it is a sign that the prayer was more than natural at heart.
Spare some leisure, therefore, from petition for thanksgiving. If
the Spirit move conspicuously to praise, it shows that He also
moved latently the prayer, and that within nature is that which is
above it. "Prayer and thanks are like the double motion of the
lungs; the air that is drawn in by prayer is breathed forth again
by thanks."
Prayer is turning our will on God
either in the way of resignation or of impetration. We yield to
His Will or He to ours. Hence religion is above all things prayer,
according as it is a religion of will and conscience, as it is an
ethical religion. It is will and Will. To be religious is to pray.
Bad prayer is false religion. Not to pray is to be irreligious.
"The battle for religion is the battle for prayer; the theory of
religion is the philosophy of prayer." In prayer we do not think
out God; we draw Him out. Prayer is where our thought of God passes
into action, and becomes more certain than thought. In all thought
which is not mere dreaming or brooding there is an element of will;
and in earnest (which is intelligent) prayer we give this element
the upper hand. We do not simply spread our thought our before God,
but we offer it to Him, turn it on Him, bring it to bear on
Him, press it on Him. This is our great and first sacrifice, and it
becomes pressure on God. We can offer God nothing so great and
effective as our obedient acceptance of the mind and purpose and
work of Christ. It is not easy. It is harder than any idealism. But
then it is very mighty. And it is a power that grows by exercise.
At first it groans, at last it glides. And it comes to this, that,
as there are thoughts that seem to think themselves in us, so there
are prayers that pray themselves in us. And, as those are the best
thoughts, these are the best prayers. For it is the Christ at
prayer who lives in us, and we are conduits of the Eternal
Intercession.
Prayer is often represented as the
great means of the Christian life. But it is no mere means, it is
the great end of that life. It is, of course, not untrue to call it
a means. It is so, especially at first. But at last it is truer to
say that we live the Christian life in order to pray than that we
pray in order to live the Christian life. It is at least as true.
Our prayer prepares for our work and sacrifice, but all our work
and sacrifice still more prepare for prayer. And we are, perhaps,
oftener wrong in our work, or even our sacrifice, than we are in
our prayer--and that for want of its guidance. But to reach this
height, to make of prayer our great end, and to order life always
in view of such a solemnity, in this sense to pray without ceasing
and without pedantry--it is a slow matter. We cannot move fast to
such a fine product of piety and feeling. It is a growth in grace.
And the whole history of the world shows that nothing grows so
slowly as grace, nothing costs as much as free grace; a fact which
drives us to all kinds of apologies to explain what seems the
absence of God from His world, and especially from His world of
souls. If God, to our grief, seems to us far absent from history,
how does He view the distance, the absence, of history from
Him?
A chief object of all prayer is to
bring us to God. But we may attain His presence and come closer to
Him by the way we ask Him for other things, concrete things or
things of the Kingdom, than by direct prayer for union with Him.
The prayer for deliverance from personal trouble or national
calamity may bring us nearer Him than mere devout aspiration to be
lost in Him. The poor woman's prayer to find her lost sovereign may
mean more than the prayer of many a cloister. Such distress is
often meant by God as the initial means and exercise to His
constant end of reunion with Him. His patience is so long and kind
that He is willing to begin with us when we are no farther on than
to use Him as a means of escape or relief. The holy Father can turn
to His own account at last even the exploiting egoism of youth. And
He gives us some answer, though the relief does not come, if He
keep us praying, and ever more instant and purified in prayer.
Prayer is never rejected so long as we do not cease to pray. The
chief failure of prayer is its cessation. Our importunity is a part
of God's answer, both of His answer to us and ours to Him. He is
sublimating our idea of prayer, and realizing the final purpose in
all trouble of driving us farther in on Himself. A homely image has
been used. The joiner, when he glues together two boards, keeps
them tightly clamped till the cement sets, and the outward pressure
is no more needed; then he unscrews. So with the calamities,
depressions, and disappointments that crush us into close contact
with God. The pressure on us is kept up till the soul's union with
God is set. Instant relief would not establish the habit of prayer,
though it might make us believe in it with a promptitude too
shallow to last or to make it the principle of our soul's life at
any depth. A faith which is based chiefly on impetration might
become more of a faith in prayer than a faith in God. If we got all
we asked for we should soon come to treat Him as a convenience, or
the request as a magic. The reason of much bewilderment about
prayer is that we are less occupied about faith in God than about
faith in prayer. In a like way we are misled about the question of
immortality because we become more occupied with the soul than with
God, and with its endless duration more than its eternal life,
asking if we shall be in eternity more than eternity in us.
In God's eyes the great object of
prayer is the opening or restoring of free communion with Himself
in a kingdom of Christ, a life communion which may even, amid our
duty and service, become as unconscious as the beating of our
heart. In this sense every true prayer brings its answer with it;
and that not "reflexly" only, in our pacification of soul, but
objectively in our obtaining a deeper and closer place in God and
His purpose. If prayer is God's great gift, it is one inseparable
from the giver; who, after all, is His own great gift, since
revelation is His Self-donation. He is actively with us, therefore,
as we pray, and we exert His will in praying. And, on the other
hand, prayer makes us to realize how far from God we were, i.e. it
makes us realize our worst trouble and repair it. The outer need
kindles the sense of the inner, and we find that the complete
answer to prayer is the Answerer, and the hungry soul comes to
itself in the fullness of Christ.
Prayer is the highest use to which
speech can be put. It is the highest meaning that can be put into
words. Indeed, it breaks through language and escapes into action.
We could never be told of what passed in Christ's mountain
midnights. Words fail us in prayer oftener than anywhere else; and
the Spirit must come in aid of our infirmity, set out our case to
God, and give to us an unspoken freedom in prayer, the possession
of our central soul, the reality of our inmost personality in
organic contact with His. We are taken up from human speech to the
region of the divine Word, where Word is deed. We are integrated
into the divine consciousness, and into the dual soliloquy of
Father and Son, which is the divine give and take that upholds the
world. We discover how poor a use of words it is to work them into
argument and pursue their dialectic consequences. There is a deeper
movement of speech than that, and a more inward mystery, wherein
the Word does not spread out to wisdom, nor broods in dream, but
gathers to power and condenses to action. The Word becomes Flesh,
Soul, Life, the active conquering kingdom of God. Prayer, as it is
spoken, follows the principle of the Incarnation with its twofold
movement, down and up.
What is true religion? It is not the
religion which contains most truth in the theological sense of the
word. It is not the religion most truly thought out, not that which
most closely fits with thought. It is religion which comes to
itself most powerfully in prayer. It is the religion in which the
soul becomes very sure of God and itself in prayer. Prayer contains
the very heart and height of truth, but especially in the Christian
sense of truth--reality and action. In prayer the inmost truth of
our personal being locks with the inmost reality of things, its
energy finds a living Person acting as their unity and life, and we
escape the illusions of sense, self, and the world. Prayer, indeed,
is the great means for appropriating, out of the amalgam of
illusion which means so much for our education, the pure gold of
God as He wills, the Spirit as He works, and things as they are. It
is the great school both of proficiency and of veracity of soul.
(How few court and attain proficiency of soul!) It may often cast
us down, for we are reduced by this contact to our true
dimensions--but to our great peace.
Prayer, true prayer, does not allow
us to deceive ourselves. It relaxes the tension of our
self-inflation. It produces a clearness of spiritual vision.
Searching with a judgment that begins at the house of God, it
ceases not to explore with His light our own soul. If the Lord is
our health He may need to act on many men, or many moods, as a
lowering medicine. At His coming our self-confidence is shaken. Our
robust confidence, even in grace, is destroyed. The pillars of our
house tremble, as if they were ivy-covered in a searching wind. Our
lusty faith is refined, by what may be a painful process, into a
subtler and more penetrating kind; and its outward effect is for
the time impaired, though in the end it is increased. The effect of
the prayer which admits God into the recesses of the soul is to
destroy that spiritual density, not to say stupidity, which made
our religion cheery or vigorous because it knew no better, and
which was the condition of getting many obvious things done, and
producing palpable effect on the order of the day. There are
fervent prayers which, by making people feel good, may do no more
than foster the delusion that natural vigour or robust religion,
when flushed enough, can do the work of the kingdom of God. There
is a certain egoist self-confidence which is increased by the more
elementary forms of religion, which upholds us in much of our
contact with men, and which even secures us an influence with them.
But the influence is one of impression rather than permeation, it
overbears rather than converts, and it inflames rather than
inspires. This is a force which true and close prayer is very apt
to undermine, because it saps our self-deception and its
Pharisaism. The confidence was due to a lack of spiritual insight
which serious prayer plentifully repairs. So by prayer we acquire
our true selves. If my prayer is not answered, I am. If my petition
is not fulfilled, my person, my soul, is; as the artist comes to
himself and his happiness in the exercise of the talent he was made
for, in spite of the delay and difficulty of turning his work to
money. If the genius is happy who gets scope, the soul is blessed
that truly comes to itself in prayer.
Blessed, yet not always happy. For by
prayers we are set tasks sometimes which (at first, at least) may
add to life's burden. Our eyes being opened, we see problems to
which before we were blind, and we hear calls that no more let us
alone. And I have said that we are shown ourselves at times in a
way to dishearten us, and take effective dogmatism out of us. We
lose effect on those people who take others at their own emphatic
valuation, who do not try the spirits, and who have acquired no
skill to discern the Lord in the apostle. True searching prayer is
incompatible with spiritual dullness or self-complacency. And,
therefore, such stupidity is not a mere defect, but a vice. It grew
upon us because we did not court the searching light, nor haunt the
vicinity of the great white Throne. We are chargeable with it
because of our neglect of what cures it. Faith is a quickening
spirit, it has insight; and religious density betrays its absence,
being often the victim of the sermon instead of the alumnus of the
gospel. It is not at all the effect of ignorance. Many ignorant
people escape it by the exercise of themselves unto godliness; and
they not only show wonderful spiritual acumen, but they turn it
upon themselves; with a result, often, of great but vigilant
humility, such axis apt to die out of an aggressive religion more
eager to bring in a kingdom coming than to trust a Kingdom come.
They are self-sufficient in a godly sort, and can even carry
others, in a way which reveals the action of a power in them beyond
all natural and unschooled force. We can feel in them the
discipline of the Spirit. We can read much habitual prayer between
their lines. They have risen far above religion. They are in the
Spirit, and live in a long Lord's day. We know that they are not
trying to serve Christ with the mere lustiness of natural religion,
nor expecting do do the Spirit's work with the force of native
temperament turned pious. There are, even amongst the religious,
people of a shrewd density or numble dullness who judge heavenly
things with an earthly mind. And, outside the religious, among
those who are but interested in religion, there may be a certain
gifted stupidity, a witty obtuseness; as among some writers who
sans gene turn what they judge to be the spirit of the age
upon the realities of Eternity, and believe that it dissolves them
in spray. Whether we meet this type within the Church or without,
we can mostly feel that it reveals the prayerless temper whatever
the zeal or vivacity may be. Not to pray is not to discern--not to
discern the things that really matter, and the powers that really
rule. The mind may see acutely and clearly, but the personality
perceives nothing subtle and mighty; and then it comforts and
deludes itself by saying it is simple and not sophisticated; and it
falls a victim to the Pharisaism of the plain man. The finer (and
final) forces, being unfelt, are denied or decried. The eternal
motives are misread, the spell of the Eternal disowned. The
simplicity in due course becomes merely bald. And all because the
natural powers are unschooled, unchastened, and unempowered by the
energy of prayer; and yet they are turned, either, in one
direction, to do Christian work, active but loveless, or, on the
other, to discuss and renounce Christian truth. It is not always
hard to tell among Christian men those whose thought is matured in
prayer, whose theology there becomes a hymn, whose energy is
disciplined there, whose work there becomes love poured out, as by
many a Salvationist lass, and whose temper is there subdued to that
illuminated humility in which a man truly finds his soul. "The
secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him, and He will show
them His covenant." The deeper we go into things the more do we
enter a world where the mastery and the career is not to talent but
to prayer.
In prayer we do not ask God to do
things contrary to Nature. Rather here ascending Nature takes its
true effect and arrives. For the God we invoke is the Lord and
Destiny of the whole creation; and in our invocation of Him Nature
ends on its own key-note. He created the world at the first with a
final and constant reference to the new creation, whose native
speech is prayer. The whole creation thus comes home and finds
itself in our prayer; and when we ask from the God of the whole
Creation we neither do not expect an arbitrary thing. We petition a
God in whom all things are fundamentally working together for good
to such a congenial cry. So far from crossing Nature, we give it
tongue. We lift it to its divinest purpose, function, and glory.
Nature excels itself in our prayer. The Creation takes its true
effect in personality, which at once resists it, crowns it, and
understands it; and personality takes true effect in God--in
prayer. If there be a divine teleology in Nature at all, prayer is
the telos. The world was made to worship God, for God's glory. And
this purpose is the world's providence, the principle of creation.
It is an end present all along the line and course of natural
evolution; for we deal in prayer most closely with One to whom is
no after nor before. We realize the simultaneity of Eternity.
When we are straitened in prayer we
are yet not victims of Nature, we are yet free in the grace of
God--as His own freedom was straitened in Christ's incarnation, not
to say His dereliction, to the finishing of His task. It is hard,
it is often impossible, for us to tell whether our hour of
constriction or our hour of expansion contributes more to the
divine purpose and its career. Both go to make real prayer. They
are the systole and diastole of the world's heart. True prayer is
the supreme function of the personality which is the world's
supreme product. It is personality with this function that God
seeks above all to rear--it is neither particular moods of its
experience, nor influential relations of it with the world. The
praying personality has an eternal value for God as an end in
itself. This is the divine fullness of life's time and course, the
one achievement that survives with more power in death than in
life. The intercession of Christ in heaven is the continuity and
consummation of His supreme work on earth. To share it is the
meaning of praying in the Spirit. And it has more effect on history
than civilization has. This is a hard saying, but a Christian can
say no otherwise without in so far giving up his Christianity.
"There is a budding morrow in
midnight." And every juncture, every relation, and every pressure
of life has in it a germ of possibility and promise for our growth
in God and grace; which germ to rear is the work of constant and
progressive prayer. (For as a soul has a history, prayer has its
progress.) This germ we do not always see, nor can we tend it as if
we did. It is often hidden up under the earthly relations, and may
there be lost--our soul is lost. (It can be lost even through
love.) But also is may from there be saved--and we escape from the
fowler's net. It's growth is often visible only to the Saviour whom
we keep near by prayer, whose search we invoke, and for whose
action we make room in prayer. Our certainty of Him is girt round
with much uncertainty, about His working, about the steps of His
process. But in prayer we become more and more sure that He is
sure, and knows all things to His end. All along Christ is being
darkly formed within us as we pray; and our converse with God goes
on rising to become an element of the intercourse of the Father and
the Son, whom we overhear, as it were, at converse in us. Yet this
does not insulate us from our kind; for other people are then no
more alien to us, but near in a Lord who is to them what He is to
us. Private prayer may thus become more really common prayer that
public prayer is.
