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        Title: Purpose in Prayer
   Creator(s): Bounds, E.M.
       Rights: Public Domain
CCEL Subjects: All; Christian Life
   LC Call no: BV210 .B585
  LC Subjects:

               Practical theology

               Worship (Public and Private) Including the church year, Christian
               symbols, liturgy, prayer, hymnology

               Prayer
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                               PURPOSE IN PRAYER

  by

E.M. Bounds
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                                       I

   My Creed leads me to think that prayer is efficacious, and surely a
   day's asking God to overrule all events for good is not lost. Still
   there is a great feeling that when a man is praying he's doing nothing,
   and this feeling makes us give undue importance to work, sometimes even
   to the hurrying over or even to the neglect of prayer.

   Do not we rest in our day too much on the arm of flesh? Cannot the same
   wonders be done now as of old? Do not the eyes of the Lord run to and
   fro throughout the whole earth still to show Himself strong on behalf
   of those who put their trust in Him? Oh that God would give me more
   practical faith in Him! Where is now the Lord God of Elijah? He is
   waiting for Elijah to call on Him.--James Gilmour of Mongolia

   The more praying there is in the world the better the world will be,
   the mightier the forces against evil everywhere. Prayer, in one phase
   of its operation, is a disinfectant and a preventive. It purifies the
   air; it destroys the contagion of evil. Prayer is no fitful, shortlived
   thing. It is no voice crying unheard and unheeded in the silence. It is
   a voice which goes into God's ear, and it lives as long as God's ear is
   open to holy pleas, as long as God's heart is alive to holy things.

   God shapes the world by prayer. Prayers are deathless. The lips that
   uttered them may be closed in death, the heart that felt them may have
   ceased to beat, but the prayers live before God, and God's heart is set
   on them and prayers outlive the lives of those who uttered them;
   outlive a generation, outlive an age, outlive a world.

   That man is the most immortal who has done the most and the best
   praying. They are God's heroes, God's saints, God's servants, God's
   vicegerents. A man can pray better because of the prayers of the past;
   a man can live holier because of the prayers of the past, the man of
   many and acceptable prayers has done the truest and greatest service to
   the incoming generation. The prayers of God's saints strengthen the
   unborn generation against the desolating waves of sin and evil. Woe to
   the generation of sons who find their censers empty of the rich incense
   of prayer; whose fathers have been too busy or too unbelieving to pray,
   and perils inexpressible and consequences untold are their unhappy
   heritage. Fortunate are they whose fathers and mothers have left them a
   wealthy patrimony of prayer.

   The prayers of God's saints are the capital stock in heaven by which
   Christ carries on His great work upon earth. The great throes and
   mighty convulsions on earth are the results of these prayers. Earth is
   changed, revolutionised, angels move on more powerful, more rapid wing,
   and God's policy is shaped as the prayers are more numerous, more
   efficient.

   It is true that the mightiest successes that come to God's cause are
   created and carried on by prayer. God's day of power; the angelic days
   of activity and power are when God's Church comes into its mightiest
   inheritance of mightiest faith and mightiest prayer. God's conquering
   days are when the saints have given themselves to mightiest prayer.
   When God's house on earth is a house of prayer, then God's house in
   heaven is busy and all potent in its plans and movements, then His
   earthly armies are clothed with the triumphs and spoils of victory and
   His enemies defeated on every hand.

   God conditions the very life and prosperity of His cause on prayer. The
   condition was put in the very existence of God's cause in this world.
   Ask of Me is the one condition God puts in the very advance and triumph
   of His cause.

   Men are to pray--to pray for the advance of God's cause. Prayer puts
   God in full force in the world. To a prayerful man God is present in
   realised force; to a prayerful Church God is present in glorious power,
   and the Second Psalm is the Divine description of the establishment of
   God's cause through Jesus Christ. All inferior dispensations have
   merged in the enthronement of Jesus Christ. God declares the
   enthronement of His Son. The nations are incensed with bitter hatred
   against His cause. God is described as laughing at their enfeebled
   hate. The Lord will laugh; The Lord will have them in derision. "Yet
   have I set My King upon My holy hill of Zion." The decree has passed
   immutable and eternal:

   I will tell of the decree:

   The Lord said unto Me, Thou art My Son;

   This day have I begotten Thee.

   Ask of Me, and I will give Thee the nations for Thine inheritance,

   And the uttermost parts of the earth for Thy possession.

   Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron;

   Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

   Ask of Me is the condition a praying people willing and obedient. "And
   men shall pray for Him continually." Under this universal and simple
   promise men and women of old laid themselves out for God. They prayed
   and God answered their prayers, and the cause of God was kept alive in
   the world by the flame of their praying.

   Prayer became a settled and only condition to move His Son's Kingdom.
   "Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it
   shall be opened." The strongest one in Christ's kingdom is he who is
   the best knocker. The secret of success in Christ's Kingdom is the
   ability to pray. The one who can wield the power of prayer is the
   strong one, the holy one in Christ's Kingdom. The most important lesson
   we can learn is how to pray.

   Prayer is the keynote of the most sanctified life, of the holiest
   ministry. He does the most for God who is the highest skilled in
   prayer. Jesus Christ exercised His ministry after this order.
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                                       II

   That we ought to give ourselves to God with regard to things both
   temporal and spiritual, and seek our satisfaction only in the
   fulfilling His will, whether He lead us by suffering, or by
   consolation, for all would be equal to a Soul truly resigned. Prayer is
   nothing else but a sense of God's presence.--Brother Lawrence

   Be sure you look to your secret duty; keep that up whatever you do. The
   soul cannot prosper in the neglect of it. Apostasy generally begins at
   the closet door. Be much in secret fellowship with God. It is secret
   trading that enriches the Christian.

   Pray alone. Let prayer be the key of the morning and the bolt at night.
   The best way to fight against sin is to fight it on our knees.--Philip
   Henry

   The prayer of faith is the only power in the universe to which the
   Great Jehovah yields. Prayer is the sovereign remedy.--Robert Hall

   An hour of solitude passed in sincere and earnest prayer, or the
   conflict with and conquest over a single passion or subtle bosom sin
   will teach us more of thought, will more effectually awaken the faculty
   and form the habit of reflection than a year's study in the schools
   without them.--Coleridge

   A man may pray night and day and deceive himself, but no man can be
   assured of his sincerity who does not pray. Prayer is faith passing
   into act. A union of the will and intellect realising in an
   intellectual act. It is the whole man that prays. Less than this is
   wishing or lip work, a sham or a mummery.

   If God should restore me again to health I have determined to study
   nothing but the Bible. Literature is inimical to spirituality if it be
   not kept under with a firm hand.--Richard Cecil

   Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in
   doing that for God's. sake which we commonly do for our own. The time
   of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer. Prayer is
   nothing else but a sense of the presence of God.--Brother Lawrence

   Let me burn out for God. After all, whatever God may appoint, prayer is
   the great thing. Oh that I may be a man of prayer.--Henry Martyn

   The possibilities and necessity of prayer, its power and results are
   manifested in arresting and changing the purposes of God and in
   relieving the stroke of His power. Abimelech was smitten by God:

   So Abraham prayed unto God: and God healed Abimelech, and his wife, and
   his maid-servants; and they bare children.

   For the Lord had fast closed up all the wombs of the house of
   Abimelech, because of Sarah Abraham's wife.

   Job's miserable, mistaken, comforters had so deported themselves in
   their controversy with Job that God's wrath was kindled against them.
   "My servant Job shall pray for you," said God, "for him will I accept."

   "And the Lord turned the captivity of Job when he prayed for his
   friends."

   Jonah was in dire condition when "the Lord sent out a great wind into
   the sea, and there was a mighty tempest." When lots were cast, "the lot
   fell upon Jonah." He was cast overboard into the sea, but "the Lord had
   prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah ... Then Jonah prayed unto
   the Lord his God out of the fish's belly ... and the Lord spake unto
   the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land."

   When the disobedient prophet lifted up his voice in prayer, God heard
   and sent deliverance.

   Pharaoh was a firm believer in the possibilities of prayer, and its
   ability to relieve. When staggering under the woeful curses of God, he
   pleaded with Moses to intercede for him. "Intreat the Lord for me," was
   his pathetic appeal four times repeated when the plagues were scourging
   Egypt. Four times were these urgent appeals made to Moses, and four
   times did prayer lift the dread curse from the hard king and his doomed
   land.

   The blasphemy and idolatry of Israel in making the golden calf and
   declaring their devotions to it were a fearful crime. The anger of God
   waxed hot, and He declared that He would destroy the offending people.
   The Lord was very wroth with Aaron also, and to Moses He said, "Let Me
   alone that I may destroy theme--But Moses prayed, and kept on praying;
   day and night he prayed forty days. He makes the record of his prayer
   struggle. "I fell down," he says, "before the Lord at the first forty
   days and nights; I did neither eat bread nor drink water because of
   your sins which ye sinned in doing wickedly in the sight of the Lord to
   provoke Him to anger. For I was afraid of the anger and hot displeasure
   wherewith the Lord was hot against you to destroy you. But the Lord
   hearkened to me at this time also. And the Lord was very angry with
   Aaron to have destroyed him. And I prayed for him also at the same
   time."

   "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. It was the purpose of
   God to destroy that great and wicked city. But Nineveh prayed, covered
   with sackcloth; sitting in ashes she cried "mightily to God," and "God
   repented of the evil that He said He would do unto them; and He did it
   not."

   The message of God to Hezekiah was: "Set thine house in order; for thou
   shalt die and not live." Hezekiah turned his face toward the wall, and
   prayed unto the Lord, and said: "Remember now, O Lord, I beseech Thee,
   how I have walked before Thee in truth, and with a perfect heart, and
   have done that which is good in Thy sight." And Hezekiah wept sore. God
   said to Isaiah, "Go, say to Hezekiah, I have heard thy prayer, I have
   seen thy tears; behold, I will add unto thy days fifteen years."

   These men knew how to pray and how to prevail in prayer. Their faith in
   prayer was no passing attitude that changed with the wind or with their
   own feelings and circumstances; it was a fact that God heard and
   answered, that His ear was ever open to the cry of His children, and
   that the power to do what was asked of Him was commensurate with His
   willingness. And thus these men, strong in faith and in prayer,
   "subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped
   the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of
   the sword, from weakness were made strong, waxed mighty in war, turned
   to flight the armies of the aliens."

   Everything then, as now, was possible to the men and women who knew how
   to pray. Prayer, indeed, opened a limitless storehouse, and God's hand
   withheld nothing. Prayer introduced those who practised it into a world
   of privilege, and brought the strength and wealth of heaven down to the
   aid of finite man. What rich and wonderful power was theirs who had
   learned the secret of victorious approach to God! With Moses it saved a
   nation; with Ezra it saved a church.

   And yet, strange as it seems when we contemplate the wonders of which
   God's people had been witness, there came a slackness in prayer. The
   mighty hold upon God, that had so often struck awe and terror into the
   hearts of their enemies, lost its grip. The people, backslidden and
   apostate, had gone off from their praying--if the bulk of them had ever
   truly prayed. The Pharisee's cold and lifeless praying was substituted
   for any genuine approach to God, and because of that formal method of
   praying the whole worship became a parody of its real purpose. A
   glorious dispensation, and gloriously executed, was it by Moses, by
   Ezra, by Daniel and Elijah, by Hannah and Samuel; but the circle seems
   limited and shortlived; the praying ones were few and far between. They
   had no survivors, none to imitate their devotion to God, none to
   preserve the roll of the elect.

   In vain had the decree established the Divine order, the Divine call.
   Ask of Me. From the earnest and fruitful crying to God they turned
   their faces to pagan gods, and cried in vain for the answers that could
   never come. And so they sank into that godless and pitiful state that
   has lost its object in life when the link with the Eternal has been
   broken. Their favoured dispensation of prayer was forgotten; they knew
   not how to pray.

   What a contrast to the achievements that brighten up other pages of
   holy writ. The power working through Elijah and Elisha in answer to
   prayer reached down even to the very grave. In each case a child was
   raised from the dead, and the powers of famine were broken. "The
   supplications of a righteous man avail much." Elijah was a man of like
   passions with us. He prayed fervently that it might not rain, and it
   rained not on the earth for three years and six months. And he prayed
   again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.
   Jonah prayed while imprisoned in the great fish, and he came to dry
   land, saved from storm and sea and monsters of the deep by the mighty
   energy of his praying.

   How wide the gracious provision of the grace of praying as administered
   in that marvellous dispensation. They prayed wondrously. Why could not
   their praying save the dispensation from decay and death? Was it not
   because they lost the fire without which all praying degenerates into a
   lifeless form? It takes effort and toil and care to prepare the
   incense. Prayer is no laggard's work. When all the rich, spiced graces
   from the body of prayer have by labour and beating been blended and
   refined and intermixed, the fire is needed to unloose the incense and
   make its fragrance rise to the throne of God. The fire that consumes
   creates the spirit and life of the incense. Without fire prayer has no
   spirit; it is, like dead spices, for corruption and worms.

   The casual, intermittent prayer is never bathed in this Divine fire.
   For the man who thus prays is lacking in the earnestness that lays hold
   of God, determined not to let Him go until the blessing comes. "Pray
   without ceasing," counselled the great Apostle. That is the habit that
   drives prayer right into the mortar that holds the building stones
   together. "You can do more than pray after you have prayed," said the
   godly Dr. A. J. Gordon, "but you cannot do more than pray until you
   have prayed." The story of every great Christian achievement is the
   history of answered prayer.

   "The greatest and the best talent that God gives to any man or woman in
   this world is the talent of prayer," writes Principal Alexander Whyte.
   "And the best usury that any man or woman brings back to God when He
   comes to reckon with them at the end of this world is a life of prayer.
   And those servants best put their Lord's money "to the exchangers" who
   rise early and sit late, as long as they are in this world, ever
   finding out and ever following after better and better methods of
   prayer, and ever forming more secret, more steadfast, and more
   spiritually fruitful habits of prayer, till they literally "pray
   without ceasing," and till they continually strike out into new
   enterprises in prayer, and new achievements, and new enrichments."

   Martin Luther, when once asked what his plans, for the following day
   were, answered: "Work, work, from early until late. In fact, I have so
   much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer."
   Cromwell, too, believed in being much upon his knees. Looking on one
   occasion at the statues of famous men, he turned to a friend and said:
   "Make mine kneeling, for thus I came to glory."

   It is only when the whole heart is gripped with the passion of prayer
   that the life-giving fire descends, for none but the earnest man gets
   access to the ear of God.
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                                      III

   When thou feelest thyself most indisposed to prayer yield not to it,
   but strive and endeavor to pray even when thou thinkest thou canst not
   pray.--Hildersam

   It was among the Parthians the custom that none was to give their
   children any meat in the morning before they saw the sweat on their
   faces, and you shall find this to be God's usual course not to give His
   children the taste of His delights till they begin to sweat in seeking
   after them.--Richard Baxter

   Of all the duties enjoined by Christianity none is more essential and
   yet more neglected than prayer. Most people consider the exercise a
   fatiguing ceremony, which they are justified in abridging as much as
   possible. Even those whose profession or fears lead them to pray, pray
   with such languor and wanderings of mind that their prayers, far from
   drawing down blessings, only increase their condemnation.--Fenelon

   More praying and better is the secret of the whole matter. More time
   for prayer, more relish and preparation to meet God, to commune with
   God through Christ--this has in it the whole of the matter. Our manner
   and matter of praying ill become us. The attitude and relationship of
   God and the Son are the eternal relationship of Father and Son, of
   asking and giving--the Son always asking, the Father always giving:

   Ask of Me, and I will give Thee the nations for Thine inheritance,

   And the uttermost parts of the earth for Thy possession.

   Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron;

   Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

   Jesus is to be always praying through His people. "And men shall pray
   for Him continually." "For My house shall be called a house of prayer
   for My peoples." We must prepare ourselves to pray; to be like Christ,
   to pray like Christ.

   Man's access in prayer to God opens everything, and makes his
   impoverishment his wealth. All things are his through prayer. The
   wealth and the glory--all things are Christ's. As the light grows
   brighter and prophets take in the nature of the restoration, the Divine
   record seems to be enlarged. "Thus saith the Lord, the Holy One of
   Israel and His Maker, ask Me of things that are to come, concerning My
   sons, and concerning the work of My hands command ye Me. I have made
   the earth, and created man upon it: I, even My hands, have stretched
   out the heavens and all their host have I commanded."

   To man is given to command God with all this authority and power in the
   demands of God's earthly Kingdom. Heaven, with all it has, is under
   tribute to carry out the ultimate, final and glorious purposes of God.
   Why then is the time so long in carrying out these wise benedictions
   for man? Why then does sin so long reign? Why are the oath-bound
   covenant promises so long in coming to their gracious end? Sin reigns,
   Satan reigns, sighing marks the lives of many; all tears are fresh and
   full.

   Why is all this so? We have not prayed to bring the evil to an end; we
   have not prayed as we must pray. We have not met the conditions of
   prayer.

   Ask of Me. Ask of God. We have not rested on prayer. We have not made
   prayer the sole condition. There has been violation of the primary
   condition of prayer. We have not prayed aright. We have not prayed at
   all. God is willing to give, but we are slow to ask. The Son, through
   His saints, is ever praying and God the Father is ever answering.

   Ask of Me. In the invitation is conveyed the assurance of answer; the
   shout of victory is there and may be heard by the listening ear. The
   Father holds the authority and power in His hands. How easy is the
   condition, and yet how long are we in fulfilling the conditions!
   Nations are in bondage; the uttermost parts of the earth are still
   unpossessed. The earth groans; the world is still in bondage; Satan and
   evil hold sway.

   The Father holds Himself in the attitude of Giver, Ask of Me, and that
   petition to God the Father empowers all agencies, inspires all
   movements. The Gospel is Divinely inspired. Back of all its
   inspirations is prayer. Ask of Me lies back of all movements. Standing
   as the endowment of the enthroned Christ is the oath-bound covenant of
   the Father, "Ask of Me, and I will give thee the nations for thine
   inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession."
   "And men shall pray to Him continually."

   Ever are the prayers of holy men streaming up to God as fragrant as the
   richest incense. And God in many ways is speaking to us, declaring his
   wealth and our impoverishment. "I am the Maker of all things; the
   wealth and glory are Mine. Command ye Me."

   We can do all things by God's aid, and can have the whole of His aid by
   asking. The Gospel, in its success and power, depends on our ability to
   pray. The dispensations of God depend on man's ability to pray. We can
   have all that God has. Command ye Me. This is no figment of the
   imagination, no idle dream, no vain fancy. The life of the Church is
   the highest life. Its office is to pray. Its prayer life is the highest
   life, the most odorous, the most conspicuous.

