CHAPTER I
The Inwardness of Prayer
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 (2 Cor. v. 20).
If our prayer reach or move Him it is because He first reached and moved us to
pray. The prayer that reached and moved us to pray. The prayer that reached
heaven began there, when Christ went forth. It began when God turned to
beseech us in Christ--in the appealing Lamb slain before the foundation of the
world. The Spirit went out with the power and function in it to return with
our soul. Our prayer is the answer to God's. Herein is prayer, not that we
prayed Him, but that He first prayed us, in giving His Son to be a propitiation
for us. The heart of the Atonement is prayer--Christ's great self-offering to
God in the Eternal Spirit. The whole rhythm of Christ's soul, so to say, was
Godhead going out and returning on itself. And so God stirs and inspires all
prayer which finds and moves Him. His love provokes our sacred forwardness.
He does not compel us, but we cannot help it after that look, that tone, that
turn of His. All say, "I am yours if you will"; and when we will it is prayer.
Any final glory of human success or destiny rises from man being God's
continual creation, and destined by Him for Him. So we pray because we were
made for prayer, and God draws us out by breathing Himself in.
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 impertration. 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.[2] It is spirit
not in expression only, but in deed and victory. It is speech become not only
movement, but moral action and achievement; it is word become work; as the Word
from being Spirit became flesh, as Christ from prophet became priest, and then
Holy Spirit. It is the principle of the Incarnation, only with the descending
movement reversed. "Ye are gods." God became man in His Son's outgoing that man
might become divine; and prayer is in the train of the Son's return to the
Father, a function of the Ascension and Exaltation, in which (if we may not say
man becomes God) we are made partakers of the divine nature, not ontologically,
but practically, experimentally. It is the true response, and tribute, and
trophy to Christ's humiliation. Man rises to be a co-worker with God in the
highest sense. For it is only action, it is not by dream or rapture, far less
in essence, that we enter communion with an active being--above all with the
eternal Act of God in Christ that upholds the world. As such communion prayer
is no mere rapport, no mere contact. It is the central act of the soul, organic
with Christ's; it is that which brings it into tune with the whole universe as
God's act, and answers the beating of its central heart. It is a part and
function of the creative, preservative, and consummatory energy of the
world.
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[3] will be very different on the prayerful and the
prayerless. It will be a sifting judgment. It will turn to prayer those who did
not pray, and increase the prayer of those who did. But some, whose belief in
God grew up only in fair weather and not at the Cross, it will make more
sceptical and prayerless than ever, and it will present them with a world more
confused and more destitute of a God than before; which can only lead to
renewed outbreaks of the same kind as soon as the nations regain strength. The
prayerless spirit saps a people's moral strength because it blunts their
thought and conviction of the Holy. It must be so if prayer is such a moral
blessing and such a shaping power, if it pass, by its nature, from the vague
volume and passion of devotion to formed petition and effort. Prayerlessness is
an injustice and a damage to our own soul, and therefore to its history, both
in what we do and what we think. The root of all deadly heresy is
prayerlessness. Prayer finds our clue in a world otherwise without form and
void. And it draws a magic circle round us over which the evil spirits may not
pass. "Prayer," says Vinet, "is like the air of certain ocean isles, which is
so pure that there vermin cannot live. We should surround ourselves with this
atmosphere, as the diver shuts himself into his bell ere he descends into the
deep."
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."
[2] See last chapter of my Person and Place of
Christ (Independent Press).
[3] The First World War.