And so also with the universe itself
as we rise in Christ to prayer. Joined with its Redeemer, we are
integrated into its universality. We are made members of its vast
whole. We are not detained and cramped in a sectional world. We are
not planted in the presence of an outside, alien universe, nor in
the midst of a distraught, unreconciled universe, which speaks like
a crowd, in many fragments and many voices, and drags us from one
relation with it to another, with a Lo, here is Christ, or there.
But it is a universe wholly vocal to us, really a universe, and
vocal as a whole, one congenial and friendly, as it comes to us in
its Christ and ours. It was waiting for us--for such a
manifestation of the Son of God as prayer is. This world is not now
a desert haunted by demons. And it is more than a vestibule to
another; it is its prelude in the drama of all things. We know it
in another knowledge now than its own. Nature can never be
understood by natural knowledge. We know it as science never
can--as a whole, and as reality. We know it as we are known of
God--altogether, and not in pieces. Having nothing, and praying for
everything, we possess all things. The faith that energizes in
Christian prayer sets us at the centre of that whole of which
Nature is the overture part. The steps of thought and its processes
of law fade away. They do not cease to act, but they retire from
notice. We grasp the mobile organization of things deep at its
constant and trusty heart. We receive the earnest of our
salvation--Christ in us.
There, where one centre reconciles all things,
The world's profound heart beats.
We are planted there. And all the
mediation of process becomes immediate in its eternal ground. As we
are going there we feel already there. "They were willing to
receive Him into the boat, and straightway the boat was at the land
whither they were going." We grasp that eternal life to which all
things work, which gives all the waxing organization its being and
meaning--for a real organism only grows because it already is. That
is the mark of a real life. And soul and person is the greatest
organism of all. We apprehend our soul as it is apprehended of God
and in God, the timeless God--with all its evolution, past or
future, converted into a divine present. We are already all that we
are to be. We possess our souls in the prayer which is real
communion with God. We enter by faith upon that which to sight and
history is but a far future reversion. When He comes to our prayer
He brings with Him all that He purposes to make us. We are already
the "brave creature" He means us to be. More than our desire is
fulfilled--our soul is. In such hour or visitation we realize our
soul or person at no one stage of it, but in its fullness, and in
the context of its whole and final place in history, the world, and
eternity. A phase which has no meaning in itself, yet carries, like
the humble mother of a great genius, an eternal meaning in it. And
we can seize that meaning in prayer; we can pierce to what we are
at our true course and true destiny, i.e. what we are to God's
grace. Laws and injunctions such as "Love your neighbour," even
"Love your enemy," then become life principles, and they are law
pressures no more. The yoke is easy. Where all is forgiven to
seventy times seven there is no friction and no grief any more. We
taste love and joy. All the pressure of life then goes to form the
crystals of faith. It is God making up His jewels.
When we are in God's presence by
prayer we are right, our will is morally right, we are doing
His will. However unsure we may be about other acts and efforts to
serve Him we know we are right in this. If we ask truly but ask
amiss, it is not a sin, and He will in due course set us right in
that respect. We are sure that prayer is according to His will, and
that we are just where we ought to be. And that is a great matter
for the rightness of our thought, and of the aims and desires
proposed by out thoughts. It means much both as to their form and
their passion. If we realize that prayer is the acme of our right
relation to God, if we are sure that we are never so right with Him
in anything we do as in prayer, then prayer must have the greatest
effect and value for our life, both in its purpose and its fashion,
in its spirit and its tenor. What puts us right morally, right with
a Holy God (as prayer does), must have a great shaping power on
every part and every juncture of life. And, of course, especially
upon the spirit and tenor of our prayer itself, upon the form and
complexion of our petition.
The effect of our awful War
If there must be in the Church a
communion of belief, there must be there also a communion of
prayer. For the communion of prayer is the very first form the
communion of belief takes. It is in this direction that Church
unity lies. It lies behind prayer, in something to which prayer
gives effect, in that which is the source and soul of prayer--in
our relation with God in Christ, in our new creation. Prayer for
Church unity will not bring that unity; but that which stirs, and
founds, and wings prayer will. And prayer is its chief exercise.
The true Church is just as wide as the community of Christian
prayer, i.e. of due response to the gospel of our reconcilement and
communion with God. And it is a thing almost dreadful that
Christians who pray to the same God, Christ, and Saviour should
refuse to unite in prayer because of institutional differences.
A prayer is also a promise. Every
true prayer carries with it a vow. If it do not, it is not in
earnest. It is not of a piece with life. Can we pray in earnest if
we do not in the act commit ourselves to do our best to bring about
the answer? Can we escape some king of hypocrisy? This is
especially so with intercession. What is the value of praying for
the poor if all the rest of our time and interest is given only to
becoming rich? Where is the honesty of praying for our country if
in our most active hours we are chiefly occupied in making
something out of it, if we are strange to all sacrifice for it?
Prayer is one form of sacrifice, but if it is the only form it is
vain oblation. If we pray for our child that he may have God's
blessing, we are really promising that nothing shall be lacking on
our part to be a divine blessing to him. And if we have no kind of
religious relation to him (as plenty of Christian parents have
none), our prayer is quite unreal, and its failure should not be a
surprise. To pray for God's kingdom is also so engage ourselves to
service and sacrifice for it. To begin our prayer with a petition
for the hallowing of God's name and to have no real and prime place
for holiness in our life or faith is not sincere. The prayer of the
vindictive for forgiveness is mockery, like the prayer for daily
bread from a wheat-cornerer. No such man could say the Lord's
Prayer but to his judgment. What would happen to the Church if the
Lord's Prayer became a test for membership as thoroughly as the
Creeds have been? The Lord's Prayer is also a vow to the Lord. None
but a Christian can pray it, or should. Great worship of God is
also a great engagement of ourselves, a great committal of our
action. To begin the day with prayer is but a formality unless it
go on in prayer, unless for the rest of it we pray in deed what we
began in word. One has said that while prayer is the day's best
beginning it must not be like the handsome title-page of a
worthless book.
"Thy will be done." Unless that were
the spirit of all our prayer, how should we have courage to pray if
we know ourselves at all, or if we have come to a time when we can
have some retrospect on our prayers and their fate? Without this
committal to the wisdom of God, prayer would be a very dangerous
weapon in proportion as it was effective. No true God could promise
us an answer to our every prayer. No Father of mankind could. The
rain that saved my crop might ruin my neighbour's. It would
paralyse prayer to be sure that it would prevail as it is offered,
certainly and at once. We should be terrified at the power put into
our foolish hands. Nothing would do more to cure us of a belief in
our own wisdom than the granting of some of our eager prayers. And
nothing could humiliate us more than to have God say when the
fulfilment of our desire brought leanness to our souls. "Well, you
have it." It is what He has said to many. But He said more, "My
grace is sufficient for thee."
We touch the last reality directly in
prayer. And we do this not by thought's natural research, yet by a
quest not less laborious. Prayer is the atmosphere of revelation,
in the strict and central sense of that word. It is the climate in
which God's manifestation bursts open into inspiration. All the
mediation of Nature and of things sinks here to the rear, and we
are left with God in Christ as His own Mediator and His own
Revealer. He is directly with us and in us. We transcend there two
thousand years as if they were but one day. By His Spirit and His
Spirit's creative miracle God becomes Himself our new nature, which
is yet our own, our destined Nature; for we were made with His
image for our "doom of greatness." It is no mere case of education
or evolution drawing our our best. Prayer has a creative action in
its answer. It does more than present us with our true, deep,
latent selves. It lays hold on God, and God is not simply our
magnified self. Our other self is, in prayer, our Creator still
creating. Our Maker it is that is our Husband. He is Another. We
feel, the more we are united with Him in true prayer, the deep,
close difference, the intimate otherness in true love. Otherwise
prayer becomes mere dreaming; it is spiritual extemporizing and not
converse. The division runs not simply between us and Nature, but
it parts us within our spiritual self, where union is most close.
It is a spiritual distinction, like the distinction of Father and
Son in heaven. But Nature itself, our natural selves, are involved
in it; because Nature for the Christian is implicated in
Redemption. It "arrives." It is read in a new script. The soul's
conflict is found in a prelude in it. This may disturb our pagan
joy. It may quench the consolations of Nature. The ancient world
could take refuge in Nature as we cannot. It could escape there
from conscience in a way impossible to us, because for us body runs
up into soul, and Nature has become organic with spirit, an arena
and even (in human nature) an experience of God's will. It groans
to come to itself in the sons of God. Redemption is cosmic. We do
not evade God's judgment there; and we put questions about His
equity there which did not trouble the Greek. It we take the wings
of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the earth, God
still besets us behind and before. We still feel the collision of
past and future, of conduct and conscience. If we try to escape
from His presence there, we fail; the winds are His messengers, the
fires His ministers, wars and convulsions instruments of His
purpose. He is always confronting us, judging us, saving us in a
spiritual world, which Nature does not stifle, but only makes it
more universal and impressive than our personal strife. In Nature
our vis-a-vis is still the same power we meet as God in our
soul.
The voice that rolls the stars along
Speaks all His promises.
Our own natural instincts turn our
scourges, but also our blessings, according as they mock God or
serve Him. So Nature becomes our chaperone for Christ, our tutor
whose duty is daily to deliver us at Christ's door. It opens out
into a Christ whose place and action are not historic only, but
also cosmic. The cosmic place of Christ in the later epistles is
not apostolic fantasy, extravagant speculation, nor groundless
theosophy. It is the ripeness of practical faith, faith which by
action comes to itself and to its own.
Especially is this pointed where
faith has its most pointed action as prayer. If cosmic Nature runs
up into man, man rises up into prayer; which thus fulfils Nature,
brings its inner truth to pass, and crowns its bias to spirit.
Prayer is seen to be the opening secret of creation, its destiny,
that to which it all travails. It is the burthen of evolution. The
earnest expectation of the creation waits, and all its onward
thrust works, for the manifestation of the sons of God. Nature
comes to itself in prayer. Prayer realizes and brings to a head the
truth of Nature, which groans being burdened with the passion of
its deliverance, its relief in prayer. "Magna ars est conversari
cum Deo." "The art of prayer is Nature gone to heaven." We
become in prayer Nature's true artists (if we may so say), the
vehicles of its finest and inmost passion. And we are also its true
priests, the organs of its inner commerce with God, where the
Spirit immanent in the world meets the Spirit transcendent in
obedient worship. The sum of things for ever speaking is heard in
heaven to pray without ceasing. It is speaking not only to us but
in us to God. Soliloquy here is dialogue. In our prayer God returns
from His projection in Nature to speak with Himself. When we speak
to God it is really the God who lives in us speaking through us to
Himself. His Spirit returns to Him who gave it; and returns not
void, but bearing our souls with Him. The dialogue of grace is
really the monologue of the divine nature in self-communing love.
In prayer, therefore, we do true and final justice to the world. We
give Nature to itself. We make it say what it was charged to say.
We make it find in thought and word its own soul. It comes to
itself not in man but in the praying man, the man of Christian
prayer. The Christian man at prayer is the secretary of Creation's
praise. So prayer is the answer to Nature's quest, as God is the
answer to prayer. It is the very nature of nature; which is thus
miraculous or nothing at its core.
Here the friction vanishes,
therefore, between prayer and natural law. Nature and all its
plexus of law is not static, but dynamic. It is not interplay, but
evolution. It has not only to move, but to arrive. Its great motive
power is not a mere instinct, but a destiny. Its system is not a
machine, but a procession. It is dramatic. It has a close. Its
ruling power is not what it rises from, but what it moves to. Its
impulse is its goal immanent. All its laws are overruled by the
comprehensive law of its destination. It tends to prayer. The laws
of Nature are not like iron. If they are fixed they are only fixed
as the composition is fixed at H20 of the river which is so fluid
and moving that I can use it at any time to bear me to its sea.
They are fixed only in so far as makes reliable, and not fatal, to
man's spirit. Their nature is constant, but their function is not
stiff. What is fixed in the river is the constancy of its fluidity.
"Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide." The greatest
law of Nature is thus its bias to God, its nisus to return
to His rest. This comes to light chiefly in man's gravitation to
Him, when His prodigal comes home to Him. The forwardest creation
comes to itself in our passion for God and in our finding of Him in
prayer. In prayer, therefore, we do not ask God to do things
contrary to Nature, though our request may seem contrary to
sections of it which we take for the whole. We ask Him to fulfil
Nature's own prayer.
The atmosphere of prayer seems at
first to be the direct contrary of all that goes with such words as
practical or scientific. But what do we mean by practical at last
but that which contributes to the end for which the world and
mankind were made? The whole of history, as the practical life of
the race, is working out the growth, the emancipation of the soul,
the enrichment and fortifying of the human spirit. It is doing on
the large scale what every active life is doing on the small--it is
growing soul. There is no reality at last except soul, except
personality. This alone has eternal meaning, power, and value,
since this alone develops or hampers the eternal reality, the will
of God. The universe has its being and its truth for a personality,
but for one at last which transcends individual limits. To begin
with the natural plane, our egoism constructs there a little world
with a definite teleology converging on self, one which would
subdue everybody and everything to the tributary to our common
sensible self. On a more spiritual (yet not on the divine) plane
the race does the like with its colossal ego. It views and treats
the universe as contributory to itself, to the corporate
personality of the race. Nature is here for man, man perhaps for
the superman. We are not here for the glory of God, but God is here
for the aid and glory of man. But either way all things are there
to work together for personality, and to run up into a free soul.
Man's practical success is then what makes for the enhancement of
this ego, small or great. But, on the Christian plane, man himself,
as part of a creation, has a meaning and an end; but it is in God;
he does not return on himself. God is his nisus and drift. God
works in him; he is not just trying to get his own head out. But
God is Love. All the higher science of Nature which is the milieu
and the machinery that give the soul its bent to love, and turn it
out its true self in love. All the practice and science of the
world is there, therefore, to reveal and realize love and love's
communion. It is all a stage, a scenery, a plot, for a denounement
where beings mingle, and each is enriched by all and all by each.
It all goes to the music of that love which binds all things
together in the cosmic dance, and which makes each stage of each
thing prophetic of its destined fullness only in a world so bound.
So science itself is practical if prayer end and round all. It is
the theory of a cosmic movement with prayer for its active end. And
it is an ethical science at last, it is a theology, if the
Christian end is the real end of the whole world. All knowledge
serves love and love's communion. For Christian faith a universe is
a universe of souls, an organism of persons, which is the
expression of an Eternal Will of love. This love is the real
presence which gives meaning, and movement, and permanence to a
fleeting world of sense. And it is by prayer that we come into
close and conscious union with this universe and power of love,
this living reality of things. Prayer (however miraculous) is,
therefore, the most natural things in the world. It is the
effectuation of all Nature, which comes home to roost there, and
settles to its rest. It is the last word of all science, giving it
contact with a reality which, as science alone, it cannot reach.
And it is also the most practical things in all man's action and
history, as doing most to bring to pass the spiritual object for
which all men and all things exist and strive.
Those who feel prayer stifled by the
organization of law do not consider that law itself, if we take a
long enough sweep, keeps passing us on to prayer. Law rises from
Nature, through history, to heaven. It is integrated historically,
i.e. by Christ's cross and the Church's history, with the
organization of love. But that is the organization of Eternity in
God, and it involves the interaction of all souls in a communion of
ascending prayer. Prayer is the native movement of the spiritual
life that receives its meaning and its soul only in Eternity, that
works in the style and scale of Eternity, owns its principles, and
speaks its speech. It is the will's congenial surrender to that
Redemption and Reconciliation between loving wills which is God's
Eternity acting in time. We beseech God because He first besought
us.