   The Book of Revelation says nothing about prayer as a great duty, a
   hallowed service, but much about prayer in its aggregated force and
   energies. It is the prayer force ever living and ever praying; it is
   all saints' prayers going out as a mighty, living energy while the lips
   that uttered the words are stilled and sealed in death, while the
   living church has an energy of faith to inherit the forces of all the
   past praying and make it deathless.

   The statement by the Baptist philospher, John Foster, contains the
   purest philosophy and the simple truth of God, for God has no force and
   demands no conditions but prayer. "More and better praying will bring
   the surest and readiest triumph to God's cause; feeble, formal,
   listless praying brings decay and death. The Church has its
   sheet-anchor in the closet; its magazine stores are there."

   "I am convinced," Foster continues, "that every man who amidst his
   serious projects is apprized of his dependence upon God as completely
   as that dependence is a fact, will be impelled to pray and anxious to
   induce his serious friends to pray almost every hour. He will not
   without it promise himself any noble success any more than a mariner
   would expect to reach a distant coast by having his sails spread in a
   stagnation of air.

   "I have intimated my fear that it is visionary to expect an unusual
   success in the human administration of religion unless there are
   unusual omens: now a most emphatical spirit of prayer would be such an
   omen; and the individual who should determine to try its last possible
   efficacy might probably find himself becoming a much more prevailing
   agent in his little sphere. And if the whole, or the greater number of
   the disciples of Christianity were with an earnest and unalterable
   resolution of each to combine that heaven should not withhold one
   single influence which the very utmost effort of conspiring and
   persevering supplication would obtain, it would be a sign that a
   revolution of the world was at hand."

   Edward Payson, one of God's own, says of this statement of Foster,
   "Very few missionaries since the apostles, probably have tried the
   experiment. He who shall make the first trial will, I believe, effect
   wonders. Nothing that I could write, nothing that an angel could write,
   would be necessary to him who should make this trial.

   "One of the principal results of the little experience which I have had
   as a Christian minister is a conviction that religion consists very
   much in giving God that place in our views and feelings which He
   actually fills in the universe. We know that in the universe He is all
   in all. So far as He is constantly all in all to us, so far as we
   comply with the Psalmist's charge to his soul, "My soul, wait thou only
   upon God;" so far, I apprehend, have we advanced towards perfection. It
   is comparatively easy to wait upon God; but to wait upon Him only--to
   feel, so far as our strength, happiness, and usefulness are concerned,
   as if all creatures and second causes were annihilated, and we were
   alone in the universe with God, is, I suspect, a difficult and rare
   attainment. At least, I am sure it is one which I am very far from
   having made. In proportion as we make this attainment we shall find
   everything easy; for we shall become, emphatically, men of prayer; and
   we may say of prayer as Solomon says of money, that it answereth all
   things."

   This same John Foster said, when approaching death: "I never prayed
   more earnestly nor probably with such faithful frequency. "Pray without
   ceasing" has been the sentence repeating itself in the silent thought,
   and I am sure it must be my practice till the last conscious hour of
   life. Oh, why not throughout that long, indolent, inanimate
   half-century past?"

   And yet this is the way in which we all act about prayer. Conscious as
   we are of its importance, of its vital importance, we yet let the hours
   pass away as a blank and can only lament in death the irremediable
   loss.

   When we calmly reflect upon the fact that the progress of our Lord's
   Kingdom is dependent upon prayer, it is sad to think that we give so
   little time to the holy exercise. Everything depends upon prayer, and
   yet we neglect it not only to our own spiritual hurt but also to the
   delay and injury of our Lord's cause upon the earth. The forces of good
   and evil are contending for the world. If we would, we could add to the
   conquering power of the army of righteousness, and yet our lips are
   sealed, our hands hang listlessly by our side, and we jeopardise the
   very cause in which we profess to be deeply interested by holding back
   from the prayer chamber.

   Prayer is the one prime, eternal condition by which the Father is
   pledged to put the Son in possession of the world. Christ prays through
   His people. Had there been importunate, universal and continuous prayer
   by God's people, long ere this the earth had been possessed for Christ.
   The delay is not to be accounted for by the inveterate obstacles, but
   by the lack of the right asking. We do more of everything else than of
   praying. As poor as our giving is, our contributions of money exceed
   our offerings of prayer. Perhaps in the average congregation fifty aid
   in paying, where one saintly, ardent soul shuts itself up with God and
   wrestles for the deliverance of the heathen world. Official praying on
   set or state occasions counts for nothing in this estimate. We
   emphasise other things more than we do the necessity of prayer.

   We are saying prayers after an orderly way, but we have not the world
   in the grasp of our faith. We are not praying after the order that
   moves God and brings all Divine influences to help us. The world needs
   more true praying to save it from the reign and ruin of Satan.

   We do not pray as Elijah prayed. John Foster puts the whole matter to a
   practical point. "When the Church of God," he says, "is aroused to its
   obligation and duties and right faith to claim what Christ has
   promised--"all things whatsoever"--a revolution will take place."

   But not all praying is praying. The driving power, the conquering force
   in God's cause is God Himself. "Call upon Me and I will answer thee and
   show thee great and mighty things which thou knowest not," is God's
   challenge to prayer. Prayer puts God in full force into God's work.
   "Ask of Me things to come, concerning My sons, and concerning the work
   of My hands command ye Me"--God's carte blanche to prayer. Faith is
   only omnipotent when on its knees, and its outstretched hands take hold
   of God, then it draws to the utmost of God's capacity; for only a
   praying faith can get God's "all things whatsoever." Wonderful lessons
   are the Syrophenician woman, the importunate widow, and the friend at
   midnight, of what dauntless prayer can do in mastering or defying
   conditions, in changing defeat into victory and triumphing in the
   regions of despair. Oneness with Christ, the acme of spiritual
   attainment, is glorious in all things; most glorious in that we can
   then "ask what we will and it shall be done unto us." Prayer in Jesus'
   name puts the crowning crown on God, because it glorifies Him through
   the Son and pledges the Son to give to men "whatsoever and anything"
   they shall ask.

   In the New Testament the marvellous prayer of the Old Testament is put
   to the front that it may provoke and stimulate our praying, and it is
   preceded with a declaration, the dynamic energy of which we can
   scarcely translate. "The supplication of a righteous man availeth much.
   Elijah was a man of like passions with us, and he prayed earnestly that
   it might not rain, and it rained not on the earth by the space of three
   years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain,
   and the earth brought forth her fruit."

   Our paucity in results, the cause of all leanness, is solved by the
   Apostle James--"Ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask and receive
   not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may spend it on your pleasures."

   That is the whole truth in a nutshell.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                       IV

   The potency of prayer hath subdued the strength of fire; it had bridled
   the rage of lions, hushed the anarchy to rest, extinguished wars,
   appeased the elements, expelled demons, burst the chains of death,
   expanded the gates of heaven, assuaged diseases, repelled frauds,
   rescued cities from destruction, stayed the sun in its course, and
   arrested the progress of the thunderbolt. Prayer is an all-efficient
   panoply, a treasure undiminished, a mine which is never exhausted, a
   sky unobscured by clouds, a heaven unruffled by the storm. It is the
   root, the fountain, the mother of a thousand blessings.--Chrysostom

   The prayers of holy men appease God's wrath, drive away temptations,
   resist and overcome the devil, procure the ministry and service of
   angels, rescind the decrees of God. Prayer cures sickness and obtains
   pardon; it arrests the sun in its course and stays the wheels of the
   chariot of the moon; it rules over all gods and opens and shuts the
   storehouses of rain, it unlocks the cabinet of the womb and quenches
   the violence of fire; it stops the mouths of lions and reconciles our
   suffering and weak faculties with the violence of torment and violence
   of persecution; it pleases God and supplies all our need.--Jeremy
   Taylor

   More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. wherefore,

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

   Perfect prayer is only another name for love.--Fenelon

   It was said of the late C. H. Spurgeon, that he glided from laughter to
   prayer with the naturalness of one who lived in both elements. With him
   the habit of prayer was free and unfettered. His life was not divided
   into compartments, the one shut off from the other with a rigid
   exclusiveness that barred all intercommunication. He lived in constant
   fellowship with his Father in Heaven. He was ever in touch with God,
   and thus it was as natural for him to pray as it was for him to
   breathe.

   "What a fine time we have had; let us thank God for it," he said to a
   friend on one occasion, when, out under the blue sky and wrapped in
   glorious sunshine, they had enjoyed a holiday with the unfettered
   enthusiasm of schoolboys. Prayer sprang as spontaneously to his lips as
   did ordinary speech, and never was there the slightest incongruity in
   his approach to the Divine throne straight from any scene in which he
   might be taking part.

   That is the attitude with regard to prayer that ought to mark every
   child of God. There are, and there ought to be, stated seasons of
   communication with God when, everything else shut out, we come into His
   presence to talk to Him and to let Him speak to us; and out of such
   seasons springs that beautiful habit of prayer that weaves a golden
   bond between earth and heaven. Without such stated seasons the habit of
   prayer can never be formed; without them there is no nourishment for
   the spiritual life. By means of them the soul is lifted into a new
   atmosphere--the atmosphere of the heavenly city, in which it is easy to
   open the heart to God and to speak with Him as friend speaks with
   friend.

   Thus, in every circumstance of life, prayer is the most natural
   out-pouring of the soul, the unhindered turning to God for communion
   and direction. Whether in sorrow or in joy, in defeat or in victory, in
   health or in weakness, in calamity or in success, the heart leaps to
   meet with God just as a child runs to his mother's arms, ever sure that
   with her is the sympathy that meets every need.

   Dr. Adam Clarke, in his autobiography, records that when Mr. Wesley was
   returning to England by ship, considerable delay was caused by contrary
   winds. Wesley was reading, when he became aware of some confusion on
   board, and asking what was the matter, he was informed that the wind
   was contrary. "Then," was his reply, "let us go to prayer."

   After Dr. Clarke had prayed, Wesley broke out into fervent supplication
   which seemed to be more the offering of faith than of mere desire.
   "Almighty and everlasting God," he prayed. "Thou hast sway everywhere,
   and all things serve the purpose of Thy will, Thou holdest the winds in
   Thy fists and sittest upon the water floods, and reignest a King for
   ever. Command these winds and these waves that they obey Thee, and take
   us speedily and safely to the haven whither we would go."

   The power of this petition was felt by all. Wesley rose from his knees,
   made no remark, but took up his book and continued reading. Dr. Clarke
   went on deck, and to his surprise found the vessel under sail, standing
   on her right course. Nor did she change till she was safely at anchor.
   On the sudden and favourable change of wind, Wesley made no remark; so
   fully did he expect to be heard that he took it for granted that he was
   heard.

   That was prayer with a purpose--the definite and direct utterance of
   one who knew that he had the ear of God, and that God had the
   willingness as well as the power to grant the petition which he asked
   of Him.

   Major D. W. Whittle, in an introduction to the wonders of prayer, says
   of George Muller, of Bristol: "I met Mr. Muller in the express, the
   morning of our sailing from Quebec to Liverpool. About half-an-hour
   before the tender was to take the passengers to the ship, he asked of
   the agent if a deck chair had arrived for him from New York. He was
   answered, "No," and told that it could not possibly come in time for
   the steamer. I had with me a chair I had just purchased, and told Mr.
   Muller of the place nearby, and suggested, as but a few moments
   remained, that he had better buy one at once. His reply was, "No, my
   brother. Our Heavenly Father will send the chair from New York. It is
   one used by Mrs. Muller. I wrote ten days ago to a brother, who
   promised to see it forwarded here last week. He has not been prompt, as
   I would have desired, but I am sure our Heavenly Father will send the
   chair. Mrs. Muller is very sick on the sea, and has particularly
   desired to have this same chair, and not finding it here yesterday, we
   have made special prayer that our Heavenly Father would be pleased to
   provide it for us, and we will trust Him to do so." As this dear man of
   God went peacefully on board, running the risk of Mrs. Muller making
   the trip without a chair, when, for a couple of dollars, she could have
   been provided for, I confess I feared Mr. Muller was carrying his faith
   principles too far and not acting wisely. I was kept at the express
   office ten minutes after Mr. Muller left. Just as I started to hurry to
   the wharf, a team drove up the street, and on top of a load just
   arrived front New York was Mr. Muller's chair. It was sent at once to
   the tender and placed in my hands to take to Mr. Muller, just as the
   boat was leaving the dock (the Lord having a lesson for me). Mr. Muller
   took it with the happy, pleased expression of a child who has just
   received a kindness deeply appreciated, and reverently removing his hat
   and folding his hands over it, he thanked the Heavenly Father for
   sending the chair."

   One of Melancthon's correspondents writes of Luther's praying: "I
   cannot enough admire the extraordinary, cheerfulness, constancy, faith
   and hope of the man in these trying and vexatious times. He constantly
   feeds these gracious affections by a very diligent study of the Word of
   God. Then not a day passes in which he does not employ in prayer at
   least three of his very best hours. Once I happened to hear him at
   prayer. Gracious God! What spirit and what faith is there in his
   expressions! He petitions God with as much reverence as if he was in
   the divine presence, and yet with as firm a hope and confidence as he
   would address a father or a friend. "I know," said he, "Thou art our
   Father and our God; and therefore I am sure Thou wilt bring to naught
   the persecutors of Thy children. For shouldest Thou fail to do this
   Thine own cause, being connected with ours, would be endangered. It is
   entirely thine own concern. We, by Thy providence, have been compelled
   to take a part. Thou therefore wilt be our defence." Whilst I was
   listening to Luther praying in this manner, at a distance, my soul
   seemed on fire within me, to hear the man address God so like a friend,
   yet with so much gravity and reverence; and also to hear him, in the
   course of his prayer, insisting on the promises contained in the
   Psalms, as if he were sure his petitions would be granted."

   Of William Bramwell, a noted Methodist preacher in England, wonderful
   for his zeal and prayer, the following is related by a sergeant major.
   "In July, 1811, our regiment was ordered for Spain, then the seat of a
   protracted and sanguinary war. My mind was painfully exercised with the
   thoughts of leaving my dear wife and four helpless children in a
   strange country, unprotected and unprovided for. Mr. Bramwell felt a
   lively interest in our situation, and his sympathising spirit seemed to
   drink in all the agonised feelings of my tender wife. He supplicated
   the throne of grace day and night in our behalf. My wife and I spent
   the evening previous to our march at a friend's house, in company with
   Mr. Bramwell, who sat in a very pensive mood, and appeared to be in a
   spiritual struggle all the time. After supper, he suddenly pulled his
   hand out of his bosom, laid it on my knee, and said: "Brother Riley,
   mark what I am about to say! You are not to go to Spain. Remember what
   I tell you, you are not; for I have been wrestling with God on your
   behalf, and when my Heavenly Father condescends in mercy to bless me
   with power to lay hold on Himself, I do not easily let Him go; no, not
   until I am favoured with an answer. Therefore you may depend upon it
   that the next time I hear from you, you will be settled in quarters."
   This came to pass exactly as he said. The next day the order for going
   to Spain was countermanded."

   These men prayed with a purpose. To them God was not far away, in some
   inaccessible region, but near at hand, ever ready to listen to the call
   of His children. There was no barrier between. They were on terms of
   perfect intimacy, if one may use such a phrase in relation to man and
   his Maker. No cloud obscured the face of the Father from His trusting
   child, who could look up into the Divine countenance and pour out the
   longings of his heart. And that is the type of prayer which God never
   fails to hear. He knows that it comes from a heart at one with His own;
   from one who is entirely yielded to the heavenly plan, and so He bends
   His ear and gives to the pleading child the assurance that his petition
   has been heard and answered.

   Have we not all had some such experience when with set and undeviating
   purpose we have approached the face of our Father? In an agony of soul
   we have sought refuge from the oppression of the world in the anteroom
   of heaven; the waves of despair seemed to threaten destruction, and as
   no way of escape was visible anywhere, we fell back, like the disciples
   of old, upon the power of our Lord, crying to Him to save us lest we
   perish. And then in the twinkling of an eye, the thing was done. The
   billows sank into a calm; the howling wind died down at the Divine
   command; the agony of the soul passed into a restful peace as over the
   whole being there crept the consciousness of the Divine presence,
   bringing with it the assurance of answered prayer and sweet
   deliverance.

   "I tell the Lord my troubles and difficulties, and wait for Him to give
   me the answers to them," says one man of God. "And it is wonderful how
   a matter that looked very dark will in prayer become clear as crystal
   by the help of God's Spirit. I think Christians fail so often to get
   answers to their prayers because they do not wait long enough on God.
   They just drop down and say a few words, and then jump up and forget it
   and expect God to answer them. Such praying always reminds me of the
   small boy ringing his neighbour's door-bell, and then running away as
   fast as he can go."

   When we acquire the habit of prayer we enter into a new atmosphere. "Do
   you expect to go to heaven?" asked someone of a devout Scotsman. "Why,
   man, I live there," was the quaint and unexpected reply. It was a pithy
   statement of a great truth, for all the way to heaven is heaven begun
   to the Christian who walks near enough to God to hear the secrets He
   has to impart.

   This attitude is beautifully illustrated in a story of Horace Bushnell,
   told by Dr. Parkes Cadman. Bushnell was found to be suffering from an
   incurable disease. One evening the Rev. Joseph Twichell visited him,
   and, as they sat together under the starry sky, Bushnell said: "One of
   us ought to pray." Twichell asked Bushnell to do so, and Bushnell began
   his prayer; burying his face in the earth, he poured out his heart
   until, said Twichell, in recalling the incident, "I was afraid to
   stretch out my hand in the darkness lest I should touch God."

   To have God thus near is to enter the holy of holies--to breathe the
   fragrance of the heavenly air, to walk in Eden's delightful gardens.
   Nothing but prayer can bring God and man into this happy communion.
   That was the experience of Samuel Rutherford, just as it is the
   experience of every one who passes through the same gateway. When this
   saint of God was confined in jail at one time for conscience sake, he
   enjoyed in a rare degree the Divine companionship, recording in his
   diary that Jesus entered his cell, and that at His coming "every stone
   flashed like a ruby."

   Many others have borne witness to the same sweet fellowship, when
   prayer had become the one habit of life that meant more than anything
   else to them. David Livingstone lived in the realm of prayer and knew
   its gracious influence. It was his habit every birthday to write a
   prayer, and on the next to the last birthday of all, this was his
   prayer: "O Divine one, I have not loved Thee earnestly, deeply,
   sincerely enough. Grant, I pray Thee, that before this year is ended I
   may have finished my task." It was just on the threshold of the year
   that followed that his faithful men, as they looked into the hut of
   Ilala, while the rain dripped from the eaves, saw their master on his
   knees beside his bed in an attitude of prayer. He had died on his knees
   in prayer.