So not to pray on principle means
that thought has got the better of the will. The question is
whether thought includes will or will thought; and thought wins if
prayer is suppressed. Thought and not personality is then in
command of the universe. If will is but a function of the idea,
then prayer is but a symptom, it is not a power. It belongs to the
phenomenology of the Infinite, it is not among its controls.
Prayer is doing God's will. It is
letting Him pray in us. We look for answer because His fullness is
completely equal to His own prayers. Father and Son are perfectly
adequate to each other. That is the Holy Spirit and
self-sufficiency of the Godhead.
If God's will is to be done on earth
as it is in heaven, prayer begins with adoration. Of course, it is
thanks and petition; but before we give even our prayer we must
first receive. The Answerer provides the very prayer. What we do
here rests on what God has done. What we offer is drawn from us by
what He offers. Our self-oblation stands on His; and the spirit of
prayer flows from the gift of the Holy Ghost, the great
Intercessor. Hence praise and adoration of His work in itself comes
before even our thanksgiving for blessings to us. At the height of
prayer, if not at its beginning, we are preoccupied with the great
and glorious thing God has done for His own holy name in
Redemption, apart from its immediate and particular blessing to us.
We are blind for the time to ourselves. We cover our faces with our
wings and cry "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts; the
fullness of the earth is His glory." Our full hearts glorify. We
magnify His name. His perfections take precedence of our occasions.
We pray for victory in the present was, for instance, and for
deliverance from all war, for the sake of God's kingdom--in a
spirit of adoration for the deliverance there that is not
destroyed, or foiled, even by a devilry like this. If the kingdom
of God not only got over the murder of Christ, but made it its
great lever, there is nothing that it cannot get over, and nothing
it cannot turn to eternal blessing and to the glory of the holy
name. But to the perspective of this faith, and to its vision of
values so alien to human standards, we can rise only in prayer.
But it would be unreal prayer which
was adoration only, with no reference to special boons or human
needs. That would be as if God recognized no life but His
own--which is very undivine egoism, and its collective form is the
religion of mere nationalism. In true prayer we do two things. We
go out of ourselves, being lost in wonder, love and praise; but
also, and in the same act, we go in upon ourselves. We stir up all
that is within us to bless and hallow God's name. We examine
ourselves keenly in that patient light, and we find ourselves even
when our sin finds us out. Our nothingness is not burned and
branded into us as if we had above only the starry irony of heaven.
Our heart comes again. Our will is braced and purified. We not only
recall our needs, but we discover new ones, of a more and more
intimate and spiritual kind. The more spiritual we grow, the more
we rise out of the subconscious or the unconscious. We never
realize ourselves as we do when we forget ourselves after this
godly sort in prayer. Prayer is not falling back upon the abyss
below the soul; even as the secret of the Incarnation is sought in
vain in that non-moral zone. Prayer is not what might be called the
increased drone or boom of an unspeakable Om. But we rise in it to
more conscious and positive relation with God the Holy--the God not
abysmal but revealed, in whose revelation the thoughts of many
hearts are revealed also, and whose fullness makes need almost as
fast as it satisfies it.
After adoration, therefore, prayer is
thanksgiving and petition. When we thank God our experience
"arrives". It finds what it came for. It fulfills the greatest end
of experience. It comes to its true self, comes to its own, and has
its perfect work. It breathes large, long, and free, sublimi
anbelitu. The soul runs its true normal course back to God its
Creator, who has stamped the destiny of this return upon it, and
leaves it no peace till it finds its goal in Him. The gift we thank
for becomes sacramental because it conveys chiefly the Giver, and
is lost in Him and in His praise. It is He that chiefly comes in
His saints and His boons. In real revelation we rise for above a
mere interpretation of life, a mere explanation of events; we touch
their Doer, the Life indeed, and we can dispense with
interpretations, having Him. An occurrence thus becomes a
revelation. It gives us God, in a sacrament. And where there is
real revelation there is thanksgiving, there is eucharist; for God
Himself is in the gift, and strikes His own music from the soul. If
we think most of the gift, prayer may subtly increase our egoism.
We praise for a gift to us. We are tempted to treat God as an
asset, and to exploit him. But true prayer, thinking most of the
Giver, quells the egoism and dissolves it in praise. What we
received came for another end than just to gratify us. It came to
carry God to us, and to lift us to Him and to the consent of His
glory. The blessing in it transcends the enjoyment of it, and the
Spirit of the outgoing God returns to Him not void, but bringing
our souls as sheaves with Him.
So also with the petition in our
prayer. It also is purified by adoration, praise, and thanksgiving.
We know better what to pray for as we ought. We do not only bring
to God desires that rise apart from Him, and that we present by an
act of our own; but our desires, our will, as they are inspired are
also formed in God's presence, as requests. They get shape. In
thanks we spread out before Him and offer Him our past and present,
but in petition it is our future.
But has petition a true place in the
highest and purest prayer? Is it not lost in adoration and
gratitude? Does adoration move as inevitably to petition as
petition rises to adoration? In reply we might ask whether the best
gratitude and purest thanks are not for answered petitions. Is
there not this double movement in all spiritual action which
centres in the Incarnation, where man ascends as God comes down?
Does not man enlarge in God as God particularizes upon men? But,
putting that aside, is the subsidence of petition not due to a
wrong idea of God; as if our only relation were dependence, as if,
therefore, will-lessness before Him were the devout ideal--as if we
but acknowledge Him and could not act on Him? Ritschl, for example,
following Schleiermacher, says, "Love to God has no sphere of
action outside love to our brother." If that were so, there would
be no room for petition, but only for worship of God and service of
man without intercession. The position is not unconnected with
Ritschl's neglect of the Spirit and His intercession, or with his
aversion to the Catholic type of piety. If suffering were the only
occasion and promptuary of prayer, then resignation, and not
petition, might be the true spirit of prayer. But our desires and
wills do not rise out of our suffering only, nor out of our
passivity and dependence, but also out of our duty and our place in
life; and therefore our petition is as due to God and as proper as
our life's calling. If we may not will nor love, no doubt petition,
especially for others, is a mistake. Of course, also, our egoism,
engrossed with our happiness influences our prayer too often and
too much. But we can never overcome our self-will by will-lessness,
nor our greed of happiness by apathy. Petitions that are less than
pure can only be purified by petition. Prayer is the salvation of
prayer. We pray for better prayer. We can rise above our egoism
only as we have real dealing with the will of God in petitionary
prayer which does change His detailed intentions toward us though
not His great will of grace and Salvation.
The element of adoration has been
missed from worship by many observers of our public prayer. And the
defect goes with the individualism of the age just past. Adoration
is a power the egoist and individualist loses. He loses also the
power both of thanksgiving and of petition, and sinks, through
silence before God, to His neglect. For our blessings are not
egoistically meant, nor do they remain blessings if so taken. They
contemplate more than ourselves, as indeed does our whole place and
work in the gift of life. We must learn to thank God not only for
the blessings of others, but for the power to convey to others
gifts which make them happier than they make us--as the gifts of
genius so often do. One Church should praise Him for the prosperity
of other Churches, for that is to the good of the gospel. And, as
for petition, how can a man or a Church pray for their own needs to
the omission of others? God's fundamental relation to us is one
that embraces and blesses all. We are saved in a common salvation.
The atmosphere of prayer is communion. Common prayer is the
inevitable fruit of a gospel like Christ's.
Public prayer, therefore, should be
in the main liturgical, with room for free prayer. The more it
really is common prayer, and the more our relation with men extend
and deepen (as prayer with and for men does extend them), the more
we need forms which proceed from the common and corporate
conscience of the Church. Even Christ did. As He rose to the height
of His great world-work on the cross His prayer fell back on the
liturgy of His people--on the Psalms. It is very hard for the
ordinary minister to come home to the spiritual variety of a large
congregation without those great forms which arose out of the deep
soul of the Church before it spread into sectional boughs or
individual twigs.
Common prayer is not necessarily
public. To recite the Litany on a sick-bed is common prayer. Christ
felt the danger of common prayer as public prayer (
Moreover, it is common prayer,
however solitary, that prevails most, as being most in tune with
the great first goal of God's grace--the community. So this union
in prayer gives to prayer an ethical note of great power and value.
If we really pray with others, it must clear, and consolidate, and
exalt our moral relations with them everywhere. Could we best the
man with whom and for whom we really pray? There is a great
democratic note in common prayer which is also true prayer.
"Eloquence and ardour have not done so much for Christ's cause as
the humble virtues, the united activity, and the patient prayers of
thousands of faithful people whose names are quite unknown." And we
are united thus not only to the living but to the long dead. "He
who prays is nearer Christ than even the apostles were," certainly
than the apostles before the Cross and Resurrection.
We have been warned by a man of
genius that the bane of so much religion is that it clings to God
with its weakness and not with its strength. This is very true of
that supreme act of religion of which our critics know least--of
the act of prayer. So many of us pray because we are driven by need
rather than kindled by grace. Our prayer is a cry rather than a
hymn. It is a quest rather than a tryst. it trembles more than it
triumphs. It asks for strength rather than exerts it. How different
was the prayer of Christ! All the divine power of the Eternal Son
went to it. It was the supreme form taken by His Sonship in its
experience and action. Nothing is more striking in Christ's life
than His combination of selflessness and power. His consciousness
of power was equal to anything, and egoism never entered Him. His
prayer was accordingly. It was the exercise of His unique power
rather than of His extreme need. It came from His uplifting and not
His despair. It was less His duty than His joy. It was more full of
God's gift of grace than of man's poverty of faith, of a holy love
than of a seeking heart. In His prayer He poured out neither His
wish nor His longing merely, but His will. And He knew He was heard
always. He knew it with such power and certainty that He could
distribute His value, bless with His overflow, and promise His
disciples they would be heard in His name. It was by His prayer
that He countered and foiled the godless power in the world, the
kingdom of the devil. "Satan hath desired to have thee--but I have
prayer for thee." His prayer means so much for the weak because it
arose out of this strength and its exercise. It was chiefly in His
prayer that He was the Messiah, and the Revealer and Wielder of the
power and kingship of God. His power with God was so great that it
made His disciples feel it could only be the power of God; He
prayer in the Eternal Spirit whereby He offered Himself to God. And
it was so great because it was spent on God alone. So true is it
that the kingdom of God comes not with observation, that the
greatest things Christ did for it were done in the night and not in
the day; His prayers meant more than His miracles. And His great
triumph was when there were none to see, as they all forsook Him
and fled. He was mightest in His action for men not when He was
acting on men but on God. He felt the dangers of the publicity
where His work lay, and He knew that they were only to be met in
secrecy. He did most for His public in entire solitude; there He
put forth all His power. His nights were not always the rest of
weakness from the day before, but often the storing of strength for
the day to come. Prayer (if we let Christ teach us of it) is
mightiest in the mightiest. It is the ether round the throne of the
Most High. Its power answers to the omnipotence of grace. And those
who feel they owe everything to God's grace need have no difficulty
about the range of prayer. They may pray for everything.
A word, as I close this chapter, to
the sufferers. We pray for the removal of pain, pray passionately,
and then with exhaustion, sick from hope deferred and prayer's
failure. But there is a higher prayer than that. It is a greater
thing to pray for pain's conversion than for its removal. It is
more of grace to pray that God would make a sacrament of it. The
sacrament of pain! That we partake not simply, nor perhaps chiefly,
when we say, or try to say, with resignation, "Thy will be done."
It is not always easy for the sufferer, if he remain clear-eyed to
see that it is God's will. It may have been caused by an evil mind,
or a light fool, or some stupid greed. But, now it is there, a
certain treatment of it is God's will; and that is to capture and
exploit it for Him. It is to make it serve the soul and glorify
God. It is to consecrate its elements and make it sacramental. It
is to convert it into prayer.
God has blessed pain even in causing
us to pray for relief from it, or profit. Whatever drives us to
Him, and even nearer Him, has a blessing in it. And, if we are to
go higher still, it is to turn pain to praise, to thank Him in the
fires, to review life and use some of the energy we spend in
worrying upon recalling and tracing His goodness, patience, and
mercy. If much open up to us in such a review we may be sure there
is much more we do not know, and perhaps never may. God is the
greatest of all who do good by stealth and do not crave for every
benefit to be acknowledged. Or we may see how our pain becomes a
blessing to others. And we turn the spirit of heaviness to the
garment of praise. We may stop grousing and get our soul into its
Sunday clothes. The sacrament of pain becomes then a true Eucharist
and giving of thanks.
And if there were a higher stage than
all it would be Adoration--when we do not think of favours or
mercies to us or ours at all, but of the perfection and glory of
the Lord. We feel to His Holy Name what the true artist feels
towards an unspeakable beauty. As Wordsworth says:
I gazed and gazed,
And did not wish her mine.
There was a girl of 15, tall, sweet,
distinguished beyond her years. And this is how Heine ran into
English at the sight of her:
No flower is half so lovely,
So dear, and fair, and kind.
A boundless tide of tenderness
Flows over my heart and mind.
And I pray. (There is no answer
To beauty unearthly but prayer.)
God answered my prayer, and keep you
So dear, and fine, and fair.
All religion is founded on prayer,
and in prayer it has its test and measure. To be religious is to
pray, to be irreligious is to be incapable of prayer. The theory of
religion is really the philosophy of prayer; and the best theology
is compressed prayer. The true theology is warm, and it steams
upward into prayer. Prayer is access to whatever we deem God, and
if there is no such access there is no religion; for it is not
religion to resign ourselves to be crushed by a brute power so that
we can no more remonstrate than resist. It is in prayer that our
real idea of God appears, and in prayer that our real relation to
God shows itself. On the first levels of our religion we go to our
God for help and boon in the junctures of our natural life; but, as
we rise to supernatural religion, gifts becomes less to us than the
Giver; they are not such as feed our egoism. We forget ourselves in
a godly sort; and what we court and what we receive in our prayer
is not simply a boon but communion--or if a boon, it is the boon
which Christians call the Holy Spirit, and which means, above all
else, communion with God. But lest communion subside into mere
meditation it must concentrate in prayer. We must keep acquiring by
such effort the grace so freely given. There is truly a
subconscious communion, and a godliness that forgets God well, in
the hourly life of taxing action and duty; but it must rise to
seasons of colloquy, when our action is wholly with the Father, and
the business even of His kingdom turns into heart converse, where
the yoke is easy and the burden light. Duty is then absorbed in
love--the deep, active union of souls outwardly distinct. Their
connection is not external and (as we might say) inorganic; it is
inward, organic, and reciprocal. There is not only action but
interplay, not only need and gift but trust and love. The boon is
the Giver Himself, and its answer is the self of the receiver.
Cor ad cor loquitor. All the asking and having goes on in a
warm atmosphere, where soul passes into soul without fusion, person
is lost in person without losing personality, and thought about
prayer becomes thought in prayer. The greatest, deepest, truest
thought of God is generated in prayer, where right thought has its
essential condition in a right will. The state and act of true
prayer contains the very substance and summit of Christian truth,
which is always there in solution, and becomes increasingly
explicit and conscious. To grow in grace is to become more
understanding in prayer. We make for the core of Christian reality
and the source of Christian power.
Our atonement with God is the
pregnant be-all and end-all of Christian peace and life; and what
is that atonement but the head and front of the Saviour's perpetual
intercession, of the outpouring of His sin-laden soul unto death?
Unto death! That is to say, it is its outpouring utterly. So that
His entire self-emptying and His perfect and prevailing prayer is
one. In this intercession our best prayer, broken, soiled, and
feeble as it is, is caught up and made prayer indeed and power with
God. This intercession prays for our very prayer, and atones for
the sin in it. This is praying in the Holy Ghost, which is not
necessarily a matter either of intensity or elation. This is
praying "for Christ's sake." If it be true that the whole Trinity
is in the gospel of our salvation, it is also true that all
theology lies hidden in the prayer which is our chief answer to the
gospel. And the bane of so much theology, old and new, is that it
has been denuded of prayer and prepared in a vacuum.
Prayer draws on our whole
personality; and not only so, but on the whole God.And it draws on
a God who really comes home nowhere else. God is here, not as a
mere presence as He is in Nature, nor is He a mere pressure as He
closes in upon us in the sobering of life. We do not face Him in
mere meditation, nor do we cultivate Him as life's most valuable
asset. But He is here as our Lover, our Seeker, our Visitant, our
Interlocutor; He is our Saviour, our Truth, our Power, nay, our
Spiritual World. In this supreme exercise of our personality He is
at once our Respondent and our Spiritual Universe. Nothing but the
experience of prayer can solve paradoxes like these. On every other
level they are absurd. But here deep answers deep. God becomes the
living truth of our most memorable and shaping experience, not its
object only but its essence. He who speaks to us also hears in us,
because He opens our inward ear (
There is no such engine for the
growth and command of the moral soul, single, or social, as prayer.
Here, above all, he who will do shall know. It is the great organ
of Christian knowledge and growth. It plants us at the very centre
of our own personality, which gives the soul the true perspective
of itself; it sets us also at the very centre of the world in God,
which gives us the true hierarchy of things. Nothing, therefore,
develops such "inwardness" and yet such self-knowledge and
self-control. Private prayer, when it is made a serious business,
when it is formed prayer, when we pray audibly in our chamber, or
when we write our prayers, guided always by the day's record, the
passion of piety, and above all the truths of Scripture, is worth
more for our true and grave and individual spirituality than
gatherings of greater unction may be. Bible searching and searching
prayer go hand in hand. What we receive from God in the Book's
message we return to Him with interest in prayer. Nothing puts us
in living contact with God but prayer, however facile our mere
religion may be. And therefore nothing does so much for our
originality, so much to make us our own true selves, to stir up all
that is in us to be, and hallow all we are. In life it is not hard
work; it is faculty, insight, gift, talent, genius. And what genius
does in the natural world prayer does in the spiritual. Nothing can
give us so much power and vision. It opens a fountain perpetual and
huminous at the centre of our personality, where we are sustained
because we are created anew and not simply refreshed. For here the
springs of life continually rise. And here also the eye discerns a
new world because it has second sight. It sees two worlds at once.
Hence, the paradoxes I spoke of. Here we learn to read the work of
Christ which commands the world unseen. And we learn to read even
the strategy of Providence in the affairs of the world. To pray to
the Doer must help us to understand what is done. Prayer, as our
greatest work, breeds in us the flair for the greatest work of God,
the instinct of His kingdom and the sense of His track in Time.
Here, too, we acquire that spiritual
veracity which we so constantly tend to lose; because we are in
contact with the living and eternal reality. Our very love is
preserved from dissimulation, which is a great danger when we love
men and court their love. Prayer is a greater school and discipline
of divine love than the service of man is. But not if it is cut off
from it.
And no less also is it the school of
repentance, which so easily can grow morbid. We are taught to be
not only true to reality, but sincere with ourselves. We cannot
touch God thus without having a light no less searching than saving
shed upon our own hearts; and we are thus protected from Pharisaism
in our judgment of either self or friend or foe--especially at
present of our foe. No companion of God can war in His name against
man without much self-searching and self-humiliation, however
reserved. But here humility turns into moral strength.
Here we are also regathered in soul
from the fancies that bewilder us and the distractions that
dissolve us into the dust of the world. We are collected into peace
and power and sound judgment, and we have a heart for any fate,
because we rest in the Lord whose judgments are salvation. What
gives us our true stay gives us our true self; and it protects us
from the elations and despairs which alternate in ourselves by
bringing home to us a Saviour who is more to us than we are to
ourselves. We become patient with ourselves because we realize the
patience of God. We get rid of illusions about ourselves and the
world because our intimacy is with the real God, and we know that
we truly are just what we are before Him. We thus have a great
peace, because in prayer, as the crowning act of faith, we lay hold
of the grace of God the Saviour. Prayer alone prevents our
receiving God's grace in vain. Which means that it establishes the
soul of a man or a people, creates the moral personality day by
day, spreads outward the new heart through society, and goes to
make a new ethos in mankind. We come out with a courage and a
humanity we had not when we went in, even though our old earth
remove, and our familiar hills are cast into the depth of the sea.
The true Church is thus co-extensive with the community of true
prayer.
It is another paradox that combines
the vast power of prayer both on the lone soul and on the moral
life, personal and social, with the soul's shyness and aloofness in
prayer. Kant (whose genius in this respect reflected his race) has
had an influence upon scientific thought and its efficiency far
greater than upon religion, though he is well named the philosopher
of Protestantism. He represent (again like his race) intellectual
power and a certain stiff moral insight, but not spiritual
atmosphere, delicacy, or flexibility, which is rather the Catholic
tradition. Intellectualism always tends to more force than finish,
and always starves or perverts ethic. And nowhere in Kant's work
does this limitation find such expression as in his treatment of
prayer, unless it be in his lack of any misgivings about treating
it at all with his equipment or the equipment of his age. Even his
successors know better now--just as we in England have learned to
find in Milton powers and harmonies hidden from the too great
sagacity of Dr. Johnson or his time. Kant, then, speaks of prayer
thus. If we found a man (he says) given to talking to himself we
should begin to suspect him of some tendency to mental aberration.
Yet the personality of such a man is a very real thing. It is a
thing we can be more sure of than we can of the personality of God,
who, if He is more than a conclusion for intellectual thought, is
not more than a postulate for moral. No doubt in time of crisis it
is an instinct to pray which even cultivated people do not, and
need not, lose. But if any such person were surprised even in the
attitude of private prayer, to say nothing of its exercise, he
would be ashamed. He would think he had been discovered doing
something unworthy of his intelligence, and would feel about it as
educated people do when found out to be yielding to a superstition
about the number thirteen.
A thinker of more sympathy and
delicacy would have spoken less bluntly. Practical experience would
have taught him discrimination. He would have realized the
difference between shame and shyness, between confusion at an
unworthy thing and confusion at a thing too fine and sacred for
exposure. And had his age allowed him to have more knowledge and
taste in history, and especially the history of religion, he would
have gone, not to the cowardice of the ordinary cultivated man, but
to the power and thoroughness of the great saints or captains of
the race--to Paul, to Thomas a Kempis, to Cromwell with his troops,
or Gustavus Adolphus with his. I do but humbly allude to
Gethsemane. But Kant belonged to a time which had not realized, as
even our science does now, the final power of the subtler forces,
and the overwhelming effect in the long run of the impalpable and
elusive influences of life. Much might be written about the effect
of prayer on the great history of the world.
Let him pray now that never prayed before,
And him that prayed before but pray the more.
The nearer we are driven to the God
of Christ, the more we are forced on paradox when we begin to
speak. I have been led to allude to this more than once. The
magnalia dei are not those great simplicities of life on
which some orders of genius lay a touch so tender and sure; but
they are the great reconciliations in which life's tragic
collisions come to lie "quiet, happy and supprest." Such are the
peaceful paradoxes (the paradox at last of grace and nature in the
Cross) which make the world of prayer such a strange and difficult
land to the lucid and rational interpreters of life. It is as
miraculous as it is real that the holy and the guilty should live
together in such habitual communion as the life of prayer. And it
is another paradox that combines the vast power of prayer for the
active soul, whether single or social, with the same soul's shyness
and aloofness in prayer.
There is a tendency to lose the true
balance and adjustment here. When all goes well we are apt to
overdo the aloofness that goes with spiritual engagement, and so to
sacrifice some of its power and blessing for the soul. Prayer which
becomes too private may become too remote, and is apt to become
weak. (Just as when it is too intimate it becomes really unworthy,
and may become absurd even to spiritual men; it does so in the
trivialities associated sometimes with the answer to prayer.) It is
neither seemly nor healthy to be nothing but shy about the greatest
powers in life. If we felt them as we should, and if we had their
true vitality in us, we could not be so reserved about them. Some
churches suffer much from extempore prayer, but perhaps those
suffer more that exclude it. It at least gives a public
consecration to prayer private and personal, which prayer, from the
nature of it, must be extempore and "occasional." The bane of
extempore prayer is that it is confused with prayer unprepared; and
the greatest preparation for prayer is to pray. The leader of
prayer should be a man of prayer--so long as prayer does not become
for him a luxury which really unfits him for liturgy, and private
devotion does not indispose him for public worship. Delicacy and
propriety in prayer are too dearly bought if they are there at the
cost of its ruling power in life, private and public, and of its
prevailing power with God.
It is one of the uses of our present
dreadful adversity
Truly the course of events has been
the answer to this question easier than at first. We are driven by
events to believe that a great moral blindness has befallen
Germany; that its God, ceasing to be Christian, has become but
Semitic; that it has lost the sense of the great imponderables;
that the idolatry of the State has barrack-bound the conscience of
the Church and stilled that witness of the kingdom of God which
beards kings and even beheads them. We are forced to think that the
cause of righteousness has passed from its hands with the passing
from them of humanity, with the submersion of the idea of God's
kingdom in nationality or the cult of race, with the worship of
force, mammon, fright, and ruthlessness, with the growth of
national cynicism in moral things, and with the culture of a
withering, self-searing hate which is the nemesis of mortal sin,
and which even God cannot use as He can use anger, but must surely
judge. This people has sinned against its own soul, and abjured the
kingdom of God. That settles our prayer for victory. We must pray
for the side more valuable for the kingdom of God--much as we have
to confess.
It would more than repay much
calamity if we were moved and enlarged to a surer sense, a greater
use, and a franker confession of the power of prayer for life,
character, and history. There is plenty of discussion of the
present situation, historic, ethical, or political, and much of it
is competent, and even deep. There is much speculation about the
situation after the War, at home and abroad. But its greatest
result may be the discredit of elegant, paltering, and feeble types
of religion, the end of the irreligious wits and fribbles, and the
rise of a new moral seriousness and a new spiritual realism. Many
will be moved, in what seems the failure of civilization, to a new
reliance on the Church, and especially on the more historic,
ethical, and positive Churches, which have survived the paganism of
culture and which ride the waves of storm. Yet even these
impressions can evaporate unless they are fixed by action. And the
action that fixes them in their own kind is prayer--prayer which is
really action. A religion of prosperity grows dainty, petty,
sentimental, and but pseudo-heroic. We unlearn our fathers' creed
that religion is, above all things, an act, that worship is the
greatest act of which man is capable, and that true worship
culminates in the supreme labour, and even sorrow, of real prayer.
This is man at his utmost; and it has for it near neighbours all
the great things that men or nations do. But when a nation must go
to righteous war it embarks on one of the very greatest acts of its
life, especially if its very existence as a servant of God's
kingdom hang on it. A state of war is really the vast and prolonged
act of a corporate soul, with a number of minor acts organized into
it. It is capable of being offered to a God whose kingdom is a
public campaign moving through history, and coming by the faith,
toil, peril, sacrifice, grief, and glory of nations, as well as the
hearts and souls. It is not possible to separate moral acts so
great and solemn as the act of prayer (especially common and
corporate prayer) and the act of war; nor to think them severed in
the movement, judgment, and purpose of the Eternal. And we are
forced into paradox again. The deeper we go down into the valley of
decision the higher we must rise (if we are to possess and command
our souls) into the mount of prayer, and we must hold up the hands
of those whose chief concern is to prevail with God. If we win we
shall have a new sense of power amid all our loss and weakness; but
what we shall need most of all if the power to use that power, and
to protest us from our victory and its perilous sequels, whether of
pride or poverty. And if we do not win we shall need it more. There
will be much to sober us either way, more perhaps than ever before
in our history.
But that is not all, and it is not
enough. As Christian people we need something to sanctify that very
sobering and to do for the new moral thoughtfulness itself what
that does for the peace-bred levity of the natural man. For such a
purpose there is no agent like prayer--serious, thinking, private
prayer, or prayer in groups, in small, grave, congenial,
understanding groups--prayer with the historic sense,
church-nurtured and Bible-fed. Public prayer by all means, but,
apart from liturgical form, the more open the occasions and the
larger the company the more hard it may be to secure for such
prayer the right circumstances or the right lead. Public facility
is apt to outstrip the real intimacy and depth with God. While on
the other hand, the prayer that freely rises and aptly flows in our
audience of God may be paralyzed in an audience of men. So that
public prayer does not always reflect the practice of private
petition as the powerful factor it is in Christian life and
history. It does not always suggest a door opened in heaven, the
insight or fellowship of eternal yet historic powers in awful
orbits. It does not always do justice to our best private prayer,
to private prayer made a business and suffused with as much sacred
mind as goes to the more secular side even of the Christian life.
Should ministers enlist? it is asked. But to live in true and
concrete prayer is to be a combatant in the War, as well as a
statesman after it, if statesmen ought to see the whole range of
forces at work. The saintly soldier still needs the soldier saint.
Yet so much prayer has ceased to be a matter of thought, will, or
conflict, and religion therefore has become so otiose, that it is
not easy even for the Christian public to take such a saying as
more than a phrase. This is but one expression of a general
scepticism, both in the Church and out, about prayer, corporate or
private, as power with God, and therefore as momentous in the
affairs of life and history. But momentous and effectual it must
be. Other things being equal, a voluntary and convinced army is
worth more than a conscript one. So to know that we are morally
right means worlds for our shaping of the things that face us and
must be met; and we are never so morally right as in proficient
prayer with the Holy One and the Just. It has, therefore, a vast
effect on the course of things if we believe at all in their moral
destiny. More it wrought by it than the too wise world wots; and
all the more as it is the prayer of a great soul or a great Church.