   Stonewall Jackson was a man of prayer. Said he: "I have so fixed the
   habit in my mind that I never raise a glass of water to my lips without
   asking God's blessing, never seal a letter without putting a word of
   prayer under the seal, never take a letter from the post without a
   brief sending of my thoughts heavenward, never change my classes in the
   lecture-room without a--minute's petition for the cadets who go out and
   for those who come in."

   James Gilmour, the pioneer missionary to Mongolia, was a man of prayer.
   He had a habit in his writing of never using a blotter. He made a rule
   when he got to the bottom of any page to wait until the ink dried and
   spend the time in prayer.

   In this way their whole being was saturated with the Divine, and they
   became the reflection of the heavenly fragrance and glory. Walking with
   God down the avenues of prayer we acquire something of His likeness,
   and unconsciously we become witnesses to others of His beauty and His
   grace. Professor James, in his famous work, "Varieties of Religious
   Experience," tells of a man of forty-nine who said: "God is more real
   to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel His presence
   positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with His laws as
   written in my body and mind. I feel Him in the sunshine or rain; and
   all mingled with a delicious restfulness most nearly describes my
   feelings. I talk to Him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our
   communion is delightful. He answers me again and again, often in words
   so clearly spoken that it seems my outer ear must have carried the
   tone, but generally in strong mental impressions. Usually a text of
   Scripture, unfolding some new view of Him and His love for me, and care
   for my safety ... That He is mine and I am His never leaves me; it is
   an abiding joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a
   shoreless, trackless waste."

   Equally notable is the testimony of Sir Thomas Browne, the beloved
   physician who lived at Norwich in 1605, and was the author of a very
   remarkable book of wide circulation, "Religio Medici." In spite of the
   fact that England was passing through a period of national convulsion
   and political excitement, he found comfort and strength in prayer. "I
   have resolved," he wrote in a journal found among his private papers
   after his death, "to pray more and pray always, to pray in all places
   where quietness inviteth, in the house, on the highway and on the
   street; and to know no street or passage in this city that may not
   witness that I have not forgotten God." And he adds: "I purpose to take
   occasion of praying upon the sight of any church which I may pass, that
   God may be worshipped there in spirit, and that souls may be saved
   there; to pray daily for my sick patients and for the patients of other
   physicians; at my entrance into any home to say, "May the peace of God
   abide here"; after hearing a sermon, to pray for a blessing on God's
   truth, and upon the messenger; upon the sight of a beautiful person to
   bless God for His creatures, to pray for the beauty of such an one's
   soul, that God may enrich her with inward graces, and that the outward
   and inward may correspond; upon the sight of a deformed person, to pray
   God to give them wholeness of soul, and by and by to give them the
   beauty of the resurrection."

   What an illustration of the praying spirit! Such an attitude represents
   prayer without ceasing, reveals the habit of prayer in its unceasing
   supplication, in its uninterrupted communion, in its constant
   intercession. What an illustration, too, of purpose in prayer! Of how
   many of us can it be said that as we pass people in the street we pray
   for them, or that as we enter a home or a church we remember the
   inmates or the congregation in prayer to God?

   The explanation of our thoughtlessness or forgetfulness lies in the
   fact that prayer with so many of us is simply a form of selfishness; it
   means asking for something for ourselves t that and nothing more.

   And from such an attitude we need to pray to be delivered.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                       V

   The prayer of faith is the only power in the universe to which the
   great Jehovah yields. Prayer is the sovereign remedy.--Robert Hall

   The Church, intent on the acquisition of temporal power, had well nigh
   abandoned its spiritual duties, and its empire, which rested on
   spiritual foundations, was crumbling with their decay, and threatened
   to pass away like an unsubstantial vision.--Lea's Inquisition

   Are we praying as Christ did? Do we abide in Him? Are our pleas and
   spirit the overflow of His spirit and pleas? Does love rule the
   spirit--perfect love?

   These questions must be considered as proper and apposite at a time
   like the present. We do fear that we are doing more of other things
   than prayer. This is not a praying age; it is an age of great activity,
   of great movements, but one in which the tendency is very strong to
   stress the seen and the material and to neglect and discount the unseen
   and the spiritual. Prayer is the greatest of all forces, because it
   honors God and brings Him into active aid.

   There can be no substitute, no rival for prayer; it stands alone as the
   great spiritual force, and this force must be imminent and acting. It
   cannot be dispensed with during one generation, nor held in abeyance
   for the advance of any great movement--it must be continuous and
   particular, always, everywhere, and in everything. We cannot run our
   spiritual operations on the prayers of the past generation. Many
   persons believe in the efficacy of prayer, but not many pray. Prayer is
   the easiest and hardest of all things; the simplest and the sublimest;
   the weakest and the most powerful; its results lie outside the range of
   human possibilities--they are limited only by the omnipotence of God.

   Few Christians have anything but a vague idea of the power of prayer;
   fewer still have any experience of that power. The Church seems almost
   wholly unaware of the power God puts into her hand; this spiritual
   carte blanche on the infinite resources of God's wisdom and power is
   rarely, if ever, used--never used to the full measure of honouring God.
   It is astounding how poor the use, how little the benefits. Prayer is
   our most formidable weapon, but the one in which we are the least
   skilled, the most averse to its use. We do everything else for the
   heathen save the thing God wants us to do; the only thing which does
   any good--makes all else we do efficient.

   To graduate in the school of prayer is to master the whole course of a
   religious life. The first and last stages of holy living are crowned
   with praying. It is a life trade. The hindrances of prayer are the
   hindrances in a holy life. The conditions of praying are the conditions
   of righteousness, holiness and salvation. A cobbler in the trade of
   praying is a bungler in the trade of salvation.

   Prayer is a trade to be learned. We must be apprentices and serve our
   time at it. Painstaking care, much thought, practice and labour are
   required to be a skillful tradesman in praying. Practice in this, as
   well as in all other trades, makes perfect. Toiling hands and hearts
   only make proficients in this heavenly trade.

   In spite of the benefits and blessings which flow from communion with
   God, the sad confession must be made that we are not praying much. A
   very small number comparatively lead in prayer at the meetings. Fewer
   still pray in their families. Fewer still are in the habit of praying
   regularly in their closets. Meetings specially for prayer are as rare
   as frost in June. In many churches there is neither the name nor the
   semblance of a prayer meeting. In the town and city churches the prayer
   meeting in name is not a prayer meeting in fact. A sermon or a lecture
   is the main feature. Prayer is the nominal attachment.

   Our people are not essentially a praying people. That is evident by
   their lives.

   Prayer and a holy life are one. They mutually act and react. Neither
   can survive alone. The absence of the one is the absence of the other.
   The monk depraved prayer, substituted superstition for praying,
   mummeries and routine for a holy life. We are in danger of substituting
   churchly work and a ceaseless round of showy activities for prayer and
   holy living. A holy life does not live in the closet, but it cannot
   live without the closet. If, by any chance, a prayer chamber should be
   established without a holy life, it would be a chamber without the
   presence of God in it.

   Put the saints everywhere to praying, is the burden of the apostolic
   effort and the key note of apostolic success. Jesus Christ had striven
   to do this in the days of His personal ministry. He was moved by
   infinite compassion at the ripened fields of earth perishing for lack
   of labourers, and pausing in His own praying, He tries to awaken the
   sleeping sensibilities of His disciples to the duty of prayer, as He
   charges them: "Pray ye the Lord of the harvest that He will send forth
   labourers into His harvest." And He spake a parable to them to this
   end, that men ought always to pray.

   Only glimpses of this great importance of prayer could the apostles get
   before Pentecost. But the Spirit coming and filling on Pentecost
   elevated prayer to its vital and all-commanding position in the Gospel
   of Christ. The call now of prayer to every saint is the Spirit's
   loudest and most exigent call. Sainthood's piety is made, refined,
   perfected, by prayer. The Gospel moves with slow and timid pace when
   the saints are not at their prayers early and late and long.

   Where are the Christlike leaders who can teach the modern saints how to
   pray and put them at it? Do our leaders know we are raising up a
   prayerless set of saints? Where are the apostolic leaders who can put
   God's people to praying? Let them come to the front and do the work,
   and it will be the greatest work that can be done. An increase of
   educational facilities and a great increase of money force will be the
   direst curse to religion if they are not sanctified by more and better
   praying than we are doing.

   More praying will not come as a matter of Course. The campaign for the
   twentieth or thirtieth century will not help our praying, but hinder if
   we are not careful. Nothing but a specific effort from a praying
   leadership will avail. None but praying leaders can have praying
   followers. Praying apostles will beget praying saints. A praying pulpit
   will beget praying pews. We do greatly need somebody who can set the
   saints to this business of praying. We are a generation of non-praying
   saints. Non-praying saints are a beggarly gang of saints, who have
   neither the ardour nor the beauty, nor the power of saints. Who will
   restore this branch? The greatest will he be of reformers and apostles,
   who can set the Church to praying.

   Holy men have, in the past, changed the whole force of affairs,
   revolutionised character and country by prayer. And such achievements
   are still possible to us. The power is only wanting to be used. Prayer
   is but the expression of faith.

   Time would fail to tell of the mighty things wrought by prayer, for by
   it holy ones have "subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained
   promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire,
   escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed
   valiant in fight, turned to fight the armies of the aliens, women
   received their dead raised to life

   Prayer honours God; it dishonours self. It is man's plea of weakness,
   ignorance, want. A plea which heaven cannot disregard. God delights to
   have us pray.

   Prayer is not the foe to work, it does not paralyse activity. It works
   mightily; prayer itself is the greatest work. It springs activity,
   stimulates desire and effort. Prayer is not an opiate but a tonic, it
   does not lull to sleep but arouses anew for action. The lazy man does
   not, will not, cannot pray, for prayer demands energy. Paul calls it a
   striving, an agony. With Jacob it was a wrestling; with the
   Syrophenician women it was a struggle which called into play all the
   higher qualities of the soul, and which demanded great force to meet.

   The closet is not an asylum for the indolent and worthless Christian.
   It is not a nursery where none but babes belong. It is the battlefield
   of the Church; its citadel; the scene of heroic and unearthly
   conflicts. The closet is the base of supplies for the Christian and the
   Church. Cut off from it there is nothing left but retreat and disaster.
   The energy for work, the mastery over self, the deliverance from fear,
   all spiritual results and graces, are much advanced by prayer. The
   difference between the strength, the experience, the holiness of
   Christians is found in the contrast in their praying.

   Few, short, feeble prayers, always betoken a low spiritual condition.
   Men ought to pray much and apply themselves to it with energy and
   perseverance. Eminent Christians have been eminent in prayer. The deep
   things of God are learned nowhere else. Great things for God are done
   by great prayers. He who prays much, studies much, loves much, works
   much, does much for God and humanity. The execution of the Gospel, the
   vigour of faith, the maturity and excellence of spiritual graces wait
   on prayer.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                       VI

   "Nothing is impossible to industry, "said one of the seven sages of
   Greece. Let us change the word industry for persevering prayer, and the
   motto will be more Christian and more worthy of universal adoption. I
   am persuaded that we are all more deficient in a spirit of prayer than
   in any other grace. God loves importunate prayer so much that He will
   not give us much blessing without it. And the reason that He loves such
   prayer is that He loves us and knows that it is a necessary preparation
   for our receiving the richest blessings which He is waiting and longing
   to bestow.

   I never prayed sincerely and earnestly for anything but it came at some
   time--no matter at how distant a day, somehow, in some shape, probably
   the last I would have devised, it came.--Adoniram Judson

   It is good, I find, to persevere in attempts to pray. If I cannot pray
   with perseverance or continue long in my address to the Divine Being, I
   have found that the more I do in secret prayer the more I have delight
   to do, and have enjoyed more of the spirit of prayer; and frequently I
   have found the contrary, when by journeying or otherwise, I have been
   deprived of retirement.--David Brainerd

   Christ puts importunity as a distinguishing characteristic of true
   praying. We must not only pray, but we must pray with great urgency,
   with intentness and with repetition. We must not only pray, but we must
   pray again and again. We must not get tired of praying. We must be
   thoroughly in earnest, deeply concerned about the things for which we
   ask, for Jesus Christ made it very plain that the secret of prayer and
   its success lie in its urgency. We must press our prayers upon God.

   In a parable of exquisite pathos and simplicity, our Lord taught not
   simply that men ought to pray, but that men ought to pray with full
   heartiness, and press the matter with vigorous energy and brave hearts.

   "And He spake a parable unto them to the end that they ought always to
   pray, and not to faint; saying, There was in a city, a judge, which
   feared not God, and regarded not man: and there was a widow in that
   city; and she came oft unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary.
   And he would not for a while: but afterwards he said within himself,
   Though I fear not God, nor regard man; yet because this widow troubleth
   me, I will avenge her, lest she wear me out by her continual coming.
   And the Lord said, Hear what the unrighteous judge saith. And shall not
   God avenge His elect, which cry to Him day and night, and He is
   longsuffering over them? I say unto you, that He will avenge them
   speedily. Howbeit when the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on
   the earth?"

   This poor woman's case was a most hopeless one, but importunity brings
   hope from the realms of despair and creates success where neither
   success nor its conditions existed. There could be no stronger case, to
   show how unwearied and dauntless importunity gains its ends where
   everything else fails. The preface to this parable says: "He spake a
   parable to this end, that men ought always to pray and not to faint."
   He knew that men would soon get faint-hearted in praying, so to hearten
   us He gives this picture of the marvellous power of importunity.

   The widow, weak and helpless, is helplessness personified; bereft of
   every hope and influence which could move an unjust judge, she yet wins
   her case solely by her tireless and offensive importunity. Could the
   necessity of importunity, its power and tremendous importance in
   prayer, be pictured in deeper or more impressive colouring? It
   surmounts or removes all obstacles, overcomes every resisting force and
   gains its ends in the face of invincible hindrances. We can do nothing
   without prayer. All things can be done by importunate prayer.

   That is the teaching of Jesus Christ.

   Another parable spoken by Jesus enforces the same great truth. A man at
   midnight goes to his friend for a loan of bread. His pleas are strong,
   based on friendship and the embarrassing and exacting demands of
   necessity, but these all fail. He gets no bread, but he stays and
   presses, and waits and gains. Sheer importunity succeeds where all
   other pleas and influences had failed.

   The case of the Syrophenician woman is a parable in action. She is
   arrested in her approaches to Christ by the information that He will
   not see anyone. She is denied His presence, and then in His presence is
   treated with seeming indifference, with the chill of silence and
   unconcern: she presses and approaches, the pressure and approach are
   repulsed by the stern and crushing statement that He is not sent to her
   kith or kind, that she is reprobated from His mission and power. She is
   humiliated by being called a dog. Yet she accepts all, overcomes all,
   wins all by her humble, dauntless, invincible importunity. The Son of
   God, pleased, surprised, overpowered by her unconquerable importunity,
   says to her: "O, woman, great is thy faith; be it unto thee even as
   thou wilt." Jesus Christ surrenders Himself to the importunity of a
   great faith. "And shall not God avenge His own elect which cry day and
   night unto Him, though He bear long with them?"

   Jesus Christ puts ability to importune as one of the elements of
   prayer, one of the main conditions of prayer. The prayer of the
   Syrophenician woman is an exhibition of the matchless power of
   importunity, of a conflict more real and involving more of vital
   energy, endurance, and all the higher elements than was ever
   illustrated in the conflicts of Isthmia or Olympia.

   The first lessons of importunity are taught in the Sermon on the
   Mount--"Ask, and it shall be given; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and
   it shall be opened." These are steps of advance--"For every one that
   asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that
   knocketh, it shall be opened."

   Without continuance the prayer may go unanswered. Importunity is made
   up of the ability to hold on, to press on, to wait with unrelaxed and
   unrelaxable grasp, restless desire and restful patience. Importunate
   prayer is not an incident, but the main thing, not a performance but a
   passion, not a need but a necessity.

   Prayer in its highest form and grandest success assumes the attitude of
   a wrestler with God. It is the contest, trial and victory of faith; a
   victory not secured from an enemy, but from Him who tries our faith
   that He may enlarge it: that tests our strength to make us stronger.
   Few things give such quickened and permanent vigour to the soul as a
   long exhaustive season of importunate prayer. It makes an experience,
   an epoch, a new calendar for the spirit, a new life to religion, a
   soldierly training. The Bible never wearies in its pressure and
   illustration of the fact that the highest spiritual good is secured as
   the return of the outgoing of the highest form of spiritual effort.
   There is neither encouragement nor room in Bible religion for feeble
   desires, listless efforts, lazy attitudes; all must be strenuous,
   urgent, ardent. Inflamed desires, impassioned, unwearied insistence
   delight heaven. God would have His children incorrigibly in earnest and
   persistently bold in their efforts. Heaven is too busy to listen to
   half-hearted prayers or to respond to pop-calls.

   Our whole being must be in our praying; like John Knox, we must say and
   feel, "Give me Scotland, or I die." Our experience and revelations of
   God are born of our costly sacrifice, our costly conflicts, our costly
   praying. The wrestling, all night praying, of Jacob made an era never
   to be forgotten in Jacob's life, brought God to the rescue, changed
   Esau's attitude and conduct, changed Jacob's character, saved and
   affected his life and entered into the habits of a nation.

   Our seasons of importunate prayer cut themselves like the print of a
   diamond, into our hardest places, and mark with ineffaceable traces our
   characters. They are the salient periods of our lives! The memorial
   stones which endure and to which we turn.

   Importunity, it may be repeated, is a condition of prayer. We are to
   press the matter, not with vain repetitions, but with urgent
   repetitions. We repeat, not to count the times, but to gain the prayer.
   We cannot quit praying because heart and soul are in it. We pray "with
   all perseverance." We hang to our prayers because by them we live. We
   press our pleas because we must have them or die. Christ gives us two
   most expressive parables to emphasise the necessity of importunity in
   praying. Perhaps Abraham lost Sodom by failing to press to the utmost
   his privilege of praying. Joash, we know, lost because he stayed his
   smiting.

   Perseverance counts much with God as well as with man. If Elijah had
   ceased at his first petition the heavens would have scarcely yielded
   their rain to his feeble praying. If Jacob had quit praying at decent
   bedtime he would scarcely have survived the next day's meeting with
   Esau. If the Syrophenician woman had allowed her faith to faint by
   silence, humiliation, repulse, or stop mid-way its struggles, her
   grief-stricken home would never have been brightened by the healing of
   her daughter.

   Pray and never faint, is the motto Christ gives us for praying. It is
   the test of our faith, and the severer the trial and the longer the
   waiting, the more glorious the results.

   The benefits and necessity of importunity are taught by Old Testament
   saints. Praying men must be strong in hope, and faith, and prayer. They
   must know how to wait and to press, to wait on God and be in earnest in
   our approaches to Him.

   Abraham has left us an example of importunate intercession in his
   passionate pleading with God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, and if,
   as already indicated, he had not ceased in his asking, perhaps God
   would not have ceased in His giving.

   "Abraham left off asking before God left off granting." Moses taught
   the power of importunity when he interceded for Israel forty days and
   forty nights, by fasting and prayer. And he succeeded in his
   importunity.

   Jesus, in His teaching and example, illustrated and perfected this
   principle of Old Testament pleading and waiting. How strange that the
   only Son of God, who came on a mission direct from His Father, whose
   only heaven on earth, whose only life and law were to do His Father's
   will in that mission--what a mystery that He should be under the law of
   prayer, that the blessings which came to Him were impregnated and
   purchased by prayer; stranger still that importunity in prayer was the
   process by which His wealthiest supplies from God were gained. Had He
   not prayed with importunity, no transfiguration would have been in His
   history, no mighty works had rendered Divine His career. His all-night
   praying was that which filled with compassion and power His all-day
   work. The importunate praying of His life crowned His death with its
   triumph. He learned the high lesson of submission to God's will in the
   struggles of importunate prayer before He illustrated that submission
   so sublimely on the cross.

   "Whether we like it or not," said Mr. Spurgeon, "asking is the rule of
   the kingdom." "Ask, and ye shall receive." It is a rule that never will
   be altered in anybody's case. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the. elder
   brother of the family, but God has not relaxed the rule for Him.
   Remember this text: Jehovah says to His own Son, "Ask of Me, and I will
   give Thee the heaven for Thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of
   the earth for Thy possession." If the Royal and Divine Son of God
   cannot be exempted from the rule of asking that He may have, you and I
   cannot expect the rule to be relaxed in our favour. Why should it be?
   What reason can be pleaded why we should be exempted from prayer? What
   argument can there be why we should be deprived of the privilege and
   delivered from the necessity of supplication? I can see none: can you?
   God will bless Elijah and send rain on Israel, but Elijah must pray for
   it. If the chosen nation is to prosper, Samuel must plead for it. If
   the Jews are to be delivered, Daniel must intercede. God will bless
   Paul, and the nations shall be converted through him, but Paul must
   pray. Pray he did without ceasing; his epistles show that he expected
   nothing except by asking for it. If you may have everything by asking,
   and nothing without asking, I beg you to see how absolutely vital
   prayer is, and I beseech you to abound in it."

   There is not the least doubt that much of our praying fails for lack of
   persistency. It is without the fire and strength of perseverance.
   Persistence is of the essence of true praying. It may not be always
   called into exercise, but it must be there as the reserve force. Jesus
   taught that perseverance is the essential element of prayer. Men must
   be in earnest when they kneel at God's footstool.

   Too often we get faint-hearted and quit praying at the point where we
   ought to begin. We let go at the very point where we should hold on
   strongest. Our prayers are weak because they are not impassioned by an
   unfailing and resistless will.

   God loves the importunate pleader, and sends him answers that would
   never have been granted but for the persistency that refuses to let go
   until the petition craved for is granted.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      VII

   I suspect I have been allotting habitually too little time to religious
   exercises as private devotion, religious meditation, Scripture reading,
   etc. Hence I am lean and cold and hard. God would perhaps prosper me
   more in spiritual things if I were to be more diligent in using the
   means of grace. I had better allot more time, say two hours or an hour
   and a half, to religious exercises daily, and try whether by so doing I
   cannot preserve a frame of spirit more habitually devotional, a more
   lively sense of unseen things, a warmer love to God, and a greater
   degree of hunger and thirst after righteousness, a heart less prone to
   be soiled with worldly cares, designs, passions, and apprehension and a
   real undissembled longing for heaven, its pleasures and its
   purity.--William Wilberforce

   "Men ought always to pray, and not to faint." The words are the words
   of our Lord, who not only ever sought to impress upon His followers the
   urgency and the importance of prayer, but set them an example which
   they alas have been far too slow to copy.

   The always speaks for itself. Prayer is not a meaningless function or
   duty to be crowded into the busy or the weary ends of the day, and we
   are not obeying our Lord's command when we content ourselves with a few
   minutes upon our knees in the morning rush or late at night when the
   faculties, tired with the tasks of the day, call out for rest. God is
   always within call, it is true; His ear is ever attentive to the cry of
   His child, but we can never get to know Him if we use the vehicle of
   prayer as we use the telephone--for a few words of hurried
   conversation. Intimacy requires development. We can never know God as
   it is our privilege to know Him, by brief and fragmentary and
   unconsidered repetitions of intercessions that are requests for
   personal favours and nothing more. That is not the way in which we can
   come into communication with heaven's King. "The goal of prayer is the
   ear of God," a goal that can only be reached by patient and continued
   and continuous waiting upon Him, pouring out our heart to Him and
   permitting Him to speak to us. Only by so doing can we expect to know
   Him, and as we come to know Him better we shall spend more time in His
   presence and find that presence a constant and ever-increasing delight.

   Always does not mean that we are to neglect the ordinary duties of
   life; what it means is that the soul which has come into intimate
   contact with God in the silence of the prayer-chamber is never out of
   conscious touch with the Father, that the heart is always going out to
   Him in loving communion, and that the moment the mind is released from
   the task upon which it is engaged it returns as naturally to God as the
   bird does to its nest. What a beautiful conception of prayer we get if
   we regard it in this light, if we view it as a constant fellowship, an
   unbroken audience with the King. Prayer then loses every vestige of
   dread which it may once have possessed; we regard it no longer as a
   duty which must be performed, but rather as a privilege which is to be
   enjoyed, a rare delight that is always revealing some new beauty.

   Thus, when we open our eyes in the morning, our thought instantly
   mounts heavenward. To many Christians the morning hours are the most
   precious portion of the day, because they provide the opportunity for
   the hallowed fellowship that gives the keynote to the day's programme.
   And what better introduction can there be to the never-ceasing glory
   and wonder of a new day than to spend it alone with God? It is said
   that Mr. Moody, at a time when no other place was available, kept his
   morning watch in the coal-shed, pouring out his heart to God, and
   finding in his precious Bible a true "feast of fat things."

   George Muller also combined Bible study with prayer in the quiet
   morning hours. At one time his practice was to give himself to prayer,
   after having dressed, in the morning. Then his plan underwent a change.
   As he himself put it: "I saw the most important thing I had to do was
   to give myself to the reading of the Word of God, and to meditation on
   it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned,
   reproved, instructed; and that thus, by means of the Word of God,
   whilst meditating on it, my heart might be brought into experimental
   communion with the Lord. I began, therefore, to meditate on the New
   Testament early in the morning. The first thing I did, after having
   asked in a few words for the Lord's blessing upon his precious Word,
   was to begin to meditate on the Word of God, searching as it were, into
   every verse to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of the public
   ministry of the Word, not for the sake of preaching on what I had
   meditated on, but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul. The
   result I have found to be almost invariably thus, that after a very few
   minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanksgiving, or to
   intercession, or to supplication; so that, though I did not, as it
   were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost
   immediately more or less into prayer."

   The study of the Word and prayer go together, and where we find the one
   truly practised, the other is sure to be seen in close alliance.

   But we do not pray always. That is the trouble with so many of us. We
   need to pray much more than we do and much .longer than we do.

   Robert Murray McCheyne, gifted and saintly, of whom it was said, that
   "Whether viewed as a son, a brother, a friend, or a pastor, he was the
   most faultless and attractive exhibition of the true Christian they had
   ever seen embodied in a living form," knew what it was to spend much
   time upon his knees, and he never wearied in urging upon others the joy
   and the value of holy intercession. "God's children should pray," he
   said. "They should cry day and night to Him, God hears every one of
   your cries in the busy hour of the daytime and in the lonely watches of
   the night." In every way, by preaching, by exhortation when present and
   by letters when absent, McCheyne emphasised the vital duty of prayer,
   importunate and unceasing prayer.

   In his diary we find this: "In the morning was engaged in preparing the
   head, then the heart. This has been frequently my error, and I have
   always felt the evil of it, especially in prayer. Reform it then, O
   Lord." While on his trip to the Holy Land he wrote: "For much of our
   safety I feel indebted to the prayers of my people. If the veil of the
   world's machinery were lifted off how much we would find done in answer
   to the prayers of God's children." In an ordination sermon he said to
   the preacher: "Give yourself to prayers and the ministry of the Word.
   If you do not pray, God will probably lay you aside from your ministry,
   as He did me, to teach you to pray. Remember Luther's maxim, "To have
   prayed well is to have studied well." Get your texts from God, your
   thoughts, your words. Carry the names of the little flock upon your
   breast like the High Priest. Wrestle for the unconverted. Luther spent
   his last three hours in prayer; John Welch prayed seven or eight hours
   a day. He used to keep a plaid on his bed that he might wrap himself in
   when he rose during the night. Sometimes his wife found him on the
   ground lying weeping. When she complained, he would say, "O, woman, I
   have the souls of three thousand to answer for, and I know not how it
   is with many of them." The people he exhorted and charged: "Pray for
   your pastor. Pray for his body, that he may be kept strong and spared
   many years. Pray for his soul, that he may be kept humble and holy, a
   burning and shining light. Pray for his .ministry, that it may be
   abundantly blessed, that he may be anointed to preach good tidings. Let
   there be no secret prayer without naming him before your God, no family
   prayer without carrying your pastor in your hearts to God."

   "Two things," says his biographer, "he seems never to have ceased
   from--the cultivation of personal holiness and the most anxious efforts
   to win souls." The two are the inseparable attendants on the ministry
   of prayer. Prayer fails when the desire and effort for personal
   holiness fail. No person is a soul-winner who is not an adept in the
   ministry of prayer. "It is the duty of ministers," says this holy man,
   "to begin the reformation of religion and manner with themselves,
   families, etc., with confession of past sin, earnest prayer for
   direction, grace and full purpose of heart." He begins with himself
   under the head of "Reformation in Secret Prayer," and he resolves:

   "I ought not to omit any of the parts of prayer--confession, adoration,
   thanksgiving, petition and intercession. There is a fearful tendency to
   omit confession proceeding from low views of God and His law, slight
   views of my heart, and the sin of my past life. This must be resisted.
   There is a constant tendency to omit adoration when I forget to Whom I
   am speaking, when I rush heedlessly into the presence of Jehovah
   without thought of His awful name and character. When I have little
   eyesight for his glory, and little admiration of His wonders, I have
   the native tendency of the heart to omit giving thanks, and yet it is
   specially commanded. Often when the heart is dead to the salvation of
   others I omit intercession, and yet it especially is the spirit of the
   great Advocate Who has the name of Israel on His heart. I ought to pray
   before seeing anyone. Often when I sleep long, or meet with others
   early, and then have family prayer and breakfast and forenoon callers,
   it is eleven or twelve o--clock before I begin secret prayer. This is a
   wretched system; it is unscriptural. Christ rose before day and went
   into a solitary place. David says, "Early will I seek Thee; Thou shalt
   early hear my voice." Mary Magdalene came to the sepulchre while it was
   yet dark. Family prayer loses much of its power and sweetness; and I
   can do no good to those who come to seek from me. The conscience feels
   guilty, the soul unfed, the lamp not trimmed. I feel it is far better
   to begin with God, to see His face first, to get my soul near Him
   before it is near another. "When I awake I am still with Thee." If I
   have slept too long, or I am going an early journey, or my time is in
   any way shortened, it is best to dress hurriedly and to have a few
   minutes alone with God than to give up all for lost. But in general it
   is best to have at least one hour alone with God before engaging in
   anything else. I ought to spend the best hours of the day in communion
   with God. When I awake in the night, I ought to rise and pray as David
   and John Welch."

   McCheyne believed in being always in prayer, and his fruitful life,
   short though that life was, affords an illustration of the power that
   comes from long and frequent visits to the secret place where we keep
   tryst with our Lord.

   Men of McCheyne's stamp are needed today--praying men, who know how to
   give themselves to the greatest task demanding their time and their
   attention; men who can give their whole heart to the holy task of
   intercession, men who can pray through. God's cause is committed to
   men; God commits Himself to men. Praying men are the vicegerents of
   God; they do His work and carry out His plans.

   We are obliged to pray if we be citizens of God's Kingdom.
   Prayerlessness is expatriation, or worse, from God's Kingdom. It is
   outlawry, a high crime, a constitutional breach. The Christian who
   relegates prayer to a subordinate place in his life soon loses whatever
   spiritual zeal he may have once possessed, and the Church that makes
   little of prayer cannot maintain vital piety, and is powerless to
   advance the Gospel. The Gospel cannot live, fight, conquer without
   prayer--prayer unceasing, instant and ardent.

   Little prayer is the characteristic of a backslidden age and of a
   backslidden Church. Whenever there is little praying in the pulpit or
   in the pew, spiritual bankruptcy is imminent and inevitable.

   The cause of God has no commercial age, no cultured age, no age of
   education, no age of money. But it has one golden age, and that is the
   age of prayer. When its leaders are men of prayer, when prayer is the
   prevailing element of worship, like the incense giving continual
   fragrance to its service, then the cause of God will be triumphant.

   Better praying and more of it, that is what we need. We need holier
   men, and more of them, holier women, and more of them to pray--women
   like Hannah, who, out of their greatest griefs and temptations brewed
   their greatest prayers. Through prayer Hannah found her relief.
   Everywhere the Church was backslidden and apostate, her foes were
   victorious. Hannah gave herself to prayer, and in sorrow she multiplied
   her praying. She saw a great revival born of her praying. When the
   whole nation was oppressed, prophet and priest, Samuel was born to
   establish a new line of priesthood, and her praying warmed into. life a
   new life for God. Everywhere religion revived and flourished. God, true
   to His promise, "Ask of Me," though the praying came from a woman's
   broken heart, heard and answered, sending a new day of holy gladness to
   revive His people.

   So once more, let us apply the emphasis and repeat that the great need
   of the Church in this and all ages is men of such commanding faith, of
   such unsullied holiness, of such marked spiritual vigour and consuming
   zeal, that they will work spiritual revolutions through their mighty
   praying. "Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as
   factors in this matter; but a capacity for faith, the ability to pray,
   the power of a thorough consecration, the ability of self-littleness,
   an absolute losing of one's self in God's glory and an ever present and
   insatiable yearning and seeking after all the fulness of God. Men who
   can set the Church ablaze for God, not in a noisy, showy way, but with
   an intense and quiet heat that melts and moves every thing for God."

   And, to return to the vital point, secret praying is the test, the
   gauge, the conserver of man's relation to God. The prayer-chamber,
   while it is the test of the sincerity of our devotion to God, becomes
   also the measure of the devotion. The self-denial, the sacrifices which
   we make for our prayer-chambers, the frequency of our visits to that
   hallowed place of meeting with the Lord, the lingering to stay, the
   loathness to leave, are values which we put on communion alone with
   God, the price we pay for the Spirit's trysting hours of heavenly love.

   The prayer-chamber conserves our relation to God. It hems every raw
   edge; it tucks up every flowing and entangling garment; girds up every
   fainting loin. The sheet-anchor holds not the ship more surely and
   safely than the prayer-chamber holds to God. Satan has to break our
   hold on, and close up our way to the prayer-chambers, ere he can break
   our hold on God or close up our way to heaven.


   "Be not afraid to pray; to pray is right;

   Pray if thou canst with hope, but ever pray,

   Though hope be weak or sick with long delay;

   Pray in the darkness if there be no light;

   And if for any wish thou dare not pray

   Then pray to God to cast that wish away."
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      VIII

   In God's name I beseech you let prayer nourish your soul as your meals
   nourish your body. Let your fixed seasons of prayer keep you in God's
   presence through the day, and His presence frequently remembered
   through it be an ever-fresh spring of prayer. Such a brief, loving
   recollection of God renews a man's whole being, quiets his passions,
   supplies light and counsel in difficulty, gradually subdues the temper,
   and causes him to possess his soul in patience, or rather gives it up
   to the possession of God.--Fenelon

   Devoted too much time and attention to outward and public duties of the
   ministry. But this has a mistaken conduct, for I have learned that
   neglect of much and fervent communion with God in meditation and prayer
   is not the way to redeem the time nor to fit me for public
   ministrations.

   I rightly attribute my present deadness to want of sufficient time and
   tranquillity for private devotion. Want of more reading, retirement and
   private devotion, I have little mastery over my own tempers. An unhappy
   day to me for want of more solitude and prayer. If there be anything I
   do, if there be anything I leave undone, let me be perfect in prayer.

   After all, whatever God may appoint, prayer is the great thing. Oh that
   I may be a man of prayer.--Henry Martyn

   That the men had quit praying in Paul's time we cannot certainly
   affirm. They have, in the main, quit praying now. They are too busy to
   pray. Time and strength and every faculty are laid under tribute to
   money, to business, to the affairs of the world. Few men lay themselves
   out in great praying. The great business of praying is a hurried,
   petty, starved, beggarly business with most men.

   St. Paul calls a halt, and lays a levy on men for prayer. Put the men
   to praying is Paul's unfailing remedy for great evils in Church, in
   State, in politics, in business, in home. Put the men to praying, then
   politics will be cleansed, business will be thriftier, the Church will
   be holier, the home will be sweeter.

   "I exhort, therefore, first of all, that supplications, prayers,
   intercessions, thanksgivings, be made for all men; for kings and all
   that are in high place; that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in
   all godliness and gravity. This is good and acceptable in the sight of
   God our Saviour ... I desire, therefore, that the men pray in every
   place, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and disputing (I Timothy
   ii. 1-3, 8).

   Praying women and children are invaluable to God, but if their praying
   is not supplemented by praying men, there will be a great loss in the
   power of prayer--a great breach and depreciation in the value of
   prayer, great paralysis in the energy of the Gospel. Jesus Christ spake
   a parable unto the people, telling them that men ought always to pray
   and not faint. Men who are strong in everything else ought to be strong
   in prayer, and never yield to discouragement, weakness or depression.
   Men who are brave, persistent, redoubtable in other pursuits ought to
   be full of courage, unfainting, strong-hearted in prayer.

   Men are to pray; all men are to pray. Men, as distinguished from women,
   men in their strength in their wisdom. There is an absolute, specific
   command that the men pray; there is an absolute imperative necessity
   that men pray. The first of beings, man, should also be first in
   prayer.

   The men are to pray for men. The direction is specific and classified.
   Just underneath we have a specific direction with regard to women.
   About prayer, its importance, wideness and practice the Bible here
   deals with the men in contrast to, and distinct from, the women. The
   men are definitely commanded, seriously charged, and warmly exhorted to
   pray. Perhaps it was that men were averse to prayer, or indifferent to
   it; it may be that they deemed it a small thing, and gave to it neither
   time nor value nor significance. But God would have all men pray, and
   so the great Apostle lifts the subject into prominence and emphases its
   importance.