It is a power behind thrones, and it neutralizes, at the far end,
the visible might of armies and their victories. It settles at last
whether morality or machinery is to rule the world. If it lose
battles, it wins in the long historic campaign. Whereas, if we have
no such action with God, we lose delicacy of perception in the
finer forces of affairs; we are out of touch and understanding with
the final control in things, the power that is working to the top
always; we become dense in regard to the subtle but supreme
influences that take the generals and chancellors by surprise; and
we are at the mercy of the sleepless action of the kingdom of evil
on the world. It is a fatal thing to under estimate the enemy; and
it is in Christian prayer, seriously and amply pursued, that the
soul really learns to gauge evil's awful and superhuman power in
affairs. I am speaking not only of the single soul, perhaps at the
moment not chiefly, but of the soul and prayer of a society like
the true Church or a sobered people. The real power of prayer in
history is not a fusillade of praying units of whom Christ is the
chief, but it is the corporate action of a Saviour-Intercessor and
His community, a volume and energy of prayer organized in a Holy
Spirit and in the Church the Spirit creates. The saints shall thus
judge the world and control life. Neither for the individual nor
for the Church is true prayer an enclave in life's larger and more
actual course. It is not a sacred enclosure, a lodge in some vast
wilderness. That is the weak side of pietism. But, however
intimate, it is in the most organic and vital context of affairs,
private and public, if all things work together, deeply and afar,
for the deep and final kingdom of God. Its constant defeat of our
egoism means the victory of our social unity and its weal. For the
egoist neither prays nor loves. On the other hand, such prayer
recalls us from a distraught altruism, teeming with oddities, and
frayed down to atomism by the variety of calls upon it; because the
prayer is the supreme energy of a loving will and believing soul
engaged with the Love that binds the earth, the sun, and all the
stars. So far it is from being the case that love to God has no
sphere outside love to man that our love to man perishes unless it
is fed by the love that spends itself on God in prayer, and is
lifted thereby to a place and a sway not historic only, but
cosmic.
Our communion with God in Christ
rose, and it abides, in a crisis which shook not the earth only,
but also heaven, in a tragedy and victory more vast, awful, and
pregnant than the greatest war in history could be. Therefore the
prayer which gives us an ever-deeper interest and surer insight
into that eternal moral crisis of the Cross gives us also (though
it might take generations) a footing that commands all the losses
or victories of earth, and a power that rules both spirit and
conscience in the clash and crash of worlds. As there is devoted
thought which ploughs its way into the command of Nature, there is
thought, still more devoted, that prays itself into that moral
interior of the Cross, where the kingdom of God is founded once for
all on the last principle and power of the universe, and set up,
not indeed amid the wreck of civilization, but by its new birth and
a baptism so as by fire. Prayer of the right kind, with heart and
soul and strength and mind, unites any society in which it prevails
with those last powers of moral and social regeneration that settle
history and that reside in the creative grace of the Cross, which
is God's true omnipotence in the world. "O God, who showest Thine
almighty power most chiefly in having mercy and forgiving." Such
speech as this may to some appear tall and rhetorical; but it would
have so seemed to no father of the church, ancient or modern,
taking apostolic measure of the place and moment of Christ in
society, history, or the universe.
If war is in any sense God's judgment
on sin, and if sin was destroyed by the judgment in Christ and on
Him, let us pray with a new depth and significance to-day, "O Lamb
of God, that takest away the sin of the world, grant us Thy peace.
Send us the peace that honours in act and deed that righteous and
final judgment in Thy Cross of all historic things, and that makes
therein for Thy Kingdom on earth as in heaven. Give peace in our
time, O Lord, but, peace or war, Take the crown of this poor
world."
Prayer as Christian freedom, and
prayer as Christian life--these are two points I would now
expand.
I. First, as to the moral freedom
involved and achieved in prayer.
Prayer has been described as religion
in action. But that as it stands is not a sufficient definition of
the prayer which lives on the Cross. The same thing might be said
about the choicest forms of Christian service to humanity. It is
true enough, and it may carry us far; but only if we become
somewhat clear about the nature of the religion at work. Prayer is
certainly not the action of a religion mainly subjective. It is the
effective work of a religion which hangs upon the living God, of a
soul surer of God than of itself, and living not its own life, but
the life of the Son of God. To say prayer is faith in action would
be better; for the word "faith" carries a more objective reference
than the word "religion." Faith is faith in another. In prayer we
do not so much work as interwork. We are fellow workers with God in
a reciprocity. And as God is the freest Being in existence, such
co-operant prayer is the freest things that man can do. It we were
free in sinning, how much more free in the praying which undoes
sin! If we were free to break God's will, how much more free to
turn it or to accept it! Petitionary prayer is man's cooperation in
kind with God amidst a world He freely made for freedom. The world
was made by a freedom which not only left room for the kindred
freedom of prayer, but which so ordered all things in its own
interest that in their deepest depths they conspire to produce
prayer. To pray in faith is to answer God's freedom in its own
great note. It means we are taken up into the fundamental movement
of the world. It is to realize that for which the whole world, the
world as a whole, was made. It is an earnest of the world's
consummation. We are doing what the whole world was created to do.
We overleap in the spirit all between now and then, as in the
return to Jesus we overleap the two thousand years that intervene.
The object the Father's loving purpose had in appointing the whole
providential order was intercourse with man's soul. That order of
the world is, therefore, no rigid fixture, nor is it even a fated
evolution. It is elastic, adjustable, flexible, with margins for
freedom, for free modification in God and man; always keeping in
view that final goal of communion, and growing into it be a
spiritual interplay in which the whole of Nature is involved. The
goal of the whole cosmic order is the "manifestation of the sons of
God," the realization of complete sonship, its powers and its
confidences.
Thus we rise to say that our prayer
is the momentary function of the Eternal Son's communion and
intercession with the Eternal Father. We are integrated in advance
into the final Christ, for whom, and to whom, all creation moves.
Our prayer is more than the acceptance by us of God's will; it is
its assertion in us. The will of God is that men should pray
everywhere. He wills to be entreated. Prayer is that will of God's
making itself good. When we entreat we give effect to His dearest
will. And in His will is our eternal liberty. In this will of His
our finds itself, and is at home. It ranges the liberties of the
Father's house. But here prayer must draw from the Cross, which is
the frontal act of our emancipation as well as the central
revelation of God's own freedom in grace. The action of the
Atonement and of its release of us is in the nature of prayer. It
is the free return of the Holy upon the Holy in the Great
Reconciliation.
II. Then, secondly, as to prayer
being the expression of the perennial new life of faith in the
Cross. The Christian life is prayer without ceasing.
When we are told to pray without
ceasing, it seems to many tastes to-day to be somewhat extravagant
language. And no doubt that is true. Why should we be concerned to
deny it? Measured language and the elegant mean is not the note of
the New Testament at least. Mhoen zyan,
said the Greek--too much of nothing. But can we love or trust God
too much? Christian faith is one that overcomes and commands the
world in a passion rather than balances it. It triumphs in a
conclusive bliss, it does not play off one part against another.
The grace of Christ is not but graciousness of nature, and He does
not rule His Church by social act. The peace of God is not the calm
of culture, it is not the charm of breeding. Every great forward
movement in Christianity is associated with much that seems
academically extravagant. Erasmus is always shocked with Luther. It
is only an outlet of that essential extravagance which makes the
paradox of the Cross, and keeps it as the irritant, no less than
the life of the world--perhaps because it is the life of the world.
There is nothing so abnormal, so unworldly, so supernatural, in
human life as prayer, nothing that is more of an instinct, it is
true, but also nothing that is less rational among all the things
that keep above the level of the silly. The whole Christian life in
so far as it is lived from the Cross and by the Cross is rationally
an extravagance. For the Cross is the paradox of all things; and
the action of the Spirit is the greatest miracle in the world; and
yet it is the principle of the world. Paradox is but the expression
of that dualism which is the moral foundation of a Christian world.
I live who die daily. I live another's life.
To pray without ceasing is not, of
course, to engage in prayer without break. That is an impossible
literalism. True, "They rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy,
holy, Lord God Almighty, who wert, and art, and art to come." But
it is mere poverty of soul to think of this as the iteration of a
doxology. It is deep calling unto deep, eternity greeting eternity.
The only answer to God's eternity is an eternal attitude of
prayer.
Nor does the phrase mean that the
Church shall use careful means that the stream and sound of prayer
shall never cease to flow at some spots of the earth, as the altar
lamp goes not out. It does not mean the continuous murmur of the
mass following the sun round the world, incessant relays of adoring
priests, and functions going on day and night.
But it means the constant bent and
drift of the soul--as the Word which was from the beginning (
So far this "pray without ceasing"
from being absurd because extravagant that every man's life is in
some sense a continual state of prayer. For what is his life's
prayer but its ruling passion? All energies, ambitions and passions
are but expressions of a standing nisus in life, of a hunger, a
draft, a practical demand upon the future, upon the unattained and
the unseen. Every life is a draft upon the unseen. If you are not
praying towards God you are towards something else. You pray as
your face is set--towards Jerusalem or Babylon. The very egotism of
craving life is prayer. The great difference is the object of it.
To whom, for what, do we pray? The man whose passion is habitualy
set upon pleasure, knowledge, wealth, honour, or power is in a
state of prayer to these things or for them. He prays without
ceasing. These are his real gods, on whom he waits day and night.
He may from time to time go on his knees in church, and use words
of Christian address and petition. He may even feel a momentary
unction in so doing. But it is a flicker; the other devotion is his
steady flame. His real God is the ruling passion and steady pursuit
of his life taken as a whole. He certainly does not pray in the
name of Christ. And what he worships in spirit and in truth is
another God than he addresses at religious times. He prays to an
unknown God for a selfish boon. Still, in a sense, he prays. The
set and drift of his nature prays. It is the prayer of instinct,
not of faith. It is prayer that needs total conversion. But he
cannot stop praying either to God or to God's rival--to self,
society, world, flesh, or even devil. Every life that is not
totally inert in praying either to God or God's adversary.
What do we really mean, whom do we
mean, when we say, "My God"? In what sense mine? May our God not be
but an idol we exploit, and in due course our doom?
There is a fearful and wonderful
passage in Kierkegaard's Entweder-Oder which, if we transfer
it to this connection, stirs thoughts deeper than its own tragedy.
The seduced, heart-broken, writes to the seducer.
"John! I do not say my John. That I
now see you never were. I am heavily punished for ever letting such
an idea be my joy. Yet--yet, mine you are--my seducer, my deceiver,
my enemy, my murderer, the spring of my calamity, the grave of my
joy, the abyss of my misery. I call you mine, and I am yours--your
curse for ever. Oh, do not think I will slay you and put a dagger
into you. But flee where you will, I am yours, to the earth's end
yours. Love a hundred others but I am yours. I am yours in your
last hour, I am yours, yours, yours--your curse."
Beware lest the whole trend of the
soul fix on a diety that turns a doom. There is the prayer which
makes God our judgment as well as one which makes Him our joy.
Prayer is the nature of our hell as
well as our heaven.
Our hell is ceaseless, passionate,
fruitless, hopeless, gnawing prayer. It is the heart churning,
churning grinding itself out in misery. It is life's passion and
struggle surging back on itself like a barren, salt, corroding sea.
It is the heart's blood rising like a fountain only to fall back on
us in red rain. It is prayer which we cannot stop, addressed to
nothing, and obtaining nothing. It calls into space and night. Or
it is addressed to self, and it aggravates the wearing action of
self on self. Our double being revolves on itself, like two
millstones with nothing to grind.
And prayer is our heaven. It goes
home to God, and attains there, and rests there. We are "in
Christ," whose whole existence is prayer, who is wholly prsz tsn Qesn for us. He is there to extinguish our
hell and make our heaven--far more to quench our wrath and our
seething than God's.
To cultivate the ceaseless spirit of
prayer, use more frequent acts of prayer. To learn to pray with
freedom, force yourself to pray. The great liberty begins in
necessity.
Do not say, "I cannot pray, I am not
in the spirit." Pray till you are in the spirit. Think of analogies
from lower levels. Sometimes when you need rest most you are too
restless to lie down and take it. Then compel yourself to lie down,
and to lie still. Often in ten minutes the compulsion fades into
consent, and you sleep, and rise a new man.
Again, it is often hard enough to
take up the task which in half an hour you enjoy. It is often
against the grain to turn out of an evening to meet the friends you
promised. But once you are in their midst you are in your
element.
Sometimes, again, you say, "I will
not go to church. I do not feel that way." That is where the habit
of an ordered religious life comes in aid. Religion is the last
region for chance desires. Do it as a duty, and it may open out as
a blessing. Omit it, and you may miss the one thing that would have
made an eternal difference. You stroll instead, and return with
nothing but appetite--when you might have come back with an
inspiration. Compel yourself to meet your God as you would meet
your promises, your obligations, your fellow men.
So if you are averse to pray, pray
the more. Do not call it lip-service. That is not the lip-service
God disowns. It is His Spirit acting in your self-coercive will,
only not yet in your heart. What is unwelcome to God is lip-service
which is untroubled at not being more. As appetite comes with
eating, so prayer with praying. Our hearts learn the language of
the lips.
Compel yourself often to shape on
your lips the detailed needs of your soul. It is not needful to
inform God, but to deepen you, to inform yourself before God, to
enrich that intimacy with ourself which is so necessary to answer
the intimacy of God. To common sense the fact that God knows all we
need, and wills us all good, the fact of His infinite Fatherhood,
is a reason for not praying. Why tell Him what He knows? Why ask
what He is more than willing to give? But to Christian faith and to
spiritual reason it is just the other way. Asking is polar
cooperation. Jesus turned the fact to a use exactly the contrary of
its deistic sense. He made the all-knowing Fatherhood the ground of
true prayer. We do not ask as beggars but as children. Petition is
not mere receptivity, nor is it mere pressure; it is filial
reciprocity. Love loves to be told what it knows already. Every
lover knows that. It wants to be asked for what it longs to give.
And that is the principle of prayer to the all-knowing Love. As God
knows all, you may reckon that your brief and humble prayer will be
understood (
Go into your chamber, shut the door,
and cultivate the habit of praying audibly. Write prayers and burn
them. Formulate your soul. Pay no attention to literary form, only
to spiritual reality. Read a passage of Scripture and then sit down
and turn it into prayer, written or spoken. Learn to be particular,
specific, and detailed in your prayer so long as you are not
trivial. General prayers, literary prayers, and stately phrases
are, for private prayer, traps and sops to the soul. To formulate
your soul is one valuable means to escape formalizing it. This is
the best, the wholesome, kind of self-examination. Speaking with
God discovers us safely to ourselves We "find" ourselves, come to
ourselves, in the Spirit. Face your special weaknesses and sins
before God. Force yourself to say to God exactly where you are
wrong. When anything goes wrong, do not ask to have it set right,
without asking in prayer what is was in you that made it go wrong.
It is somewhat fruitless to ask for a general grace to help
specific flaws, sins, trials, and griefs. Let prayer be concrete,
actual, a direct product of life's real experiences. Pray as your
actual self, not as some fancied saint. Let it be closely relevant
to your real situation. Pray without ceasing in this sense. Pray
without a break between your prayer and your life. Pray so that
there is a real continuity between your prayer and your whole
actual life. But I will bear round upon this point again
immediately.
Meantime, let me say this. Do not
allow your practice in prayer to be arrested by scientific or
philosophic considerations as to how answer is possible. That is a
valuable subject for discussion, but it is not entitled to control
our practice. Faith is at least as essential to the soul as
science, and it has a foundation more independent. And prayer is
not only a necessity of faith, it is faith itself in action.
Criticism of prayer dissolves in the
experience of it. When the soul is at close quarters with God it
becomes enlarged enough to hold together in harmony things that
oppose, and to have room for harmonious contraries. For instance:
God, of course, is always working for His Will and Kingdom. But man
is bound to pray for its coming, while it is coming all the time.