   For prayer is of transcendent importance. Prayer is the mightiest agent
   to advance God's work. Praying hearts and hands only can do God's work.
   Prayer succeeds when all else fails. Prayer has won great victories,
   and rescued, with notable triumph, God's saints when every other hope
   was gone. Men who know how to pray are the greatest boon God can give
   to earth--they are the richest gift earth can offer heaven. Men who
   know how to use this weapon of prayer are God's best soldiers. His
   mightiest leaders.

   Praying men are God's chosen leaders. The distinction between the
   leaders that God brings to the front to lead and bless His people, and
   those leaders who owe their position of leadership to a worldly,
   selfish, unsanctified selection, is this, God's leaders are
   pre-eminently men of prayer. This distinguishes them as the simple,
   Divine attestation of their call, the seal of their separation by God.
   Whatever of other graces or gifts they may have, the gift and grace of
   prayer towers above them all. In whatever else they may share or
   differ, in the gift of prayer, they are one.

   What would God's leaders be without prayer? Strip Moses of his power in
   prayer, a gift that made him eminent in pagan estimate, and the crown
   is taken from his head, the food and fire of his faith are gone.
   Elijah, without his praying, would have neither record nor place in the
   Divine legation, his life insipid, cowardly, its energy, defiance and
   fire gone. Without Elijah's praying the Jordan would never have yielded
   to the stroke of his mantle, nor would the stem angel of death have
   honored him with the chariot and horses of fire. The argument that God
   used to quiet the fears and convince Ananias of Paul's condition and
   sincerity is the epitome of his history, the solution of his life and
   work--"Behold he prayeth."

   Paul, Luther, Wesley--what would these chosen ones of God be without
   the distinguishing and controlling element of prayer? They were leaders
   for God because mighty in prayer. They were not leaders because of
   brilliancy in thought, because exhaustless in resources, because of
   their magnificent culture or native endowment, but leaders because by
   the power of prayer they could command the power of God. Praying men
   means much more than men who say prayers; much more than men who pray
   by habit. It means men with whom prayer is a mighty force, an energy
   that moves heaven and pours untold treasures of good on earth.

   Praying men are the safety of the Church from the materialism that is
   affecting all its plans and polity, and which is hardening the
   life-blood. The insinuation circulates as a secret, deadly poison that
   the Church is not so dependent on purely spiritual forces as it used to
   be--that changed times and changed conditions have brought it out of
   its spiritual straits and dependencies and put it where other forces
   can bear it to its climax. A fatal snare of this kind has allured the
   Church into worldly embraces, dazzled her leaders, weakened her
   foundations, and shorn her of much of her beauty and strength. Praying
   men are the saviours of the Church from this material tendency. They
   pour into it the original spiritual forces, lift it off the sand-bars
   of materialism, and press it out into the ocean depths of spiritual
   power. Praying men keep God in the Church in full force; keep His hand
   on the helm, and train the Church in its lessons of strength and trust.

   The number and efficiency of the labourers in God's vineyard in all
   lands is dependent on the men of prayer. The mightiness of these men of
   prayer increases, by the divinely arranged process, the number and
   success of the consecrated labours. Prayer opens wide their doors of
   access, gives holy aptness to enter, and holy boldness, firmness, and
   fruitage. Praying men are needed in all fields of spiritual labour.
   There is no position in the Church of God, high or low, which can be
   well filled without instant prayer. No position where Christians are
   found that does not demand the full play of a faith that always prays
   and never faints. Praying men are needed in the house of business, as
   well as in the house of God, that they may order and direct trade, not
   according to the maxims of this world, but according to Bible precepts
   and the maxims of the heavenly world.

   Men of prayer are needed especially in the positions of Church
   influence, honour, and power. These leaders of Church thought, of
   Church work, and of Church life should be men of signal power in
   prayer. It is the praying heart that sanctifies the toil and skill of
   the hands, and the toil and wisdom of the head. Prayer keeps work in
   the line of God's will, and keeps thought in the line of God's Word.
   The solemn responsibilities of leadership, in a large or limited
   sphere, in God's Church should be so hedged about with prayer that
   between it and the world there should be an impassable gulf, so
   elevated and purified by prayer that neither cloud nor night should
   stain the radiance nor dim the sight of a constant meridian view of
   God. Many Church leaders seem to think if they can be prominent as men
   of business, of money, influence, of thought, of plans, of scholarly
   attainments, of eloquent gifts, of taking, conspicuous activities, that
   these are enough, and will atone for the absence of the higher
   spiritual power which much praying only can give. But how vain and
   paltry are these in the serious work of bringing glory to God,
   controlling the Church for Him, and bringing it into full accord with
   its Divine mission.

   Praying men are the men that have done so much for God in the past.
   They are the ones who have won the victories for God, and spoiled His
   foes. They are the ones who have set up His Kingdom in the very camps
   of His enemies. There are no other conditions of success in this day.
   The twentieth century has no relief statute to suspend the necessity or
   force of prayer--no substitute by which its gracious ends can be
   secured. We are shut up to this, praying hands only can build for God.
   They are God's mighty ones on earth, His master-builders. They may be
   destitute of all else, but with the wrestlings and prevailings of a
   simple-hearted faith they are mighty, the mightiest for God. Church
   leaders may be gifted in all else, but without this greatest of gifts
   they are as Samson shorn of his locks, or as the Temple without the
   Divine presence or the Divine glory, and on whose altars the heavenly
   flame has died.

   The only protection and rescue from worldliness lie in our intense and
   radical spirituality; and our only hope for the existence and
   maintenance of this high, saving spirituality, under God, is in the
   purest and most aggressive leadership--a leadership that knows the
   secret power of prayer, the sign by which the Church has conquered, and
   that has conscience, conviction, and courage to hold true to her
   symbols, true to her traditions, and true to the hidings of her power.
   We need this prayerful leadership; we must have it, that by the
   perfection and beauty of its holiness, by the strength and elevation of
   its faith, by the potency and pressure of its prayers, by the authority
   and spotlessness of its example, by the fire and contagion of its zeal,
   by the singularity, sublimity, and unworldliness of its piety, it may
   influence God and hold and mould the Church to its heavenly pattern.

   Such leaders, how mightily they are felt. How their flame arouses the
   Church! How they stir it by the force of their Pentecostal presence!
   How they embattle and give victory by the conflicts and triumphs of
   their own faith! How they fashion it by the impress and importunity of
   their prayers! How they inoculate it by the contagion and fire of their
   holiness! How they lead the march in great spiritual revolutions! How
   the Church is raised from the dead by the resurrection call of their
   sermons! Holiness springs up in their wake as flowers at the voice of
   spring, and where they tread the desert blooms as the garden of the
   Lord. God's cause demands such leaders along the whole line of official
   position from subaltern to superior. How feeble, aimless, or worldly
   are our efforts, how demoralised and vain for God's work without them!

   The gift of these leaders is not in the range of ecclesiastical power.
   They are God's sifts. Their being, their presence, their number, and
   their ability are the tokens of His favour; their lack the sure sign of
   His disfavour, the presage of His withdrawal. Let the Church of God be
   on her knees before the Lord of hosts, that He may more mightily endow
   the leaders we already have, and put others in rank, and lead all along
   the line of our embattled front.

   The world is coming into the Church at many points and in many ways. It
   oozes in; it pours in; it comes in with brazen front or soft,
   insinuating disguise; it comes in at the top and comes in at the
   bottom; and percolates through many a hidden way.

   For praying men and holy men we are looking--men whose presence in the
   Church will make it like a censer of holiest incense flaming up to God.
   With God the man counts for everything. Rites, forms, organizations are
   of small moment; unless they are backed by the holiness of the man they
   are offensive in His sight. "Incense is an abomination unto Me; the new
   moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies I cannot away with; it is
   iniquity, even the solemn meeting."

   Why does God speak so strongly against His own ordinances? Personal
   purity had failed. The impure man tainted all the sacred institutions
   of God and defiled them. God regards the man in so important a way as
   to put a kind of discount on all else. Men have built Him glorious
   temples and have striven and exhausted themselves to please God by all
   manner of gifts; but in lofty strains He has rebuked these proud
   worshippers and rejected their princely gifts.

   "Heaven is My throne and the earth is My footstool: where is the house
   that ye build unto Me? and where is the place of My rest? For all those
   things hath Mine hand made, and all those things hath been, saith the
   Lord. He that killeth an ox is as if he slew a man; he that sacrificeth
   a lamb, as if he cut off a dog's neck; he that offereth an oblation, as
   if he offered swine's blood; he that burneth incense, as if he blessed
   an idol." Turning away in disgust from these costly and profane
   offerings, He declares: "But to this man will I look, even to him that
   is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at My word."

   This truth that God regards the personal purity of the man is
   fundamental. This truth suffers when ordinances are made much of and
   forms of worship multiply. The man and his spiritual character
   depreciate as Church ceremonials increase. The simplicity of worship is
   lost in religious aesthetics, or in the gaudiness of religious forms.

   This truth that the personal purity of the individual is the only thing
   God cares for is lost sight of when the Church begins to estimate men
   for what they have. When the Church eyes a man's money, social
   standing, his belongings in any way, then spiritual values are at a
   fearful discount, and the tear of penitence, the heaviness of guilt are
   never seen at her portals. Worldly bribes have opened and stained its
   pearly gates by the entrance of the impure.

   This truth that God is looking after personal purity is swallowed up
   when the Church has a greed for numbers. "Not numbers, but personal
   purity is our aim," said the fathers of Methodism. The parading of
   Church statistics is mightily against the grain of spiritual religion.
   Eyeing numbers greatly hinders the looking after personal purity. The
   increase of quantity is generally at a loss of quality. Bulk abates
   preciousness.

   The age of Church organization and Church machinery is not an age noted
   for elevated and strong personal piety. Machinery looks for engineers
   and organizations for generals, and not for saints, to run them. The
   simplist organization may aid purity as well as strength; but beyond
   that narrow limit organization swallows up the individual and is
   careless of personal purity; push, activity, enthusiasm, zeal for an
   organization, come in as the vicious substitutes for spiritual
   character. Holiness and all the spiritual graces of hardy culture and
   slow growth are discarded as too slow and too costly for the progress
   and rush of the age. By dint of machinery, new organizations, and
   spiritual weakness, results are vainly expected to be secured which can
   only be secured by faith, prayer, and waiting on God.

   The man and his spiritual character is what God is looking after. If
   men, holy men, can be turned out by the easy process of Church
   machinery readier and better than by the old-time processes, we would
   gladly invest in every new and improved patent; but we do not believe
   it. We adhere to the old way--the way the holy prophets went, the
   king's highway of holiness.

   An example of this is afforded by the case of William Wilberforce. High
   in social position, a member of Parliament, the friend of Pitt the
   famous statesman, he was not called of God to forsake his high social
   position nor to quit Parliament, but he was called to order his life
   according to the pattern set by Jesus Christ and to give himself to
   prayer. To read the story of his life is to be impressed with its
   holiness and its devotion to the claims of the quiet hours alone with
   God. His conversion was announced to his friends--to Pitt and
   others--by letter.

   In the beginning of his religious career he records: "My chief reasons
   for a day of secret prayer are, (1) That the state of public affairs is
   very critical and calls for earnest deprecation of the Divine
   displeasure. (2) My station in life is a very difficult one, wherein I
   am at a loss to know how to act. Direction, therefore, should be
   specially sought from time to time. (3) I have been graciously
   supported in difficult situations of a public nature. I have gone out
   and returned home in safety, and found a kind reception has attended
   me. I would humbly hope, too, that what I am now doing is a proof that
   God has not withdrawn His Holy Spirit from me. I am covered with
   mercies."

   The recurrence of his birthday led him again to review his situation
   and employment. "I find," he wrote, "that books alienate my heart from
   God as much as anything. I have been framing a plan of study for
   myself, but let me remember but one thing is needful, that if my heart
   cannot be kept in a spiritual state without so much prayer, meditation,
   Scripture reading, etc., as are incompatible with study, I must seek
   first the righteousness of God." All were to be surrendered for
   spiritual advance. "I fear," we find him saying, "that I have not
   studied the Scriptures enough. Surely in the summer recess I ought to
   read the Scriptures and hour or two every day, besides prayer,
   devotional reading and meditation. God will prosper me better if I wait
   on Him. The experience of all good men shows that without constant
   prayer and watchfulness the life of God in the soul stagnates.
   Doddridge's morning and evening devotions were serious matters. Colonel
   Gardiner always spent hours in prayer in the morning before he went
   forth. Bonnell practised private devotions largely morning and evening,
   and repeated Psalms dressing and undressing to raise his mind to
   heavenly things. "I would look up to God to make the means effectual. I
   fear that my devotions are too much hurried, that I do not read
   Scripture enough. I must grow in grace; I must love God more; I must
   feel the power of Divine things more. Whether I am more or less learned
   signifies not. Whether even I execute the work which I deem useful is
   comparatively unimportant. But beware my soul of lukewarmness."

   The New Year began with the Holy Communion and new vows. "I will press
   forward," he wrote, "and labour to know God better and love Him more.
   Assuredly I may, because God will give His Holy Spirit to them that ask
   Him, and the Holy Spirit will shed abroad the love of God in the heart.
   O, then, pray, pray; be earnest, press forward and follow on to know
   the Lord. Without watchfulness, humiliation and prayer, the sense of
   Divine things must languish." To prepare for the future he said he
   found nothing more effectual than private prayer and the serious
   perusal of the New Testament.

   And again: "I must put down that I have lately too little time for
   private devotions. I can sadly confirm Doddridge's remark that when we
   go on ill in the closet we commonly do so everywhere else. I must mend
   here. I am afraid of getting into what Owen calls the trade of sinning
   and repenting ... Lord help me, the shortening of private devotions
   starves the soul; it grows lean and faint. This must not be. I must
   redeem more time. I see how lean in spirit I become without full
   allowance of time for private devotions; I must be careful to be
   watching unto prayer."

   At another tune he puts on record: "I must try what I long ago heard
   was the rule of E--the great upholsterer, who, when he came from Bond
   Street to his little villa, always first retired to his Closet. I have
   been keeping too late hours, and hence have had but a hurried half hour
   to myself. Surely the experience of all good men confirms the
   proposition, that without due measure of private devotions, the soul
   will grow lean."

   To his son he wrote: "Let me conjure you not to be seduced into
   neglecting, curtailing or hurrying over your morning prayers. Of all
   things, guard against neglecting God in the closet. There is nothing
   more fatal to the life and power of religion. More solitude and earlier
   hours--prayer three times a day at least. How much better might I serve
   if I cultivated a closer communication with God."

   Wilberforce knew the secret of a holy life. Is that not where most of
   us fail? We are so busy with other things, so immersed even in doing
   good and in carrying on the Lord's work, that we neglect the quiet
   seasons of prayer with God, and before we are aware of it our soul is
   lean and impoverished.

   "One night alone in prayer," says Spurgeon, "might make us new men,
   changed from poverty of soul to spiritual wealth, from trembling to
   triumphing. We have an example of it in the life of Jacob. A foretime
   the crafty shuffler, always bargaining and calculating, unlovely in
   almost every respect, yet one night in prayer turned the supplanter
   into a prevailing prince, and robed "him with celestial grandeur. From
   that night he lives on the sacred page as one of the nobility of
   heaven. Could not we, at least now and then, in these weary earthbound
   years, hedge abot a single night for such enriching traffic with the
   skies? What, have we no sacred ambition? Are we deaf to the yearnings
   of Divine love? Yet, my brethren, for wealth and for science men will
   cheerfully quit their warm couches, and cannot we do it now and again
   for the love of God, and the good of souls? Where is our zeal, our
   gratitude, our sincerity? I am ashamed while I thus upbraid both myself
   and you. May we often tarry at Jabbok, and cry with Jacob, as he
   grasped the angel?


   "With thee all night I mean to stay,

   And wrestle till the break of day."

   Surely, brethren, if we have given whole days to folly, we can afford a
   space for heavenly wisdom. Time was when we gave whole nights to
   chambering and wantonness, to dancing and the world's revelry; we did
   not tire then; we were chiding the sun that he rose so soon, and
   wishing the hours would lag awhile that we might delight in wilder
   merriment and perhaps deeper sin. Oh, wherefore, should we weary in
   heavenly employments? Why grow we weary when asked to watch with our
   Lord? Up sluggish heart, Jesus calls thee! Rise and go forth to meet
   the Heavenly Friend in the place where He manifests Himself."

   We can never expect to grow in the likeness of our Lord unless we
   follow His example and give more time to communion with the Father. A
   revival of real praying would produce a spiritual revolution.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                       IX

   Bear up the hands that hang down, by faith and prayer; support the
   tottering knees. Have you any days of fasting and prayer? Storm the
   throne of. grace and persevere therein, and mercy will come down.--John
   Wesley

   We must remember that the goal of prayer is the ear of God. Unless that
   is gained the prayer has utterly failed. The utterings of it may have
   kindled devotional feeling in our minds, the hearing of it may have
   comforted and strengthened the hearts of those with whom we have
   prayed, but (f the prayer has not gained the heart of God, it has
   failed in its essential purpose.

   A mere formalist can always pray so as to please himself. What has he
   to do but to open his book and read the prescribed words, or bow his
   knee and repeat such phrases as suggest themselves to his memory or his
   fancy? Like the Tartarian Praying Machine, give but the wind and the
   wheel, and the business is full arranged. So much knee-bending and
   talking, and the prayer is done. The formalist's prayers are always
   good, or, rather, always bad, alike. But the living child of God never
   offers a prayer which pleases himself; his standard is above his
   attainments; he wonders that God listens to him, and though he knows he
   will be heard for Christ's sake, yet he accounts it a wonderful
   instance of condescending mercy that such poor prayers as his should
   ever reach the ears of the Lord God of Sabaoth.--C. H. Spurgeon

   It may be said with emphasis that no lazy saint prays. Can there be a
   lazy saint? Can there be a prayerless saint? Does not slack praying cut
   short sainthood's crown and kingdom? Can there be a cowardly soldier?
   Can there be a saintly hypocrite? Can there be virtuous vice? It is
   only when these possibilities are brought into being that we then can
   find a prayerless saint.

   To go through the motion of praying is a dull business, though not a
   hard one. To say prayers in a decent, delicate way is not heavy work.
   But to pray really, to pray till hell feels the ponderous stroke, to
   pray till the iron gates of difficulty are opened, till the mountains
   of obstacles are removed, till the mists are exhaled and the clouds are
   lifted, and the sunshine of a cloudless day brightens--this is hard
   work, but it is God's work and man's best labour. Never was the toil of
   hand, head and heart less spent in vain than when praying. It is hard
   to wait and press and pray, and hear no voice, but stay till God
   answers. The joy of answered prayer is the joy of a travailing mother
   when a man child is born in to the world, the joy of a slave whose
   chains have been burst asunder and to whom new life and liberty have
   just come.

   A bird's-eye view of what has been accomplished by prayer shows what we
   lost when the dispensation of real prayer was substituted by
   Pharisaical pretence and sham; it shows, too, how imperative is the
   need for holy men and women who will give themselves to earnest,
   Christlike praying.

   It is not an easy thing to pray. Back of the praying there must lie all
   the conditions of prayer. These conditions are possible, but they are
   not to be seized on in a moment by the prayerless. Present they always
   may be to the faithful and holy, but cannot exist in nor be met by a
   frivolous, negligent, laggard spirit. Prayer does not stand alone. It
   is not an isolated performance. Prayer stands in closet connection with
   all the duties of an ardent piety. It is the issuance of a character
   which is made up of the elements of a vigorous and commanding faith.
   Prayer honours God, acknowledges His being, exalts His power, adores
   His providence, secures His aid. A sneering half-rationalism cries out
   against devotion, that it does nothing but pray. But to pray well is to
   do all things well. If it be true that devotion does nothing but pray,
   then it does nothing at all. To do nothing but pray fails to do the
   praying, for the antecedent, coincident, and subsequent conditions of
   prayer are but the sum of all the energised forces of a practical,
   working piety.

   The possibilities of prayer run parallel with the promises of God.
   Prayer opens an outlet for the promises, removes the hindrances in the
   way of their execution, puts them into working order, and secures their
   gracious ends. More than this, prayer like faith, obtains promises,
   enlarges their operation, and adds to the measure of their results.
   God's promises were to Abraham and to his seed, but many a barren womb,
   and many a minor obstacle stood in the way of the fulfillment of these
   promises; but prayer removed them all, made a highway for the promises,
   added to the facility and speediness of their realisation, and by
   prayer the promise shone bright and perfect in its execution.

   The possibilities of prayer are found in its allying itself with the
   purposes of God, for God's purposes and man's praying are the
   combination of all potent and omnipotent forces. More than this, the
   possibilities of prayer are seen in the fact that it changes the
   purposes of God. It is in the very nature of prayer to plead and give
   directions. Prayer is not a negation. It is a positive force. It never
   rebels against the will of God, never comes into conflict with that
   will, but that it does seek to change God's purpose is evident. Christ
   said, "The cup which My Father hath given Me shall I not drink it" and
   yet He had prayed that very night, "If it be possible let this cup pass
   from Me." Paul sought to change the purposes of God about the thorn in
   his flesh. God's purposes were fixed to destroy Israel, and the prayer
   of Moses changed the purposes of God and saved Israel. In the time of
   the Judges Israel were apostate and greatly oppressed. They repented
   and cried unto God and He said: "Ye have forsaken Me and served other
   gods, wherefore I will deliver you no more:" but they humbled
   themselves, put away their strange gods, and God's "soul was grieved
   for the misery of Israel," and he sent them deliverance by Jephthah.

   God sent Isaiah to say to Hezekiah, "Set thine house in order: for thou
   shalt die, and not live." and Hezekiah prayed, and God sent Isaiah back
   to say, "I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears; behold I will
   add unto thy days fifteen years." "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be
   overthrown," was God's message by Jonah. But Nineveh cried mightily to
   God, and "God repented of the evil that He had said He would do unto
   them; and He did it not."

   The possibilities of prayer are seen from the diverse conditions it
   reaches and the diverse ends it secures. Elijah prayed over a dead
   child, and it came to life; Elisha did the same thing; Christ prayed at
   Lazarus's grave, and Lazarus came forth. Peter kneeled down and prayed
   beside dead Dorcas, and she opened her eyes and sat up, and Peter
   presented her alive to the distressed company. Paul prayed for Publius,
   and healed him. Jacob's praying changed Esau's murderous hate into the
   kisses of the tenderest brotherly embrace. God gave to Rebecca Jacob
   and Esau because Isaac prayed for her. Joseph was the child of Rachel's
   prayers. Hannah's praying gave Samuel to Israel. John the Baptist was
   given to Elizabeth, barren and past age as she was, in answer to the
   prayer of Zacharias. Elisha's praying brought famine or harvest to
   Israel; as he prayed so it was. Ezra's praying carried the Spirit of
   God in heartbreaking conviction to the entire city of Jerusalem, and
   brought them in tears of repentance back to God. Isaiah's praying
   carried the shadow of the sun back ten degrees on the dial of Ahaz.

   In answer to Hezekiah's praying an angel slew one hundred and
   eighty-five thousand of Sennacherib's army in one night. Daniel's
   praying opened to him the vision of prophecy, helped him to administer
   the affairs of a mighty kingdom, and sent an angel to shut the lions'
   mouths. The angel was sent to Cornelius, and the Gospel opened through
   him to the Gentile world, because his "prayers and alms had come up as
   a memorial before God." "And what shall I more say? for the time would
   fail me to tell of Gideon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of
   Jephthah; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets;" of Paul and
   Peter, and John and the Apostles, and the holy company of saints,
   reformers, and martyrs, who, through praying, "subdued kingdoms,
   wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions,
   quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of
   weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the
   armies of the aliens."

   Prayer puts God in the matter with commanding force: "Ask of Me things
   to come concerning My sons," says God, "and concerning the work of My
   hands command ye Me." We are charged in God's Word "always to pray,"
   "in everything by prayer," "continuing instant in prayer," to "pray
   everywhere," "praying always." The promise is as illimitable as the
   command is comprehensive. "All things whatsoever ye shall ask in
   prayer, believing, ye shall receive," "whatever ye shall ask," "if ye
   shall ask anything." "Ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be done
   unto you." "Whatsoever ye ask the Father He will give it to you." If
   there is anything not involved in "All things whatsoever," or not found
   in the phrase "Ask anything," then these things may be left out of
   prayer. Language could not cover a wider range, nor involve more fully
   all minutia. These statements are but samples of the all-comprehending
   possibilities of prayer under the promises of God to those who meet the
   conditions of right praying.

   These passages, though, give but a general outline of the immense
   regions over which prayer extends its sway. Beyond these the effects of
   prayer reach and secure good from regions which cannot be traversed by
   language or thought. Paul exhausted language and thought in praying,
   but conscious of necessities not covered and realms of good not reached
   he covers these impenetrable and undiscovered regions by this general
   plea, "unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that
   we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us." The
   promise is, "Call upon Me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great
   and mighty things, which thou knowest not."

   James declares that "the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man
   availeth much." How much he could not tell, but illustrates it by the
   power of Old Testament praying to stir up New Testament saints to
   imitate by the fervour and influence of their praying the holy men of
   old, and duplicate and surpass the power of their praying. Elijah, he
   says, was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed
   earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the
   space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the
   heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.

   In the Revelation of John the whole lower order of God's creation and
   His providential government, the Church and the angelic world, are in
   the attitude of waiting on the efficiency of the prayers of the saintly
   ones on earth to carry on the various interests of earth and heaven.
   The angel takes the fire kindled by prayer and casts it earthward, "and
   there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake."
   Prayer is the force which creates all these alarms, stirs, and throes.
   "Ask of Me," says God to His Son, and to the Church of His Son, "and I
   shall give Thee the nations for Thine inheritance and the uttermost
   parts of the earth for Thine possessions."

   The men who have done mighty things for God have always been mighty in
   prayer, have well understood the possibilities of prayer, and made most
   of the possibilities. The Son of God, the first of all and the
   mightiest of all, has shown us the all-potent and far-reaching
   possibilities of prayer. Paul was might for God because he knew how to
   use, and how to get others to use, the mighty spiritual forces of
   prayer.

   The seraphim, burning, sleepless, adoring, is the figure of prayer. It
   is resistless in its ardour, devoted and tireless. There are hindrances
   to prayer that nothing but pure, intense flame can surmount. There are
   toils and outlays and endurance which nothing but the strongest, most
   ardent flame can abide. Prayer may be low-tongued, but it cannot be
   cold-tongued. Its words may be few, but they must be on fire. Its
   feelings may not be impetuous, but they must be white with heat. It is
   the effectual, fervent prayer that influences God.

   God's house is the house of prayer; God's work is the work of prayer.
   It is the zeal for God's house and the zeal for God's work that makes
   God's house glorious and His work abide.

   When the prayer-chambers of saints are closed or are entered casually
   or coldly, then Church rulers are secular, fleshly, materialised;
   spiritual character sinks to a low level, and the ministry becomes
   restrained and enfeebled.

   When prayer falls, the world prevails. When prayer fails the Church
   loses its Divine characteristics, its Divine power; the Church is
   swallowed up by a proud ecclesiasticism, and the world scoffs at its
   obvious impotence.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                       X

   I look upon all the four Gospels as thoroughly genuine, for there is in
   them the reflection of a greatness which emanated from the person of
   Jesus and which was of as Divine a kind as ever was seen on
   earth.--Goethe

   There are no possibilities, no necessity for prayerless praying, a
   heartless performance, a senseless routine, a dead habit, a hasty,
   careless performance--it justifies nothing. Prayerless praying has no
   life, gives no life, is dead, breathes out death. Not a battle-axe but
   a child's toy, for play not for service. Prayerless praying does not
   come up to the importance and aims of a recreation. Prayerless praying
   is only a weight, an impediment in the hour of struggle, of intense
   conflict, a call to retreat in the moment of battle and victory.

   Why do we not pray? What are the hindrances to prayer? This is not a
   curious nor trivial question. It goes not only to the whole matter of
   our praying, but to the whole matter of our religion. Religion is bound
   to decline when praying is hindered. That which hinders praying,
   hinders religion. He who is too busy to pray will be too busy to live a
   holy life.

   Other duties become pressing and absorbing and crowd out prayer. Choked
   to death, would be the coroner's verdict in many cases of dead praying,
   if an inquest could be secured on this dire, spiritual calamity. This
   way of hindering prayer becomes so natural, so easy, so innocent that
   it comes on us all unawares. If we will allow our praying to be crowded
   out, it will always be done. Satan had rather we let the grass grow on
   the path to our prayer-chamber than anything else. A dosed chamber of
   prayer means gone out of business religiously or what is worse, made an
   assignment and carrying on our religion in some other name than God's
   and to somebody else's glory. God's glory is only secured in the
   business of religion by carrying that religion on with a large capital
   of prayer. The apostles understood this when they declared that their
   time must not be employed in even the sacred duties of alms-giving;
   they must give themselves, they said, "continually to prayer and to the
   ministry of the Word," prayer being put first with them and the
   ministry of the Word having its efficiency and life from prayer.

   The process of hindering prayer by crowding out is simple and goes by
   advancing stages. First, prayer is hurried through. Unrest and
   agitation, fatal to all devout exercises, come in. Then the time is
   shortened, relish for the exercise palls. Then it is crowded into a
   corner and depends on the fragments of time for its exercise. Its value
   depreciates. The duty has lots its importance. It no longer commands
   respect nor brings benefit. It has fallen out of estimate, out of
   heart, out of the habits, out of the life. We cease to pray and cease
   to live spiritually.

   There is no stay to the desolating floods of worldliness and business
   and cares, but prayer. Christ meant this when He charged us to watch
   and pray. There is no pioneering corps for the Gospel but prayer. Paul
   knew that when he declared that "night and day he prayed exceedingly
   that we might see your face and might perfect that which is lacking in
   your faith." There is no arriving at a high state of grace without much
   praying and no staying in those high altitudes without great praying.
   Epaphras knew this when he "laboured fervently in prayers" for the
   Colossian Church, "that they might stand perfect and complete in all
   the will of God."

   The only way to preserve our praying from being hindered is to estimate
   prayer at its true and great value. Estimate it as Daniel did, who,
   when he "knew that the writing was signed he went into his house, and
   his windows being opened to Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three
   times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God as he did
   aforetime." Put praying into the high values as Daniel did, above
   place, honour, ease, wealth, life. Put praying into the habits as
   Daniel did. "As he did aforetime," has much in it to give firmness and
   fidelity in the hour of trial; much in it to remove hindrances and
   master opposing circumstances.

   One of Satan's wiliest tricks is to destroy the best by the good.
   Business and other duties are good, but we are so filled with these
   that they crowd out and destroy the best. Prayer holds the citadel for
   God, and if Satan can by any means weaken prayer he is a gainer so far,
   and when prayer is dead the citadel is taken. We must keep prayer as
   the faithful sentinel keeps guard, with sleepless vigilance. We must
   not keep it half-starved and feeble as a baby, but we must keep it in
   giant strength. Our prayer-chamber should have our freshest strength,
   our calmest time, its hours unfettered, without obtrusion, without
   haste. Private place and plenty of time are the life of prayer. "To
   kneel upon our knees three times a day and pray and give thanks before
   God as we did aforetime," is the very heart and soul of religion, and
   makes men, like Daniel, of "an excellent spirit," "greatly beloved in
   heaven."

   The greatness of prayer, involving as it does the whole man, in the
   intensest form, is not realised without spiritual discipline. This
   makes it hard work, and before this exacting and consuming effort our
   spiritual sloth or feebleness stands abashed.

   The simplicity of prayer, its child-like elements form a great obstacle
   to true praying. Intellect gets in the way of the heart. The child
   spirit only is the spirit of prayer. It is no holiday occupation to
   make the man a child again. In song, in poetry, in memory he may wish
   himself a child again, but in prayer he must be a child again in
   reality. At his mother's knee, artless, sweet, intense, direct,
   trustful. With no shade of doubt, no temper to be denied. A desire
   which burns and consumes which can only be voiced by a cry. It is no
   easy work to have this child-life spirit of prayer.

   If praying were but an hour in the closet, difficulties would face and
   hinder even that hour, but praying is the whole life preparing for the
   closet. How difficult it is to cover home and business, all the sweets
   and all the bitters of life, with the holy atmosphere of the closet! A
   holy life is the only preparation for prayer. It is just as difficult
   to pray, as it is to live a holy life. In this we find a wall of
   exclusion built around our closets; men do not love holy praying,
   because they do not love and will not do holy living. Montgomery sets
   forth the difficulties of true praying when he declares the sublimity
   and simplicity of prayer.


   Prayer is the simplest form of speech

   That infant lips can try.

   Prayer is the sublimest strains that reach

   The Majesty on high.

   This is not only good poetry, but a profound truth as to the loftiness
   and simplicity of prayer. There are great difficulties in reaching the
   exalted, angelic strains of prayer. The difficulty of coming down to
   the simplicity of infant lips is not much less.

   Prayer in the Old Testament is called wrestling. Conflict and skill,
   strenuous, exhaustive effort are involved. In the New Testament we have
   the terms striving, labouring fervently, fervent, effectual, agony, all
   indicating intense effort put forth, difficulties overcome. We, in our
   praises sing out--


   "What various hindrances we meet

   In coming to a mercy seat."

   We also have learned that the gracious results secured by prayer are
   generally proportioned to the outlay in removing the hindrances which
   obstruct our soul's high communion with God.

   Christ spake a parable to this end, that men ought always to pray and
   not faint. The parable of the importunate widow teaches the
   difficulties in praying, how they are to be surmounted, and the happy
   results which follow from valorous praying. Difficulties will always
   obstruct the way to the closet as long as it remains true,


   "That Satan trembles when he sees

   The weakest saint upon his knees."

   Courageous faith is made stronger and purer by mastering difficulties.
   These difficulties but couch the eye of faith to the glorious prize
   which is to be won by the successful wrestler in prayer. Men must not
   faint in the contest of prayer, but to this high and holy work they
   must give themselves, defying the difficulties in the way, and
   experience more than an angel's happiness in the results. Luther said:
   "To have prayed well is to have studied well." More than that, to have
   prayed well is to have fought well. To have prayed well is to have
   lived well. To pray well is to die well.

   Prayer is a rare gift, not a popular, ready gift. Prayer is not the
   fruit of natural talents; it is the product of faith, of holiness, of
   deeply spiritual character. Men learn to. pray as they learn to love.
   Perfection in simplicity, in humility in faith--these form its chief
   ingredients. Novices in these graces are not adepts in prayer. It
   cannot be seized upon by untrained hands; graduates in heaven's highest
   school of art can alone touch its finest keys, raise its sweetest,
   highest notes. Fine material, free finish are requisite. Master workmen
   are required, for mere journeymen cannot execute the work of prayer.

   The spirit of prayer should rule our spirits and our conduct. The
   spirit of the prayer-chamber must control our lives or the closet hour
   will be dull and sapless. Always praying in spirit; always acting in
   the spirit of praying; these make our praying strong. The spirit of
   every moment is that which imparts strength to the closet communion. It
   is what we are out of the closet gives victory or brings defeat to the
   closet. If the spirit of the world prevails in our non-closet hours,
   the spirit of the world will prevail in our closet hours, and that will
   be a vain and idle farce.

   We must live for God out of the closet if we would meet God in the
   closet. We must bless God by praying lives if we would have God's
   blessing in the closet. We must do God's will in our lives if we would
   have God's ear in the closet. We must listen to God's voice in public
   if we would have God listen to our voice in private. God must have our
   hearts out of the closet, if we would have God's presence in the
   closet. If we would have God in the closet, God must have us out of the
   closet. There is no way of praying to God, but by living to God. The
   closet is not a confessional, simply, but the hour of holy communion
   and high and sweet intercourse and of intense intercession..

   Men would pray better if they lived better. They would get more from
   God if they lived more obedient and well pleasing to God. We would have
   more strength and time for the Divine work of intercession if we did
   not have to expend so much strength and time settling up old scores and
   paying our delinquent taxes. Our spiritual liabilities are so greatly
   in excess of our spiritual assets that our closet time is spent in
   taking out a decree of bankruptcy instead of being the time of great
   spiritual wealth for us and for others. Our closets are too much like
   the sign, "Closed for Repairs."

   John said of primitive Christian praying, "Whatsoever we ask we receive
   of Him, because we keep His commandments and do those things which are
   pleasing in His sight." We should note what illimitable grounds were
   covered, what illimitable gifts were received by their strong praying:
   "Whatsoever"--how comprehensive the range and reception of mighty
   praying; how suggestive the reasons for the ability to pray and to have
   prayers answered. Obedience, but more than mere obedience, doing the
   things which please God well. They went to their closets made strong by
   their strict obedience and loving fidelity to God in their conduct.
   Their lives were not only true and obedient, but they were thinking
   about things above obedience, searching for and doing things to make
   God glad. These can come with eager step and radiant countenance to
   meet their Father in the closet, not simply to be forgiven, but to be
   approved and to receive.

   It makes much difference whether we come to God as a criminal or a
   child; to be pardoned or to be approved; to settle scores or to be
   embraced; for punishment or for favour. Our praying to be strong must
   be buttressed by holy living. The name of Christ must be honoured by
   our lives before it will honour our intercessions. The life of faith
   perfects the prayer of faith.