Christ laid stress on prayer as a necessary means of bringing the
Kingdom to pass. And it cannot come without our praying. Why?
Because its coming is the prayerful frame of soul. So again with
God's freedom. It is absolute. But it reckons on ours. Our prayer
does not force His hand; it answers His freedom in kind. We are
never so active and free as in prayer to an absolutely free God. We
share His freedom when we are "in Christ."
If I must choose between Christ, who
bids me pray for everything, and the servant, who tells me certain
answers are physically and rationally impossible, must I not choose
Christ? Because, while the savant knows much about nature and its
action (and much more than Christ did), Christ knew everything
about the God of nature and His reality. He knew more of what is
possible to God than anybody has ever known about what is possible
in nature. On such a subject as prayer, anyone is a greater
authority who wholly knows the will of God than he who only knows
God's methods, and knows them but in part. Prayer is not an act of
knowledge but of faith. It is not a matter of calculation but of
confidence--"that our faith should not stand in the wisdom of men,
but in the power of God." Which means that in this region we are
not to be regulated by science, but by God's self-revelation. Do
not be so timid about praying wrongly if you pray humbly. If God is
really the Father that Christ revealed, then the principle is--take
everything to Him that exercises you. Apart from frivolity, such as
praying to find the stud you lost, or the knife, or the umbrella,
there is really no limitation in the New Testament on the contents
of petition. Any regulation is as to the spirit of the prayer, the
faith it springs from. In all distress which mars your peace,
petition must be the form your faith takes--petition for rescue.
Keep close to the New Testament Christ, and then ask for anything
you desire in that contact. Ask for everything you can ask in
Christ's name, i.e. everything desirable by a man who is in
Christ's kingdom of God, by a man who lives for it at heart,
everything in tune with the purpose and work of the kingdom in
Christ. If you are in that kingdom, then pray freely for whatever
you need or wish to keep you active and effective for it, from
daily bread upwards and outwards. In all things make your requests
known. At least you have laid them on God's heart; and faith means
confidences between you and not only favours. And there is not
confidence if you keep back what is hot or heavy on your heart. If
prayer is not a play of the religious fantasy, or a routine task,
it must be the application of faith to a concrete actual and urgent
situation. Only remember that prayer does not work by magic, and
that stormy desire is not fervent, effectual prayer. You may be but
exploiting a mighty power; whereas you must be in real contact with
the real God. It is the man that most really has God that most
really seeks God.
I said a little while ago that to
pray without ceasing also meant to pray without a breach with your
actual life and the whole situation in which you are. This is the
point at which to dwell on that. If you may not come to God with
the occasions of your private life and affairs, then there is some
unreality in the relation between you and Him. If some private
crisis absorbs you, some business or family anxiety of little
moment to others but of much to you, and if you may not bring that
to God in prayer, then one of two things. Either it is not you, in
your actual reality, that came to God, but it is you in a pose--you
in some role which you are trying with poor success to play before
Him. You are trying to pray as another person than you are,--a
better person, perhaps, as some great apostle, who should have on
his worshipping mind nothing but the grand affairs of the Church
and Kingdom, and not be worried by common cares. You are praying in
court-dress. You are trying to pray as you imagine one should pray
to God, i.e. as another person than you are, and in other
circumstances. You are creating a self and a situation to place
before God. Either that or you are not praying to a God who loves,
helps, and delivers you in every pinch of life, but only to one who
uses you as a pawn for the victory of His great kingdom. You are
not praying to Christ's God. You are praying to a God who cares
only for the great actions in His kingdom, for the heroic people
who cherish nothing but the grand style, or for the calm people who
do not deeply feel life's trials. The reality of prayer is bound up
with the reality and intimacy of life.
And its great object is to get home
as we are to God as He is, and to win response even when we get no
compliance. The prayer of faith does not mean a prayer absolutely
sure that it will receive what it asks. That is not faith. Faith is
that attitude of soul and self to God which is the root and
reservoir of prayer apart from all answer. It is what turns need
into request. It is what moves your need to need God. It is what
makes you sure your prayer is heard and stored, whether granted or
not. "He putteth all my tears in His bottle." God has old prayers
of yours long maturing by Him. What wine you will drink with Him in
His kingdom! Faith is sure that God refuses with a smile; that He
says No in the spirit of Yes, and He gives or refuses always in
Christ, our Great Amen. And better prayers are stirred by the
presence of the Deliverer than even by the need of deliverance.
It is not sufficiently remembered
that before prayer can expect an answer it must be itself an
answer. That is what is meant by prayer in the name of Christ. It
is prayer which answers God's gift in Christ, with Whom are already
given us all things. And that is why we must pray without ceasing,
because in Christ God speaks without ceasing. Natural or
instinctive prayer is one thing; supernatural prayer is another; it
is the prayer not of instinct but of faith. It is our word
answering God's. It is more the prayer of fullness even than of
need, of strength than of weakness--though it be "a strength girt
round with weakness." Prayer which arises from mere need is flung
out to a power which is only remembered, or surmised, or unknown.
It is flung into darkness and uncertainty. But in Christian prayer
we ask for what we need because we are full of faith in God's power
and word, because need becomes petition at the touch of His word.
(I always feel that in the order of our public worship prayer
should immediately follow the lesson, without the intrusion on an
anthem. And for the reason I name--that Christian prayer is our
word answering God's). We pray, therefore, in Christ's name, or for
His sake, because we pray as answering the gift in Christ. Our
prayer is the note the tremulous soul utters when its chords are
smitten by Him. We then answer above all things God's prayer to us
in His cross that we would be reconciled. God so beseeches us in
Christ. So that, if we put it strongly, we may say that our prayer
to God in Christ is our answer to God's prayer to us there. "The
best thing in prayer is faith," says Luther.
And the spirit of prayer in Christ's
name is the true child-spirit. A certain type of religion is fond
of dwelling on faith as the spirit of divine childhood; and its
affinities are all with the tender and touching element in
childhood. But one does not always get from the prophets of such
piety the impression of a life breathed in prayer. And the notion
is not the New Testament sense of being children of God. That is a
manlier, a maturer thing. It is being sons of God by faith, and by
faith's energy of prayer. It is not the sense of being as helpless
as a child that clings, not the sense of weakness, ignorance,
gentleness, and all that side of things. But it is the spirit of a
prayer which is a great act of faith, and therefore a power. Faith
is not simply surrender, but adoring surrender, not a mere sense of
dependence, but an act of intelligent committal, and the confession
of a holiness which is able to save, keep, and bless for ever.
How is it that the experience of life
is so often barren of spiritual culture for religious people? They
become stoic and stalwart, but not humble; they have been sight,
but no insight. Yet it is not the stalwarts but the saints that
judge the world, i.e. that ake the true divine measure of the world
and get to its subtle, silent, and final powers. Whole sections of
our Protestantism have lost the virtue of humility or the
understanding of it. It means for them no more than modesty or
diffidence. It is the humility of weakness, not of power. To many
useful, and even strong, people no experience seems to bring this
subtle, spiritual intelligence, this finer discipline of the moral
man. No rebukes, no rebuffs, no humiliations, no sorrows, seem to
bring it to them. They have no spiritual history. Their spiritual
biography not even an angel could write. There is no romance in
their soul's story. At sixty they are, spiritually, much where they
were at twenty-six. To calamity, to discipline of any kind, they
are simply resilient. Their religion is simply elasticity. It is
but lusty life. They rise up after the smart is over, or the
darkness fades away, as self-confident as if they were but seasoned
politicians beaten at one election, but sure of doing better at the
next. They are to the end just irrepressible, or persevering, or
dogged. And they are as juvenile in moral insight, as boyish in
spiritual perception, as ever.
Is it not because they have never
really had personal religion? That is, they have never really
prayed with all their heart; only, at most, with all their fervour,
certainly not with strength and mind. They have neer "spread out"
their whole soul and situation to a god who knows. They have never
opened the petals of their soul in the warm sympathy of His
knowledge. They have not become particular enough in their prayer,
faithful with themselves, or relevant to their complete situation.
They do not face themselves, only what happens to them. They pray
with their heart and not with their conscience. They pity
themselves, perhaps they spare themselves, they shrink from hurting
themselves more than misfortune hurts them. They say, "If you knew
all you could not help pitying me." They do not say, "God knows
all, and how can He spare me?" For themselves, or for their
fellows, it is the prayer of pity, not of repentance. We need the
prayer of self-judgment more than the prayer of fine insight.
We are not humble in God's sight,
partly because in our prayer there is a point at which we cease to
pray, where we do not turn everything out into God's light. It is
because there is a chamber or two in our souls where we do not
enter in and take God with us. We hurry Him by the door as we take
Him along the corridors of our life to see our tidy places or our
public rooms. We ask from our prayers too exclusively comfort,
strength, enjoyment, or tenderness and graciousness, and not often
enough humiliation and its fine strength. We want beautiful
prayers, touching prayers, simple prayers, thoughtful prayers;
prayers with a quaver or a tear in them, or prayers with delicacy
and dignity in them. But searching prayer, humbling prayer, which
is the prayer of the conscience, and not merely of the heart or
taste; prayer which is bent on reality, and to win the new joy goes
through new misery if need by--are such prayers as welcome and
common as they should be? Too much of our prayer is apt to leave us
with the self-complacency of the sympathetically incorrigible, of
the benevolent and irremediable, of the breezy octogenarian, all of
whose yesterdays look backward with a cheery and exasperating
smile.
It is an art--this great and creative
prayer--this intimate conversation with God. "Magna ars est
conversari cum Deo," says Thomas a Kempis. It has to be
learned. In social life we learn that conversation is not mere
talk. There is an art in it, if we are not to have a table of
gabblers. How much more is it so in the conversation of heaven! We
must learn that art by practice, and by keeping the best society in
that kind. Associate much with the great masters in this kind;
especially with the Bible; and chiefly with Christ. Cultivate His
Holy Spirit. He is the grand master of God's art and mystery in
communing with man. And there is no other teacher, at least, of
man's art of communion with God.
The work of the ministry labours
under one heavy disadvantage when we regard it as a profession and
compare it with other professions. In these, experience brings
facility, a sense of mastery in the subject, self-satisfaction,
self-confidence; but in our subject the more we pursue it, the more
we enter into it, so much the more are we cast down with the
overwhelming sense, not only of our insufficiency, but of our
unworthiness. Of course, in the technique of our work we acquire a
certain ease. We learn to speak more or less freely and aptly. We
learn the knack of handling a text, of conducting church work, or
dealing with men, and the life. If it were only texts or men we had
to handle! But we have to handle the gospel. We have to lift up
Christ--a Christ who is the death of natural self-confidence--a
humiliating, even a crushing Christ; and we are not always alive to
our uplifting and resurrection in Him. We have to handle a gospel
that is a new rebuke to us every step we gain in intimacy with it.
There is no real intimacy with the gospel which does not mean a new
sense of God's holiness, and it may be long before we realize that
the same holiness that condemns is that which saves. There is no
new insight into the Cross which does not bring, whatever else come
with it, a deeper sense of the solemn holiness of the love that
meets us there. And there is no new sense of the holy God that does
not arrest His name upon our unclean lips. If our very repentance
is to be repented of, and we should be forgiven much in our very
prayers, how shall we be proud, or even pleased, with what we may
think a success in our preaching? So that we are not surprised that
some preachers, after what the public calls a most brilliant and
impressive discourse, retire (as the emperor retired to close his
life in the cloister) to humble themselves before God, to ask
forgiveness for the poor message, and to call themselves most
unprofitable servants--yea, even when they knew themselves that
they had "done well." The more we grasp our gospel the more it
abashes us.
Moreover, as we learn more of the
seriousness of the gospel for the human soul, we feel the more that
every time we present it we are adding to the judgment of some as
well as to the salvation of others. We are not like speakers who
present a matter that men can freely take or leave, where they can
agree or differ with us without moral result. No true preacher can
be content that his flock should believe in him. That were egoism.
They must believe with him. The deeper and surer our gospel is the
more is our work a judgment on those to whom it is not a grace.
This was what bore upon the Saviour's own soul, and darkened His
very agony into eclipse. That He, who knew Himself to be the
salvation of His own beloved people, should, by His very love,
become their doom! And here we watch and suffer with Him, however
sleepily. There is put into our charge our dear people's life or
death. For to those to whom we are not life we are death, in
proportion as we truly preach, not ourselves, but the real
salvation of Christ.
How solemn our place is! It is a
sacramental place. We have not simply to state our case, we have to
convey our Christ, and to convey Him effectually as the soul's
final fate. We are sacramental elements, broken often, in the
Lord's hands, as He dispenses His grace through us. We do not, of
course, believe that orders are an ecclesiastical sacrament, as
Rome does. But we are forced to realize the idea underlying that
dogma--the sacramental nature of our person, work, and vocation for
the gospel. We are not saviours. There is only one Saviour. But we
are His sacraments. We do not believe in an ecclesiastical
priesthood; but we are made to feel how we stand between God and
the people as none of our flock do. We bring Christ to them, and
them to Christ, in sacrificial action in a way far more moral,
inward, and taxing than official preisthood can be. As ministers we
lead the sacerdotal function of the whole Church in the world--its
holy confession and sacrifice for the world in Christ.
We ought, indeed, to feel the dignity
of the ministry; we must present some protest against the mere
fraternal conception which so easily sinks into an unspiritual
familiarity. But still more than the dignity of the ministry do its
elect feel its solemnity. How can it be otherwise? We have to dwell
much with the everlasting burnings of God's love. We have to tend
that consuming fire. We have to feed our life where all the tragedy
of life is gathered to an infinite and victorious crisis in Christ.
We are not the fire, but we live where it burns. The matter we
handle in our theological thought we can only handle with some due
protection for our face. It is one of the dangerous industries. It
is continually acting on us, continually searching our inner selves
that no part of us may be unforgiven, unfed, or unsanctified. We
cannot hold it and examine it at arm's length. It enters into us.
It evokes the perpetual comment of our souls, and puts us
continually on self-judgment. Our critic, our judge, is at the
door. Self-condemnation arrests denunciation. And the true apostle
can never condemn but in the spirit of self-condemnation.
But, after all, our doom is our
blessing. Our Judge is on our side. For if humiliation be wrung
from us, still more is faith, hope, and prayer. Everything that
rebukes our self-satisfaction does still more to draw out our
faith. When we are too tired or doubtful to ask we can praise and
adore. When we are weary of confessing our sin we can forget
ourselves in a godly sort and confess our Saviour. We can say the
creed when we cannot raise the song. He also hath given us the
reconciliation. The more judgment we see in the holy cross the more
we see it is judgment unto salvation. The more we are humbled the
more we "roll our souls upon Christ." And we recover our
self-possession only by giving our soul again and again to Christ
to keep. We win a confidence in self-despair. Prayer is given us as
wings wherewith to mount, but also to shield our face when they
have carried us before the great white throne. It is in prayer that
the holiness comes home as love, and the love is established as
holiness. At every step our thought is transformed to prayer, and
our prayer opens new ranges of thought. His great revelation is His
holiness, always outgoing in atoning love. The Christian revelation
is not "God is love" so much as "love is God." That is, it is not
God's love, but the infinite power of God's love, its finality,
omnipotence, and absoluteness. It is not passionate and helpless
love, but it has power to subdue everything that rises against it.