   Our lives not only give colour to our praying, but they give body to it
   as well. Bad living makes bad praying. We pray feebly because we live
   feebly. The stream of praying cannot rise higher than the fountain of
   living. the closet force is made up of the energy which flows from the
   confluent streams of living. The feebleness of living throws its
   faintness into closet homes. We cannot talk to God strongly when we
   have not lived for God strongly. The closet cannot be made holy to God
   when the life has not been holy to God. The Word of God emphasises our
   conduct as giving value to our praying. "Then shalt thou call and the
   Lord shalt answer, Thou shalt cry and He shall say, Here I am. If thou
   take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth the
   finger, and speaking vanity."

   Men are to pray "lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting." We
   are to pass the time of our sojourning here in fear if we would call on
   the Father. We cannot divorce praying from conduct. "Whatsoever we ask
   we receive of Him because we keep His commandments and do those things
   that are pleasing in His sight." "Ye ask and receive not because ye ask
   amiss that ye may consume it upon your lusts." the injunction of
   Christ, "Watch and pray," is to cover and guard conduct that we may
   come to our closets with all the force secured by a vigilant guard over
   our lives.

   Our religion breaks down oftenest and most sadly in our conduct.
   Beautiful theories are marred by ugly lives. The most difficult as well
   as the most impressive point in piety is to live it. Our praying
   suffers as much as our religion from bad living. Preachers were charged
   in primitive times to preach by their lives or preach not at all. So
   Christians everywhere ought to be charged to pray by their lives or
   pray not at all. Of course, the prayer of repentance is acceptable. But
   repentance means to quit doing wrong and learn to do well. A repentance
   which does not produce a change in conduct is a sham. Praying which
   does not result in pure conduct is a delusion. We have missed the whole
   office and virtue of praying if it does not rectify conduct. It is in
   the very nature of things that we must quit praying or quit bad
   conduct. Cold, dead praying may exist with bad conduct, but cold, dead
   praying is no praying in God's esteem. Our praying advances in power as
   it rectifies the life. A life growing in its purity and devotion will
   be a more prayerful life.

   The pity is that so much of our praying is without object or aim. It is
   without purpose. How much praying there is by men and women who never
   abide in Christ--hasty praying, sweet praying full of sentiment,
   pleasing. praying, but not backed by a life wedded to Christ. Popular
   praying! How much of this praying is from unsanctified hearts and
   unhallowed lips! Prayers spring into life under the influence of some
   great excitement, by some pressing emergency, through some popular
   clamour, some great peril. But the conditions of prayer are not there.
   We rush into God's presence and try to link Him--to our cause, inflame
   Him with our passions, move Him--by our peril. All things are to be
   prayed for--but with clean hands, with absolute deference to God's will
   and abiding in Christ. Prayerless praying by lips and hearts untrained
   to prayer, by lives out of harmony with Jesus Christ; prayerless
   praying, which has the form and motion of prayer but is without the
   true heart of prayer, never moves God to an answer. It is of such
   praying that James says: "Ye have not because ye ask not; ye ask and
   receive not, because ye ask amiss."

   The two great evils--not asking, and asking in a wrong way. Perhaps the
   greater evil is wrong asking, for it has in it the show of duty done,
   of praying when there has been no praying--a deceit, a fraud, a sham.
   The times of the most praying are not really the times of the best
   praying. The Pharisees prayed much, but they were actuated by vanity;
   their praying was the symbol of their hypocrisy by which they made
   God's house of prayer a den of robbers. Theirs was praying on state
   occasions--mechanical, perfunctory, professional, beautiful in words,
   fragrant in sentiment, well ordered, well received by the ears that
   heard, but utterly devoid of every element of real prayer.

   The conditions of prayer are well ordered and clear--abiding in Christ;
   in His name. One of the first necessities, if we are to grasp the
   infinite possibilities of prayer, is to get rid of prayerless praying.
   It is often beautiful in words and in execution; it has the drapery of
   prayer in rich and costly form, but it lacks the soul of praying. We
   fall so easily into the habit of prayerless service, of merely filling
   a programme.

   If men only prayed on all occasions and in every place where they go
   through the motion! If there were only holy inflamed hearts back of all
   these beautiful words and gracious forms! If there were always uplifted
   hearts in these erect men who are uttering flawless but vain words
   before God! If there were always reverent bended hearts when bended
   knees are uttering words before God to please men's ears!

   There is nothing that will preserve the life of prayer; its vigour,
   sweetness, obligations, seriousness and value, so much as a deep
   conviction that prayer is an approach to God, a pleading with God, an
   asking of God. Reality will then be in it; reverence will then be in
   the attitude, in the place, and in the air. Faith will draw, kindle and
   open. Formality and deadness cannot live in this high and all-serious
   home of the soul.

   Prayerless praying lacks the essential element of true praying; it is
   not based on desire, and is devoid of earnestness and faith. Desire
   burdens the chariot of prayer, and faith drives its wheels. Prayerless
   praying has no burden, because no sense of need; no ardency, because
   none of the vision, strength, or glow of faith. No mighty pressure to
   prayer, no holding on to God with the deathless, despairing grasp, "I
   will not let Thee go except Thou bless me." No utter self-abandon, lost
   in the throes of a desperate, pertinacious, and consuming plea: "Yet
   now if Thou wilt forgive their sin--if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out
   of Thy book;" or "Give me Scotland, or I die." Prayerless praying
   stakes nothing on the issue, for it has nothing to stake. It comes with
   empty hands, indeed, but they are listless hands as well as empty. They
   have never learned the lesson of empty hands clinging to the cross;
   this lesson to them has no form nor comeliness.

   Prayerless praying has no heart in its praying. The lack of heart
   deprives praying of its reality, and makes it an empty and unfit
   vessel. Heart, soul, life must be in our praying; the heavens must feel
   the force of our crying, and must be brought into oppressed sympathy
   for our bitter and needy state, A need that oppresses us, and has no
   relief but in our crying to God, must voice our praying.

   Prayerless praying is insincere. It has no honesty at heart. We name in
   words what we do not want in heart. Our prayers give formal utterance
   to the things for which our hearts are not only not hungry, but for
   which they really have no taste. We once heard an eminent and saintly
   preacher, now in heaven, come abruptly and sharply on a congregation
   that had just risen from prayer, with the question and statement, "What
   did you pray for? If God should take hold of you and shake you, and
   demand what you prayed for, you could not tell Him to save your life
   what the prayer was that has just died from your lips." So it always
   is, prayerless praying has neither memory nor heart. A mere form, a
   heterogeneous mass, an insipid compound, a mixture thrown together for
   sound and to fill up, but with neither heart nor aim, is prayerless
   praying. A dry routine, a dreary drudge, a dull and heavy task is this
   prayerless praying.

   But prayerless praying is much worse than either task or drudge, it
   divorces praying from living; it utters its words against the world,
   but with heart and life runs into the world; it prays for humility, but
   nurtures pride; prays for self-denial, while indulging the flesh.
   Nothing exceeds in gracious results true praying, but better not to
   pray at all than to pray prayerless prayers, for they are but sinning,
   and the worst of sinning is to sin on our knees.

   The prayer habit is a good habit, but praying by dint of habit only is
   a very bad habit. This kind of praying is not conditioned after God's
   order, nor generated by God's power. It is not only a waste, a
   perversion, and a delusion, but it is a prolific source of unbelief.
   Prayerless praying gets no results. God is not reached, self is not
   helped. It is better not to pray at all than to secure no results from
   praying. Better for the one who prays, better for others. Men hear of
   the prodigious results which are to be secured by prayer: the matchless
   good promised in God's Word to prayer. These keen-eyed worldlings or
   timid little faith ones mark the great discrepancy between the results
   promised and results realised, and are led necessarily to doubt the
   truth and worth of that which is so big in promise and so beggarly in
   results. Religion and God are dishonoured, doubt and unbelief are
   strengthened by much asking and no getting.

   In contrast with this, what a mighty force prayerful praying is. Real
   prayer helps God and man. God's Kingdom is advanced by it. The greatest
   good comes to man by it. Prayer can do anything that God can do. The
   pity is that we do not believe this as we ought, and we do not put it
   to the test.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                       XI

   The deepest need of the Church today is not for any material or
   external thing, but the deepest need is spiritual. Prayerless work will
   never bring in the kingdom. We neglect to pray in the prescribed way.
   We seldom enter the closet and shut the door for a season of prayer.
   Kingdom interests are pressing on us thick and fast and we must pray.
   Prayerless giving will never evangelise the world.--Dr. A. J. Gordon

   The great subject of prayer, that comprehensive need of the Christian's
   life, is intimately bound up in the personal fulness of the Holy
   Spirit. It is "by the One Spirit we have access unto the Father" (Eph.
   2:18), and by the same Spirit, having entered the audience chamber
   through the "new and living way," we are enabled to pray in the will of
   God (Rom. 8:15, 26-27; Gal. 4:6; Eph. 6:18; Jude 20-21).

   Here is the secret of prevailing prayer, to pray under a direct
   inspiration of the Holy Spirit, whose petitions for us and through us
   are always according to the Divine purpose, and hence certain of
   answer. "Praying in the Holy Ghost" is but co-operating with the will
   of God, and such prayer is always victorious. How many Christians there
   are who cannot pray, and who seek by effort, resolve, joining prayer
   circles, etc., to cultivate in themselves the "holy art of
   intercession," and all to no purpose. Here for them and for all is the
   only secret of a real prayer life--"Be filled with the Spirit," who is
   "the Spirit of grace and supplication."--Rev. J. Stuart Holden, M.A.

   The preceding chapter closed with the statement that prayer can do
   anything that God can do. It is a tremendous statement to make, but it
   is a statement borne out by history and experience. If we are abiding
   in Christ--and if we abide in Him we are living in obedience to His
   holy will--and approach God in His name, then there lie open before us
   the infinite resources of the Divine treasurehouse.

   The man who truly prays gets from God many things denied to the
   prayerless man. The aim of all real praying is to get the thing prayed
   for, as the child's cry for bread has for its end the getting of bread.
   This view removes prayer clean out of the sphere of religious
   performances. Prayer is not acting a part or going through religious
   motions. Prayer is neither official nor formal nor ceremonial, but
   direct, hearty, intense. Prayer is not religious work which must be
   gone through, and avails because well done. Prayer is the helpless and
   needy child crying to the compassion of the Father's heart and the
   bounty and power of a Father's hand. The answer is as sure to come as
   the Father's heart can be touched and the Father's hand moved.

   The object of asking is to receive. The aim of seeking is to find. The
   purpose of knocking is to arouse attention and get in, and this is
   Christ's iterated and reiterated asseveration that the prayer without
   doubt will be answered, its end without doubt secured. Not by some
   round-about way, but by getting the very thing asked for.

   The value of prayer does not lie in the number of prayers, or the
   length of prayers, but its value is found in the great truth that we
   are privileged by our relations to God to unburden our desires and make
   our requests known to God, and He will relieve by granting our
   petitions. The child asks because the parent is in the habit of
   granting the child's requests. As the children of God we need something
   and we need it badly, and we go to God for it. Neither the Bible nor
   the child of God knows anything of that half-infidel declaration, that
   we are to answer our own prayers. God answers prayer. The true
   Christian does not pray to stir himself up, but his prayer is the
   stirring up of himself to take hold of God. The heart of faith knows
   nothing of that specious scepticism which stays the steps of prayer and
   chills its ardour by whispering that prayer does not affect God.

   D. L. Moody used to tell a story of a little child whose father and
   mother had died, and who was taken into another family. The first night
   she asked whether she could pray as she used to do. They said: "Oh,
   yes!" So she knelt down and prayed as her mother had taught her; and
   when that was ended, she added a little prayer of her own: "O God, make
   these people as kind to me as father and mother were." Then she paused
   and looked up, as if expecting the answer, and then added: "Of course
   you will." How sweetly simple was that little one's faith! She expected
   God to answer and "do," and "of course" she got her request, and that
   is the spirit in which God invites us to approach Him.

   In contrast to that incident is the story told of the quaint Yorkshire
   class leader, Daniel Quorm, who was visiting a friend. One forenoon he
   came to the friend and said, "I am sorry you have met with such a great
   disappointment."

   "Why, no," said the man, "I have not met with any disappointment."

   "Yes," said Daniel, "you were expecting something remarkable today."

   "What do you mean?" said the friend.

   "Why you prayed that you might be kept sweet and gentle all day long.
   And, by the way things have been going, I see you have been greatly
   disappointed."

   "Oh," said the man, "I thought you meant something particular."

   Prayer is mighty in its operations, and God never disappoints those who
   put their trust and confidence in Him. They may have to wait long for
   the answer, and they may not live to see it, but the prayer of faith
   never misses its object.

   "A friend of mine in Cincinnati had preached his sermon and sank back
   in his chair, when he felt impelled to make another. appeal," says Dr.
   J. Wilbur Chapman. "A boy at the back of the church lifted his hand. My
   friend left the pulpit and went down to him, and said, Tell me about
   yourself.' The boy said, I live in New York. I am a prodigal. I have
   disgraced my father's name and broken my mother's heart. I ran away and
   told them I would never come back until I became a Christian or they
   brought me home dead.' That night there went from Cincinnati a letter
   telling his father and mother that their boy had turned to God.

   "Seven days later, in a black-bordered envelope, a reply came which
   read: My dear boy, when I got the news that you had received Jesus
   Christ the sky was overcast; your father was dead.' Then the letter
   went on to tell how the father had prayed for his prodigal boy with his
   last breath, and concluded, You are a Christian tonight because your
   old father would not let you go.'"

   A fourteen-year-old boy was given a task by his father. It so happened
   that a group of boys came along just then and wiled the boy away with
   them, and so the work went undone. But the father came home that
   evening and said, "Frank, did you do the work that I gave you?" "Yes,
   sir," said Frank. He told an untruth, and his father knew it, but said
   nothing. It troubled the boy, but he went to bed as usual. Next morning
   his mother said to him, "Your father did not sleep all last night."

   "Why didn't he sleep?" asked Frank.

   His mother said, "He spent the whole night praying for you."

   This sent the arrow into his heart. He was deeply convicted of his sin,
   and knew no rest until he had got right with God. Long afterward, when
   the boy became Bishop Warne, he said that his decision for Christ came
   from his father's prayer that night. He saw his father keeping his
   lonely and sorrowful vigil praying for his boy, and it broke his heart.
   Said he, "I can never be sufficiently grateful to him for that prayer."

   An evangelist, much used of God, has put on record that he commenced a
   series of meetings in a little church of about twenty members who were
   very cold and dead, and much divided. A little prayer-meeting was kept
   up by two or three women. "I preached, and closed at eight o--clock,"
   he says. "There was no one to speak or pray. The next evening one man
   spoke.

   "The next morning I rode six miles to a minister's study, and kneeled
   in prayer. I went back, and said to the little church:

   "If you can make out enough to board me, I will stay until God opens
   the windows of heaven. God has promised to bless these means, and I
   believe He will.

   "Within ten days there were so many anxious souls that I met one
   hundred and fifty of them at a time in an inquiry meeting, while
   Christians were praying in another house of worship. Several hundred, I
   think, were converted. It is safe to believe God."

   A mother asked the late John B. Gough to visit her son to win him to
   Christ. Gough found the young man's mind full of sceptical notions, and
   impervious to argument. Finally, the young man was asked to pray, just
   once, for light. He replied: "I do not know anything perfect to whom or
   to which I could pray." "How about your mother's love?" said the
   orator. "Isn't that perfect? Hasn't she always stood by you, and been
   ready to take you in, and care for you, when even your father had
   really kicked you out?" The young man choked with emotion, and said,
   "Y-e-s, sir; that is so." "Then pray to Love--it will help you. Will
   you promise?" He promised. That night the young man prayed in the
   privacy of his room. He kneeled down, closed his eyes, and struggling a
   moment uttered the words: "O Love." Instantly as by a flash of
   lightning, the old Bible text came to him: "God is love," and he said,
   brokenly, "O God!" Then another flash of Divine truth, and a voice
   said, God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son,'"and
   there, instantly, he exclaimed, "O Christ, Thou incarnation of Divinest
   love, show me light and truth." It was all over. He was in the light of
   the most perfect peace. He ran downstairs, adds the narrator of this
   incident, and told his mother that he was saved. That young man is
   today an eloquent minister of Jesus Christ.

   A water famine was threatened in Hakodate, Japan. Miss Dickerson, of
   the Methodist Episcopal Girls' School, saw the water supply growing
   less daily, and in one of the fall months appealed to the Board in New
   York for help. There was no money on hand, and nothing was done. Miss
   Dickerson inquired the cost of putting down an artesian well, but found
   the expense too great to be undertaken. On the evening of December
   31st, when the water was almost exhausted, the teachers and the older
   pupils met to pray for water, though they had no idea how their prayer
   was to be answered. A couple of days later a letter was received in the
   New York office which ran something like this: "Philadelphia, January
   1st. It is six o--clock in the morning of New Year's Day. All the other
   members of the family are asleep, but I was awakened with a strange
   impression that some one, somewhere, is in need of money which the Lord
   wants me to supply." Enclosed was a cheque for an amount which just
   covered the cost of the artesian well and the piping of the water into
   the school buildings.

   "I have seen God's hand stretched out to heal among the heathen in as
   mighty wonder-working power as in apostolic times," once said a
   well-known minister to the writer. "I was preaching to two thousand
   famine orphaned girls, at Kedgaum, India, at Ramabai's Mukti
   (salvation) Mission. A swarm of serpents as venomous and deadly as the
   reptile that smote Paul, suddenly raided the walled grounds, sent of
   Satan,' Ramabai said, and several of her most beautiful and faithful
   Christian girls were smitten by them, two of them bitten twice. I saw
   four of the very flower of her flock in convulsions at once,
   unconscious and apparently in the agonies of death.

   "Ramabai believes the Bible with an implicit and obedient faith. There
   were three of us missionaries there. She said: We will do just what the
   Bible says, I want you to minister for their healing according to James
   1:14-18.' She led the way into the dormitory where her girls were lying
   in spasms, and we laid our hands upon their heads and prayed, and
   anointed them with oil in the name of the Lord. Each of them was healed
   as soon as anointed and sat up and sang with faces shining. That
   miracle and marvel among the heathen mightily confirmed the word of the
   Lord, and was a profound and overpowering proclamation of God."

   Some years ago, the record of a wonderful work of grace in connection
   with one of the stations of the China Inland Mission attracted a good
   deal of attention. Both the number and spiritual character of the
   converts had been far greater than at other stations where the
   consecration of the missionaries had been just as great at the more
   fruitful place.

   This rich harvest of souls remained a mystery until Hudson Taylor on a
   visit to England discovered the secret. At the close of one of his
   addresses a gentleman came forward to make his acquaintance. In the
   conversation which followed, Mr. Taylor was surprised at the accurate
   knowledge the man possessed concerning this inland China station. "But
   how is it,? Mr. Taylor asked, "that you are so conversant with the
   conditions of that work?" "Oh!" he replied, "the missionary there and I
   are old college-mates; for years we have regularly corresponded; he has
   sent me names of enquirers and converts, and these I have daily taken
   to God in prayer."