And that is the holiness of love--the eternal thing in it. We
receive the last reconciliation. Then the very wrath of God becomes
a glory. The red in the sky is the new dawn. Our self-accusation
becomes a new mode of praise. Our loaded hearts spring light again.
Our heavy conscience turns to grave moral power. A new love is born
for our kind. A new and tender patience steals upon us. We see new
ways of helping, serving, and saving. We issue into a new world. We
are one with the Christ not only on His cross, but in His
resurrection. Think of the resurrection power and calm, of that
solemn final peace, that infinite satisfaction in the eternal thing
eternally achieved, which filled His soul when He had emerged from
death, when man's worst had been done, and God's best had been won,
for ever and for all. We have our times of entrance into that
Christ. As we were one with Him in the likeness of His death, so we
are in the likeness of His resurrection. And the same Eternal
Spirit which puts the preacher's soul much upon the cross also
raises it continually from the dead. We overcome our mistakes,
negligences, sins; nay, we rise above the sin of the whole world,
which will not let our souls be as good as they are. We overcome
the world, and take courage, and are of new cheer. We are in the
Spirit. And then we can preach, pray, teach, heal. And even the
unclean lips then put a new thrill into our sympathy and a new
tremor into our praise.
If it be not so, how shall our
dangerous work not demoralize us, and we perish from our too much
contact with holy things.
The minister's holiest prayer is
hardly lawful to utter. Few of his public would comprehend it. Some
would dismiss it with their most opprobrious word. They would call
it theological. When he calls to God in his incomprehensible
extremity they would translate it into an appeal to Elijah (
We are called at the present day to a
reconstruction of the old theology, a restatement of the old
gospel. We have to reappropriate and remint the truth of our
experienced Christianity. But what a hardship it is that this call
should search us at a time when the experimental power of our
Christianity has abated, and the evangelical experience is so low
and so confused as it often is! It must be the minister's work to
recover and deepen this experience for the churches, in the
interest of faith, and of the truth in which faith renders account
of itself. Theological inadequacy, and especially antagonism to
theology, means at root religious defect. For the reformation of
belief we must have a restoration of faith. And a chief engine for
such recovery of faith is for us what it was for Luther and his
like--prayer. And it is not mindless prayer, but that prayer which
is the wrestling of the conscience and not merely the cry of the
heart, the prayer for reconciliation and redemption and not merely
for guidance and comfort, the prayer of faith and not merely of
love.
I saw in a friend's house a
photograph from (I think) Durer--just two tense hands, palms
together, and lifted in prayer. It was most eloquent, most
subduing. I wish I could stamp the picture on the page here and fit
it to Milton's line:
The
great two-handed engine at our door.
Public prayer is, on the whole, the
most difficult part of the work of the minister. To help the
difficulty I have always claimed that pulpit notes of prayer may be
used. "The Lord's Prayer" itself is of this nature. It is not a
prayer, but a scheme of prayer, heads of prayer, or buoys in the
channel. But even with the use of all helps there are perils
enough. There are prayers that, in the effort to become real, are
much too familiar in their fashion of speech. A young man began his
prayer, in my own hearing, with the words, "O God, we have come to
have a chat with Thee." It was gruesome. Think of it as a sample of
modern piety for the young! No prayers, certainly no public
prayers, should be "chats with God." Again, other prayers are
sentimental prayers. George Dawson's volume has this fault. The
prayers of the Church should not be exposures of the affectional
man. The public prayer of the Church, as the company of grace, is
the saved soul returning to God that gave it; it is the sinner
coming to the Saviour, or the ransomed of the Lord returning to
Zion; it is the sanctified with the sanctifier; it is not primarily
the child talking to the Father--though that note may prevail in
more private prayers. We are more than stray sheep reclaimed. We
are those whose defiant iniquity has lain upon Christ for us
all.
But the root of the difficulty of
public prayer lies further back than in the matter of style. It
lies in the difficulty of private prayer, in its spiritual poverty,
its inertia, its anemia. What culture can deal with the rooted
difficulty that resides there, out of sight, in the inner man of
the heart, for lack of the courage of faith, for sheer spiritual
fecklessness? Yet the preparation for prayer is to pray. The prayer
is the practice of prayer. It is only prayer that teaches to pray.
The minister ought never to speak before men in God's name without
himself first speaking to God in man's name, and making
intercession as for himself so for his people.
Intercession! We are properly
vigilant that the minister do not sever himself from his people in
any sacredotal way. But for all that, is the minister's personal
and private prayer on exactly the same footing as a layman's? It is
a question that leads to the distinction between intercessory and
vicarious prayer. The personal religion of the minister is
vicarious even when it is not intercessory. Great indeed is the
spiritual value of private intercession. The intercessory private
prayer of the minister is the best corrective of the critical
spirit or the grumbling spirit which so easily besets and withers
us to-day. That reconciliation, that pacification of heart, which
comes by prayer opens in us a fountain of private intercession,
especially for our antagonists. Only, of course, it must be
private. But the minister is also praying to his people's good even
when he is not interceeding on their behalf, or leading them in
prayer. What he is for his Church he is with his whole personality.
And so his private and personal prayers are vicarious for his
people even when he does not know it. No Christian man lives for
himself, nor believes for himself. And if the private Christian in
his private prayers does not pray, any more than he lives, unto
himself alone, much more is this true for the minister. His private
prayers make a great difference to his people. They may not know
what makes his spell and blessing; even he may not. But it is his
most private prayers; which, thus, are vicarious even where not
intercessory.
What he is for his Church, I have
said, he is with his whole personality. And nothing gives us
personality like true prayer. Nothing makes a man so original. We
cannot be true Christians without being original. Living faith
destroys the commonplaceness, the monotony of life. Are not all men
original in death? "Je mourrai seul." Much more are they
original and their true selves in Christ's death, and in their part
and lot in that. For true originality we must be one, and closely
one, with God. To be creative we must learn with the Creator. The
most effectual man in history was he who said, "I live; yet not I,
but Christ liveth in me." What a reflection on our faith that so
much piety should be humdrum, and deadly dull! Private prayer, when
it is real action, is the greatest forge of personality. It places
a man in direct and effective contact with God the Creator, the
source of originality, and especially with God the Redeemer as the
source of the new creation. For the minister personality is
everything--not geniality, as it is the day's fashion to say, but
personality; and prayer is the spring of personality. This
impressive personality, due to prayer, you may often have in "the
peasant saint." And in some cases its absence is as palpable. Hence
comes vulgarity in prayer, essential vulgarity underlying much
possible fineness of phrase or manner. Vulgarity in prayer lies not
so much in its offenses to good taste in style as in its
indications of the absence of spiritual habit and reality. If the
theology of rhetoric destroys the theology of reality in the
sermon, how much more in prayer!
Prayer is for the religious life what
original research is for science--by it we get direct contact with
reality. The soul is brought into union with its own vaster
nature--God. Therefore, also, we must use the Bible as an original;
for indeed, the Bible is the most copious spring of prayer, and of
power, and of range. If we learn to pray from the Bible, and avoid
a mere cento of its phrases, we shall cultivate in our prayer the
large humane note of a universal gospel. Let us nurse our prayer on
our study of our Bible; and let us, therefore, not be too afraid of
theological prayer. True Christian prayer must have theology in it;
no less than true theology must have prayer in it and must be
capable of being prayed. "Your theology is too difficult," said
Charles V to the Reformers; "it cannot be understood without much
prayer." Yes, that is our arduous puritan way. Prayer and theology
must interpenetrate to keep each other great, and wide, and mighty.
The failure of the habit of prayer is at the root of much of our
light distaste for theology. There is a conspiracy of influences
round us whose effect is to belittle our great work. Earnest
ministers suffer more from the smallness of their people than from
their sins, and far more than from their unkindness. Our public may
kill by its triviality a soul which could easily resist the
assaults of opposition or wickedness. And our newspapers will
greatly aid their work. Now, to resist this it is not enough to
have recourse to prayer and to cultivate devotion. Unfortunately,
there are signs in the religious world to show that prayer and
piety alone do not save men from pettiness of interest, thinness of
soul, spiritual volatility, the note of insincerity, or foolishness
of judgment, or even vindictiveness. The remedy is not prayer
alone, but prayer on the scale of the whole gospel and at the depth
of searching faith. It is considered prayer--prayer which rises
above the childish petitions that disfigure much of our public
pietism, prayer which issues from the central affairs of the
kingdom of God. It is prayer with the profound Bible as its book of
devotion, and a true theology of faith for half of its power. It is
the prayer of a mind that moves in Bible passion, and ranges with
Bible scope, even when it eschews Bible speech and "the language of
Canaan."
And yet, with all its range, it is
prayer with concentration. It has not only thought but will in it.
The great reason why so many will not decide for Christ is that
Christ requires from the world concentration; not seclusion and not
renunciation merely, but concentration. And we ministers have our
special form of that need. I am speaking not of our share in the
common troubles of life, but of those specially that arise from the
ministerial office and care. No minister can live up to his work on
the casual or interjectional kind of prayer that might be
sufficient for many of his flock. He must think, of course, in his
prayers--in his private prayers--and he must pray his faith's
thought. But, still more, in his praying he must act. Prayer is not
a frame of mind, but a great energy. He must rise to conceive his
work as an active function of the work of Christ; and he must link
his faith, therefore, with the intercession which covers the whole
energy of Christ in His kingdom. In this, as in many ways, he must
remember, to his great relief and comfort, that it is not he who is
the real pastor of his church, but Christ, and that he is but
Christ's curate. The final responsibility is not his, but Christ's,
who bears the responsibility of all the sins and frets, both of the
world and, especially, of the Church.
The concentration, moreover, should
correspond to the positivity of the gospel and the Bible. Prayer
should rise more out of God's Word and concern for His kingdom than
even out of our personal needs, trials, or desires. That is implied
in prayer in Christ's name or for Christ's sake, prayer from His
place in the midst of the Kingdom. Our Prayer-book, the Bible, does
not prescribe prayer, but it does more--it inspires it. And prayer
in Christ's name is prayer inspired by His first interest--the
gospel. Do not use Christ simply to countersign your egoist
petition by a closing formula, but to create, inspire, and glorify
it. Prayer in Christ's name is prayer for Christ's object--for His
Kingdom, and His promise of the Holy Ghost.
It we really pray for that and yet do
not feel we receive it, probably enough we have it; and we are
looking for some special form of it not ours, or not ours yet. We
may be mistaking the fruits of the Spirit for His presence. Fruits
come late. They are different from signs. Buds are signs, and so
are other things hard to see. It is the Spirit that keeps us
praying for the Spirit, as it is grace that keeps us in grace.
Remember the patience of the missionaries who waited in the Spirit
fifteen years for their first convert. If God gave His Son unasked,
how much more will He give His Holy Spirit to them that ask it! But
let us not prescribe the form in which He comes.
The true close of prayer is when the
utterance expires in its own spiritual fullness. That is the true
Amen. Such times there are. We feel we are at last laid open to
God. We feel as though we "did see heaven opened, and the holy
angels, and the great God Himself."
In all I have said I have implied
that prayer should be strenuously importunate. Observe, not
petitionary merely, nor concentrated, nor active alone, but
importunate. For prayer is not only meditation or communion. Nor
ought it to be merely submissive in tone, as the "quietist" ideal
is. We need not begin with "Thy will be done" if we but end with
it. Remember the stress that Christ laid on importunity. Strenuous
prayer will help us to recover the masculine type of religion--and
then our opponents will at least respect us.
I would speak a little more fully on
this matter of importunity. It is very closely bound up with the
reality both of prayer and of religion. Prayer is not really a
power till it is importunate. And it cannot be importunate unless
it is felt to have a real effect on the Will of God. I may slip in
here my conviction that far less of the disbelief in prayer is due
to a scientific view of nature's uniformity than to the slipshod
kind of prayer that men hear from us in public worship; it is often
but journalese sent heavenwards, or phrase-making to carry on. And
I would further say that by importunity something else is meant
than passionate dictation and stormy pertinacity--imposing our
egoist will on God, and treating Him as a mysterious but manageable
power that we may coerce and exploit.
The deepening of the spiritual life
is a subject that frequently occupies the attention of religious
conferences and of the soul bent on self-improvement. But it is not
certain that the great saints would always recognize the ideal of
some who are addicted to the use of the phrase. The "deepening of
the spiritual life" they would find associated with three unhappy
things.
1. They would recoil from a use of
Scripture prevalent to those circles, which is atomistic
individualist, subjective, and fantastic.
2. And what they would feel most
foreign to their own objective and penetrating minds might be the
air of introspection and self-measurement too often associated with
the spiritual thus "deepened"--a spiritual egoism.
3. And they would miss the note of
judgment and Redemption.
We should distinguish at the outset
the deepening of spiritual life from the quickening of
spiritual sensibility. Christ on the cross was surely deepened
in spiritual experience, but was not the essence of that
dereliction, and the concomitant of that deepening, the dulling of
spiritual sensibility?
There are many plain obstacles to the
deepening of spiritual life, amid which I desire to name here only
one; it is prayer conceived merely, or chiefly, as submission,
resignation, quietism. We say too soon, "Thy will be done"; and too
ready acceptance of a situation as His will often means feebleness
or sloth. It may be His will that we surmount His will. It may be
His higher will that we resist His lower. Prayer is an act of will
much more than of sentiment, and its triumph is more than
acquiescence. Let us submit when we must, but let us keep the
submission in reserve rather than in action, as a ground tone
rather than the stole effort. Prayer with us has largely ceased to
be wrestling. But is that not the dominant scriptural idea? It is
not the sole idea, but is it not the dominant? And is not our
subdued note often but superinduced and unreal?
I venture to enlarge on this last
head, by way of meeting some who hesitate to speak of the power of
prayer to alter God's will. I offer two points:
I. Prayer may really change the will
of God, or, if not His will, His intention.
II. It may, like other human energies
of godly sort, take the form of resisting the will of God.
Resisting His will may be doing His will.
I. As to the first point. If this is
not believed the earnestness goes out of prayer. It becomes either
a ritual, or a soliloquy only overheard by God; just as thought
with the will out of it degenerates into dreaming or brooding,
where we are more passive than active. Prayer is not merely the
meeting of two moods or two affections, the laying of the head on a
divine bosom in trust and surrender. That may have its place in
religion, but it is not the nerve and soul of prayer. Nor is it
religious reverie. Prayer is an encounter of wills--till one will
or the other give way. It is not a spiritual exercise merely, but
in its maturity it is a cause acting on the course of God's
world.
"Thy will be done" was no utterance
of mere resignation; thought it has mostly come to mean this in a
Christianity which tends to canonize the weak instead of
strengthening them. As prayer it was a piece of active cooperation
with God's will. It was a positive part of it. It is one thing to
submit to a stronger will, it is another to be one with it. We
submit because we cannot resist it; but when we are one with it we
cannot succumb. It is not a power, but our power. But the natural
will is not one with God's; and so we come to use these words in a
mere negative way, meaning that we cease to resist. Our will does
not accept God's, it just stops work. We give in and lie down. But
is that the sense of the words in the Lord's Prayer? Do they mean
that we have no objection to God's will being done? or that we do
not withstand any more? or even that we accept it gladly? Do they
not mean something far more positive--that we actively will God's
will and aid it, that it is the whole content of our own, that we
put into it all the will that there can be in prayer, which is at
last the great will power of the race? It is our heart's passion
that God's will be done and His kingdom come. And can His kingdom
come otherwise than as it is a passion with us? Can His will be
done? God's will was not Christ's consent merely, nor His pleasure,
but His meat and drink, the source of His energy and the substance
of His work.
Observe, nothing can alter God's
grace, His will in that sense, His large will and final
purpose--our racial blessing, our salvation, our redemption in
Jesus Christ. But for that will He is an infinite opportunist. His
ways are very flexible. His intentions are amenable to us if His
will is changeless. The steps of His process are variable according
to our freedom and His.
We are living, let us say, in a
careless way; and God proposes a certain treatment of us according
to our carelessness. But in the exercise of our spiritual freedom
we are by some means brought to pray. We cease to be careless. We
pray God to visit us as those who hear. Then He does another thing.
He acts differently, with a change caused by our freedom and our
change. The treatment for deafness is altered. God adopts another
treatment--perhaps for weakness. We have by prayer changed His
action, and, so far, His will (at any rate His intention)
concerning us. As we pray, the discipline for the prayerless is
altered to that for the prayerful. We attain the thing God did not
mean to give us unless He had been affected by our prayer. We
change the conduct, if not the will, of God to us, the
Verhalten if not the Verhaltniss.
Again, we pray and pray, and no
answer comes. The boon does not arrive. Why? Perhaps we are not
spiritually ready for it. It would not be a real blessing. But the
persistence, the importunity of faith, is having a great effect on
our spiritual nature. It ripens. A time comes when we are ready for
answer. We then present ourselves to God in a spiritual condition
which reasonably causes His to yield. The new spiritual state is
not the answer to our prayer, but it is its effect; and it is the
condition which makes the answer possible. It makes the prayer
effectual. The gift can be a blessing now. So God resists us no
more. Importunity prevails, not as mere importunity (for God is not
bored into answer), but as the importunity of God's own elect, i.e.
as obedience, as a force of the Kingdom, as increased spiritual
power, as real moral action, bringing corresponding strength and
fitness to receive. I have often found that what I sought most I
did not get at the right time, not till it was too late, not till I
had learned to do without it, till I had renounced it in principle
(though not in desire). Perhaps it had lost some of its zest by the
time it came, but it meant more as a gift and a trust. That was
God's right time--when I could have it as though I had it not. If
it came, it came not to gratify me, but to glorify Him and be a
means of serving Him.
One recalls here that most pregnant
saying of Schopenhauer: "All is illusion--the hope or the thing
hoped." If it is not true for all it is true for very many. Either
the hope is never fulfilled or else its fulfilment disappoints. God
gives the hoped for thing, but sends leanness into the soul. The
mother prays to have a son--and he breaks her heart, and were
better dead. Hope may lie to us, or the thing hoped may dash us.
But though He slay me I will trust. God does not fail. Amid the
wreck of my little world He is firm, and I in Him. I justify God in
the ruins; in His good time I shall arrive. More even than my hopes
may go wrong. I may go wrong. But my Redeemer liveth; and, great
though God is as my Fulfiller, He is greater as my Redeemer. He is
great as my hope, but He is greater as my power. What is the
failure of my hope from Him compared with the failure of His hope
in me? If He continue to believe in me I may well believe in
Him.
God's object with us is not to give
just so many things and withhold so many; it is to place us in the
tissue of His kingdom. His best answer to us is to raise us to the
power of answering Him. The reason why He does not answer our
prayer is because we do not answer Him and His prayer. And His
prayer was, as though Christ did beseech us, "Be ye reconciled." He
would lift us to confident business with Him, to commerce of loving
wills. The painter wrestles with the sitter till he gives him back
himself, and there is a speaking likeness. So man with God, till
God surrender His secret. He gives or refuses things, therefore,
with a view to that communion alone, and on the whole. It is that
spiritual personal end, and not an iron necessity, that rules His
course. Is there not a constant spiritual interaction between God
and man as free spiritual beings? How that can be is one of the
great philosophic problems. But the fact that it is is of the
essence of faith. It is the unity of our universe. Many systems try
to explain how human freedom and human action are consistent with
God's omnipotence and omniscience. None succeed. How secondary
causes like man are compatible with God as the Universal and
Ultimate Cause is not rationally plain. But there is no practical
doubt that they are compatable. And so it is with the action of man
on God in prayer. We may perhaps, for the present, put it thus,
that we cannot change the will of God, which is grace, and which
even Christ never changed but only revealed or effected; but we can
change the intention of God, which is a manner of treatment, in the
interest of grace, according to the situation of the hour.
If we are guided by the Bible we have
much ground for this view of prayer. Does not Christ set more
value upon importunity than on submission? "Knock, and it shall
be opened." I would refer also not only to the parable of the
unjust judge, but to the incident of the Syrophenician woman, where
her wit, faith, and importunity together did actually change our
Lord's intention and break His custom. There there is Paul
beseeching the Lord thrice for a boon; and urging us to be instant,
insistent, continual in prayer. We have Jacob wrestling. We have
Abraham pleading, yea, haggling, with God for Sodom. We have Moses
interceding for Israel and asking God to blot his name out of the
book of life, if that were needful to save Israel. We have Job
facing God, withstanding Him, almost bearding Him, and extracting
revelation. And we have Christ's own struggle with the Father in
Gethsemane.
It is a wrestle on the greatest
scale--all manhood taxed as in some great war, or some great
negotiation of State. And the effect is exhaustion often. No, the
result of true, prayer is not always peace.
II. As to the second point. This
wrestle is in a certain sense a resisting of God. You cannot have
wrestling otherwise; but you may have Christian fatalism. It is not
mere wrestling with ourselves, our ignorance, our self-will. That
is not prayer, but self-torment. Prayer is wrestling with God. And
it is better to fall thus into the hands of God than of man--even
than our own. It is a resistance that God loves. It is quite
foreign to the godless, self-willed defiant resistance. In love
there is a kind of resistance that enhances it. The resistance of
love is a quite different thing from the resistance of hostility.
The yielding to one you love is very different from capitulating to
an enemy:
Two
constant lovers, being joined in one,
Yielding
unto each other yield to none -
i.e. to no foreign force, no force foreign to the love which
makes them one.
So when God yields to prayer in the
name of Christ, to the prayer of faith and love, He yields to
Himself who inspired it, as He sware by Himself since none was
greater. Christian prayer is the Spirit praying in us. It is prayer
in the solidarity of the Kingdom. It is a continuation of Christ's
prayer, which in Gethsemane was a wrestle, an sgwnia with the Father. But if so, it is God
pleading with God, God dealing with God--as the true atonement must
be. And when God yields it is not to an outside influence He
yields, but to Himself.
Let me make it still more plain. When
we resist the will of God we may be resisting what God wills to be
temporary and to be resisted, what He wills to be intermediary and
transcended. We resist because God wills we should. We are not
limiting God's will, any more than our moral freedom limits it.
That freedom is the image of His, and, in a sense, part of His. We
should defraud Him and His freedom if we did not exercise ours. So
the prayer which resists His dealing may be part of His will and
its fulfilment.
Does God not will the existence of
things for us to resist, to grapple with? Do we ourselves not
appoint problems and make difficulties for those we teach, for the
very purpose of their overcoming them? We set questions to children
of which we know the answer quite well. The real answer to our will
and purpose is not the solution but the grappling, the wrestling.
And we may properly give a reward not for the correct answer, but
for the hard and honest effort. That work is the prayer; and it has
its reward apart from the solution.
That is a principle of education with
us. So it may be with God. But I mean a good deal more by this than
what is called the reflex action of prayer. It that were all it
would introduce an unreality into prayer. We should be praying for
exercise, not for action. It would be prayer with a theological
form, which yet expects no more than a psychological effect. It
would be a prayer which is not sure that God is really more
interested in us than we are in Him. But I mean that God's
education has a lower stage for us and a higher. He has a lower
will and a higher, a prior and a posterior. And the purpose of the
lower will is that it be resisted and struggled through to the
higher. By God's will (let us say) you are born in a home where
your father's earnings are a few shillings a week, like many an
English labourer. Is it God's will that you acquiesce in that and
never strive out of it? It is God's will that you are there. Is it
God's will that you should not resist being there? Nay, it may be
His will that you should wisely resist it, and surmount His lower,
His initial, will, which is there for the purpose. That is to say,
it is His will that you resist, antagonize, His will. And so it is
with the state of childhood altogether.
Again: Is disease God's will? We all
believe it often is--even if man is to blame for it. It may be, by
God's will, the penalty on human ignorance, negligence, or sin. But
let us suppose there were only a few cases where disease is God's
will. It was so in the lower creatures, before man lived,
blundered, or sinned. Take only one such case. Is it God's will
that we should lie down and let the disease have its way? Why, a
whole profession exists to say no. Medicine exists as an antagonism
to disease, even when you can say that disease is God's will and
His punishment of sin. A doctor will tell you that resignation is
one of his foes. He begins to grow hopeless if the patient is so
resigned from the outset as to make no effort, if there be no will
to live. Resistance to this ordinance of God's is the doctor's
business and the doctor's ally. And why? Because God ordained
disease for the purpose of being resisted; He ordained the
resistance, that from the conflict man might come out the stronger,
and more full of resource and dominion over nature.
Again, take death. It is God's will.
It is in the very structure of man, in the divine economy. It is
not the result of sin; it was there before sin. Is it to be
accepted without demur? Are doctors impious who resist it? Are we
sinning when we shrink from it? Does not the life of most people
consist in the effort to escape it, in the struggle for a living?
So also when we pray and wrestle for another's life, for our dear
one's life. "Sir, come down ere my child die." The man was
impatient. How familiar we are with his kind! "Do, please, leave
your religious talk, which I don't understand; get doing something;
cure my child." But was that an impious prayer? It was ignorant,
practical, British, but not quite faithless. And it was answered,
as many a similar prayer has been. But, then, if death be God's
will, to resist it is to resist God's will. Well, it is His will
that we should. Christ, who always did God's will, resisted His own
death, slipped away from it often, till the hour came; and even
then He prayed with all his might against it when it seemed
inevitable. "If it be possible, release Me." He was ready to accept
it, but only in the last resort, only if there was no other way,
only after every other means had been exhausted. To the end He
cherished the fading hope that there might be some other way. He
went to death voluntarily, freely, but--shall we say
reluctantly?--resisting the most blessed act of God's will that
ever was performed in heaven or on earth; resisting, yet sure to
acquiesce when that was God's clear will.
The whole nature, indeed, is the will
of God, and the whole of grace is striving with nature. It is our
nature to have certain passions. That is God's will. But it is our
calling of God to resist them as much as to gratify them. There are
there as God's will to be resisted as much as indulged. The
redemption from the natural man includes the resistance to it, and
the release of the soul from what God Himself appointed as its
lower stages--never as its dwelling place, and never its tomb. So
far prayer is on the lines of evolution.
Obedience is the chief end. But
obedience is not mere submission, mere resignation. It is not
always acquiescence, even in prayer. We obey God as much when we
urge our suit, and make a real petition of it, as when we accept
His decision; as much when we try to change His will as when we bow
to it. The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence. There is a very
fine passage in Dante, Parad. xx. 94 (Longfellow):
Regnum
coelorum suffereth violence
From
fervent love, and from that living hope
That
overcometh the divine volition.
Not
in the way that man o'ercometh man;
We
conquer it because it will be conquered,
And,
conquered, conquers by benignity.
It is His will--His will of
grace--that prayer should prevail with Him and extract blessings.
And how we love the grace that so concedes them! The answer to
prayer is not the complaisance of a playful power lightly yielding
to the playful egoism of His favorites. "Our antagonist is our
helper." To struggle with Him is one way of doing His will. To
resist is one way of saying, "Thy will be done." It was God's will
that Christ should deprecate the death God required. It pleased God
as much as His submission to death. But could it have been pleasing
to Him that Christ should pray so, if no prayer could ever possibly
change God's will? Could Christ have prayed so in that belief?
Would faith ever inspire us to pray if the God of our faith must be
unmoved by prayers? The prayer that goes to an inflexible God,
however good He is, is prayer that rises more from human need than
from God's own revelation, or from Christian faith (where Christian
prayer should rise). It is His will, then, that we should pray
against what seems His will, and what, for the lower stage of our
growth, is His will. And all this without any unreality
whatever.
Let us beware of a pietist fatalism
which thins the spiritual life, saps the vigour of character, makes
humility mere acquiescence, and piety only feminine, by banishing
the will from prayer as much as thought has been banished from it.
"The curse of so much religion" (I have quoted Meredith) "is that
men cling to God with their weakness rather than with their
strength."
The popularity of much acquiescence
is not because it is holier, but because it is easier. And an easy
gospel is the consumption that attacks Christianity. It is the
phthisis to faith.
Once come to think that we best say
"Thy will be done" when we acquiesce, when we resign, and not also
when we struggle and wrestle, and in time all effort will seem less
pious than submission. And so we fall into the ecclesiastical type
of religion, drawn from an age whose first virtue was submission to
outward superiors. We shall come to canonize decorum and
subduedness in life and worship (as the Episcopal Church with its
monarchical ideas of religion has done). We shall think more of
order than of effort, more of law than of life, more of fashion
than of faith, of good form than of great power. But was
subduedness the mark of the New Testament men? Our religion may
gain some beauty in this way, but it loses vigour. It may gain
style, but it loses power. It is good form, but mere aesthetic
piety. It may consecrate manners, but it improverishes the mind. It
may regulate prayer by the precepts of intelligence instead of the
needs and faith of the soul. It may feed certain pensive emotions,
but it may emasculate will, secularize energy, and empty character.
And so we decline to a state of things in which we have no shocking
sins--yes, and no splendid souls; when all souls are dully correct,
as like as shillings, but as thin, and as cheap.
All our forms and views of religion
have their test in prayer. Lose the importunity of prayer, reduce
it to soliloquy, or even to colloquy, with God, lose the real
conflict of will and will, lose the habit of wrestling and the hope
of prevailing with God, make it mere walking with God in friendly
talk; and, precious as that is, yet you tend to lose the reality of
prayer at last. In principle you make it mere conversation instead
of the soul's great action. You lose the food of character, the
renewal of will. You may have beautiful prayers--but as ineffectual
as beauty so often is, and as fleeting. And so in the end you lose
the reality of religion. Redemption turns down into mere
revelation, faith to assent, and devotion to a phase of culture.
For you lose the power of the Cross and so of the soul.
Resist God, in the sense of rejecting
God, and you will not be able to resist any evil. But resist God in
the sense of closing with God, cling to Him with your strength, not
your weakness only, with your active and not only your passive
faith, and He will give you strength. Cast yourself into His arms
not to be caressed but to wrestle with Him. He loves that holy war.
He may be too many for you, and lift you from your feet. But it
will be to lift you from earth, and set you in the heavenly places
which are their who fight the good fight and lay hold of God as
their eternal life.