   At last the secret was found! A praying man at home, praying
   definitely, praying daily, for specific cases among the heathen. That
   is the real intercessory missionary.

   Hudson Taylor himself, as all the world knows, was a man who knew how
   to pray and whose praying was blessed with fruitful answers. In the
   story of his life, told by Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor, we find page
   after page aglow with answered prayer. On his way out to China for the
   first time, in 1853, when he was only twenty-one years of age, he had a
   definite answer to prayer that was a great encouragement to his faith.
   "They .had just come through the Dampier Strait, but were not yet out
   of sight of the islands. Usually a breeze would spring up after sunset
   and last until about dawn. The utmost use was made of it, but during
   the day they lay still with flapping sails, often drifting back and
   losing a good deal of the advantage gained at night." The story
   continues in Hudson Taylor's own words:

   "This happened notably on one occasion when we were in dangerous
   proximity to the north of New Guinea. Saturday night had brought us to
   a point some thirty miles off the land, and during the Sunday morning
   service, which was held on deck, I could not fail to see that the
   Captain looked troubled and frequently went over to the side of the
   ship. When the service was ended I learnt from him the cause. A
   four-knot current was carrying us toward some sunken reefs, and we were
   already so near that it seemed improbable that we should get through
   the afternoon in safety. After dinner, the long boat was put out and
   all hands endeavored, without success, to turn the ship's head from the
   shore.

   "After standing together on the deck for some time in silence, the
   Captain said to me:

   "Well, we have done everything that can be done. We can only await the
   result.'

   "A thought occurred to me, and I replied: No, there is one thing we
   have not done yet.'

   "What is that?' he queried.

   "Four of us on board are Christians. Let us each retire to his own
   cabin, and in agreed prayer ask the Lord to give us immediately a
   breeze. He can as easily send it now as at sunset.'

   "The Captain complied with this proposal. I went and spoke to the other
   two men, and after prayer with the carpenter, we all four retired to
   wait upon God. I had a good but very brief season in prayer, and then
   felt so satisfied that our request was granted that I could not
   continue asking, and very soon went up again on deck. The first
   officer, a godless man, was in charge. I went over and asked him to let
   down the clews or corners of the mainsail, which had been drawn up in
   order to lessen the useless flapping of the sail against the rigging.

   "What would be the good of that?' he answered roughly.

   "I told him we had been asking a wind from God; that it was coming
   immediately; and we were so near the reef by this time that there was
   not a minute to lose.

   "With an oath and a look of contempt, he said he would rather see a
   wind than hear of it.

   "But while he was speaking I watched his eye, following it up to the
   royal, and there, sure enough, the corner of the topmost sail was
   beginning to tremble in the breeze.

   "Don't you see the wind is coming? Look at the royal!' I exclaimed.

   "No, it is only a cat's paw,' he rejoined (a mere puff of wind).

   "Cat's paw or not,' I cried, pray let down the mainsail and give us the
   benefit.'

   "This he was not slow to do. In another minute the heavy tread of the
   men on deck brought up the Captain from his cabin to see what was the
   matter. The breeze had indeed come! In a few minutes we were ploughing
   our way at six or seven knots an hour through the water ... and though
   the wind was sometimes unsteady, we did not altogether lose it until
   after passing the Pelew Islands.

   "Thus God encouraged me," adds this praying saint, "ere landing on
   China's shores to bring every variety of need to Him in prayer, and to
   expect that He would honour the name of the Lord Jesus and give the
   help each emergency required."

   In an address at Cambridge some time ago (reported in "The Life of
   Faith," April 3rd, 1912), Mr. S. D. Gordon told in his own inimitable
   way the story of a man in his own country, to illustrate from real life
   the fact of the reality of prayer, and that it is not mere talking.

   "This man," said Mr. Gordon, "came of an old New England family, a bit
   farther back an English family. He was a giant in size, and a keen man
   mentally, and a university-trained man. He had gone out West to live,
   and represented a prominent district in our House of Congress,
   answering to your House of Commons. He was a prominent leader there. He
   was reared in a Christian family, but he was a sceptic, and used to
   lecture against Christianity. He told me he was fond, in his lectures,
   of proving, as he thought, conclusively, that there was no God. That
   was the type of his infidelity.

   "One day he told me he was sitting in the Lower House of Congress. It
   was at the time of a Presidential Election, and when party feeling ran
   high. One would have thought that was the last place where a man would
   be likely to think about spiritual things. He said: I was sitting in my
   seat in that crowded House and that heated atmosphere, when a feeling
   came to me that the God, whose existence I thought I could successfully
   disprove, was just there above me, looking down on me, and that He was
   displeased with me, and with the way I was doing. I said to myself,
   "This is ridiculous, I guess I've been working too hard. I'll go and
   get a good meal and take a long walk and shake myself, and see if that
   will take this feeling away."' He got his extra meal, took a walk, and
   came back to his seat, but the impression would not be shaken off that
   God was there and was displeased with him. He went for a walk, day
   after day, but could never shake the feeling off. Then he went back to
   his constituency in his State, he said, to arrange matters there. He
   had the ambition to be the Governor of his State, and his party was the
   dominant party in the State, and, as far as such things could be
   judged, he was in the line to become Governor there, in one of the most
   dominant States our Central West. He said: I went home to fix that
   thing up as far as I could, and to get ready for it. But I had hardly
   reached home and exchanged greetings, when my wife, who was an earnest
   Christian woman, said to me that a few of them had made a little
   covenant of prayer that I might become a Christian.' He did not want
   her to know the experience that he had just been going through, and so
   he said as carelessly as he could, When did this thing begin, this
   praying of yours?' She named the date. Then he did some very quick
   thinking, and he knew, as he thought back, that it was the day on the
   calendar when that strange impression came to him for the first time.

   "He said to me: I was tremendously shaken. I wanted to be honest. I was
   perfectly honest in not believing in God, and I thought I was right.
   But if what she said was true, then merely as a lawyer sifting his
   evidence in a case, it would be good evidence that there was really
   something in their prayer. I was terrifically shaken, and wanted to be
   honest, and did not know what to do. That same night I went to a little
   Methodist chapel, and if somebody had known how to talk with me, I
   think I should have accepted Christ that night.' Then he said that the
   next night he went back again to that chapel, where meetings were being
   held each night, and there he kneeled at the altar, and yielded his
   great strong will to the will of God. Then he said, I knew I was to
   preach,' and he is preaching still in a Western State. That is half of
   the story. I also talked with his wife--I wanted to put the two halves
   together, so as to get the bit of teaching in it all--and she told me
   this. She had been a Christian--what you call a nominal Christian--a
   strange confusion of terms. Then there came a time when she was led
   into a full surrender of her life to the Lord Jesus Christ. Then she
   said, At once there came a great intensifying of desire that my husband
   might be a Christian, and we made that little compact to pray for
   him--each day until he became a Christian. That night I was kneeling at
   my bedside before going to rest, praying for my husband, praying very
   earnestly and then a voice said to me, "Are you willing for the results
   that will come if your husband is converted?"' The little message was
   so very distinct that she said she was frightened; she had never had
   such an experience. But she went on praying still more earnestly, and
   again there came the quiet voice, Are you willing for the
   consequences?' And again there was a sense of being startled,
   frightened. But she still went on praying, and wondering what this
   meant, and a third time the quiet voice came more quietly than ever as
   she described it, Are you willing for the consequences?'

   "Then she told me she said with great earnestness, O God, I am willing
   for anything Thou dost think good, if only my husband may know Thee,
   and become a true Christian man.' She said that instantly, when that
   prayer came from her lips, there came into her heart a wonderful sense
   of peace, a great peace that she could not explain, a peace that
   passeth understanding,' and from that moment--it was the very night of
   the covenant, the night when her husband had that first strange
   experience--the assurance never left her that he would accept Christ.
   But all those weeks she prayed with the firm assurance that the result
   was coming. What were the consequences? They were of a kind that I
   think no one would think small. She was the wife of a man in a very
   prominent political position; she was the wife of a man who was in the
   line of becoming the first official of his State, and she officially
   the first lady socially? of that State, with all the honour that that
   social standing would imply. Now she is the wife of a Methodist
   preacher, with her home changed every two or three years, she going
   from this place to that, a very different social position, and having a
   very different income that she would otherwise have had. Yet I never
   met a woman who had more of the wonderful peace of God in her heart and
   of the light of God in her face, that that woman."

   And Mr. Gordon's comment on that incident is this: "Now, you can see at
   once that there was no change in the purpose of God through that
   prayer. The prayer worked out His purpose; it did not change it. But
   the woman's surrender gave the opportunity of working out the will that
   God wanted to work out. If we might give ourselves to Him and learn His
   will, and use all our strength in learning His will and bending to His
   will, then we would begin to pray, and there is simply nothing that
   could resist the tremendous power of the prayer. Oh for more men who
   will be simple enough to get in touch with God, and give Him the
   mastery of the whole life, and learn His will, and then give
   themselves, as Jesus gave Himself, to the sacred service of
   intercession!"

   To the man or woman who is acquainted with God and who knows how to
   pray, there is nothing remarkable in the answers that come. They are
   sure of being heard, since they ask in accordance with what they know
   to be the mind and the will of God. Dr. William Burr, Bishop of Europe
   in the Methodist Episcopal Church, tells that a few years ago, when he
   visited their Boys' School in Vienna, he found that although the year
   was not up, all available funds had been spent. He hesitated to make a
   special appeal to his friends in America. He counselled with the
   teachers. They took the matter to God in earnest and continued prayer,
   believing that He would grant their request. Ten days later Bishop Burt
   was in Rome, and there came to him a letter from a friend in New York,
   which read substantially thus: "As I went to my office on Broadway one
   morning (and the date was the very one on which the teachers were
   praying), a voice seemed to tell me that you were in need of funds for
   the Boys' School in Vienna. I very gladly enclose a cheque for the
   work." The cheque was for the amount needed. There had been no human
   communication between Vienna and New York. But while they were yet
   speaking God answered them.

   Some time ago there appeared in an English religious weekly the report
   of an incident narrated by a well-known preacher in the course of an
   address to children. For the truth of the story he was able to vouch. A
   child lay sick in a country cottage, and her younger sister heard the
   doctor say, as he left the house, "Nothing but a miracle can save her."
   The little girl went to her money-box, took out the few coins it
   contained, and in perfect simplicity of heart went to shop after shop
   in the village street, asking, "Please, I want to buy a miracle."

   From each she came away disappointed. Even the local chemist had to
   say, "My dear, we don't sell miracles here." But outside his door two
   men were talking, and had overheard the child's request. One was a
   great doctor from a London hospital, and he asked her to explain what
   she wanted. When he understood the need, he hurried with her to the
   cottage, examined the sick girl and said to the mother: "It is
   true--only a miracle can save her, and it must be performed at once."
   He got his instruments, performed the operation, and the patient's life
   was saved.

   D. L. Moody gives this illustration of the power of prayer: "While in
   Edinburgh, a man was pointed out to me by a friend, who said: That man
   is chairman of the Edinburgh Infidel Club.' I went and sat beside him
   and said, My friend, I am glad to see you in our meeting. Are you
   concerned about your welfare?'

   "I do not believe in any hereafter.'

   "Well, just get down on your knees and let me pray for you.'

   "No, I do not believe in prayer.'

   "I knelt beside him as he sat, and prayed. He made a great deal of
   sport of it. A year after I met him again. I took him by the hand and
   said: Hasn't God answered my prayer yet?'

   "There is no God. If you believe in one who answers prayers, try your
   hand on me.'

   "Well, a great many are now praying for you, and God's time will. come,
   and I believe you will be saved yet.'

   "Some time afterwards I got a letter from a leading barrister in
   Edinburgh telling me that my infidel friend had come to Christ, and
   that seventeen of his club men had followed his example.

   "I did not know how God would answer prayer, but I knew He would
   answer. Let us come boldly to God."

   Robert Louis Stevenson tells a vivid story of a storm at sea. The
   passengers below were greatly alarmed, as the waves dashed over the
   vessel. At last one of them, against orders, crept to the deck, and
   came to the pilot, who was lashed to the wheel which he was turning
   without flinching. The pilot caught sight of the terror-stricken man,
   and gave him a reassuring smile. Below went the passenger, and
   comforted the others by saying, "I have seen the face of the pilot, and
   he smiled. All is well."

   That is how we feel when through the gateway of prayer we find our way
   into the Father's presence. We see His face, and we know that all is
   well, since His hand is on the helm of events, and "even the winds and
   the waves obey Him." When we live in fellowship with Him, we come with
   confidence into His presence, asking in the full confidence of
   receiving and meeting with the justification of our faith.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      XII

   Let your hearts be much set on revivals of religion. Never forget that
   the churches have hitherto existed and prospered by revivals; and that
   if they are to exist and prosper in time to come, it must be by the
   same cause which has from the first been their glory and defence.--Joel
   Hawes

   If any minister can be satisfied without conversions, he shall have no
   conversions.--C. H. Spurgeon

   I do not believe that my desires for a revival were ever half so strong
   as they ought to be; nor do I see how a minister can help being in a
   "constant fever" when his Master is dishonoured and souls are destroyed
   in so many ways.--Edward Payson

   An aged saint once came to the pastor at night and said: "We are about
   to have a revival." He was asked why he knew so. His answer was, "I
   went into the stable to take care of my cattle two hours ago, and there
   the Lord has kept me in prayer until just now. And I feel that we are
   going to be revived." It was the commencement of a revival.--H. C. Fish

   It has been said that the history of revivals is the history of
   religion, and no one can study their history without being impressed
   with their mighty influence upon the destiny of the race. To look back
   over the progress of the Divine Kingdom upon earth is to review revival
   periods which have come like refreshing showers upon dry and thirsty
   ground, making the desert to blossom as the rose, and bringing new eras
   of spiritual life and activity just when the Church had fallen under
   the influence of the apathy of the times, and needed to be aroused to a
   new sense of her duty and responsibility. "From one point of view, and
   that not the least important," writes Principal Lindsay, in "The Church
   and the Ministry in the Early Centuries," "the history of the Church
   flows on from one time of revival to another, and whether we take the
   awakenings in the old Catholic, the mediaeval, or the modern Church,
   these have always been the work of men specially gifted with the power
   of seeing and declaring the secrets of the deepest Christian life, and
   the effect of their work has always been proportionate to the spiritual
   receptivity of the generation they have spoken to."

   As God, from the beginning, has wrought prominently through revivals,
   there can be no denial of the fact that revivals are a part of the
   Divine plan. The Kingdom of our Lord has been advanced in large measure
   by special seasons of gracious and rapid accomplishment of the work of
   conversion, and it may be inferred, therefore, that the means through
   which God has worked in other times will be employed in our time to
   produce similar results. "The quiet conversion of one sinner after
   another, under the ordinary ministry of the Gospel," says one writer on
   the subject, "must always be regarded with feelings of satisfaction and
   gratitude by the ministers and disciples of Christ; but a periodical
   manifestation of the simultaneous conversion of thousands is also to be
   desired, because of its adaptation to afford a visible and impressive
   demonstration that God has made that same Jesus, Who was rejected and
   crucified, both Lord and Christ; and that, in virtue of His Divine
   Mediatorship, He has assumed the royal sceptre of universal supremacy,
   and "must reign till all His enemies be made His footstool." It is,
   therefore, reasonable to expect that, from time to time, He will repeat
   that which on the day of Pentecost formed the con-elusive and crowning
   evidence of His Messiahship and Sovereignty; and, by so doing, startle
   the slumbering souls of careless worldlings, gain the attentive ear of
   the unconverted, and, in a remarkable way, break in upon those
   brilliant dreams of earthly glory, grandeur, wealth, power and
   happiness, which the rebellious and God-forgetting multitude so fondly
   cherish. Such an outpouring of the Holy Spirit forms at once a
   demonstrative proof of the completeness and acceptance of His once
   offering of Himself as a sacrifice for sin, and a prophetic "earnest"
   of the certainty that He "shall appear the second time without sin unto
   salvation," to judge the world in righteousness."

   And that revivals are to be expected, proceeding, as they do, from the
   right use of the appropriate means, is a fact which needs not a little
   emphasis in these days, when the material is exalted at the expense of
   the spiritual, and when ethical standards are supposed to be supreme.
   That a revival is not a miracle was powerfully taught by Charles G.
   Finney. There might, he said, be a miracle among its antecedent causes,
   or there might not. The Apostles employed miracles simply as a means by
   which they arrested attention to their message, and established its
   Divine authority. "But the miracle was not the revival. The miracle was
   one thing; the revival that followed it was quite another thing. The
   revivals in the Apostles' days were connected with miracles, but they
   were not miracles." All revivals are dependent upon God, but in
   revivals, as in other things, He invites and requires the assistance of
   man, and the full result is obtained when there is co-operation between
   the Divine and the human. In other words, to employ a familiar phrase,
   God alone can save the world, but God cannot save the world alone. God
   and man unite for the task, the response of the Divine being invariably
   in proportion to the desire and the effort of the human.

   This co-operation, then, being necessary, what is the duty which we, as
   co-workers with God, require to undertake? First of all, and most
   important of all--the point which we desire particularly to
   emphasise--we must give ourselves to prayer. "Revivals," as Dr. J.
   Wilbur Chapman reminds us, "are born in prayer. When Wesley prayed
   England was revived; when Knox prayed, Scotland was refreshed; when the
   Sunday School teachers of Tannybrook prayed, 11,000 young people were
   added to the Church in a year. Whole nights of prayer have always been
   succeeded by whole days of soul-winning."

   When D. L. Moody's Church in Chicago lay in ashes, he went over to
   England, in 1872, not to preach, but to listen to others preach while
   his new church was being built. One Sunday morning he was prevailed
   upon to preach in a London pulpit. But somehow the spiritual atmosphere
   was lacking. He confessed afterwards that he never had such a hard time
   preaching in his life. Everything was perfectly dead, and, as he vainly
   tried to preach, he said to himself, "What a fool I was to consent to
   preach! I came here to listen, and here I am preaching." Then the awful
   thought came to him that he had to preach again at night, and only the
   fact that he had given the promise to do so kept him faithful to the
   engagement. But when Mr. Moody entered the pulpit at night, and faced
   the crowded congregation, he was conscious of a new atmosphere. "The
   powers of an unseen world seemed to have fallen upon the audience." As
   he drew towards the close of his sermon he became emboldened to give
   out an invitation, and as he concluded he said, "If there is a man or
   woman here who will tonight accept Jesus Christ, please stand up." At
   once about 500 people rose to their feet. Thinking that there must be
   some mistake, he asked the people to be seated, and then, in order that
   there might be no possible misunderstanding, he repeated the
   invitation, couching it in even more definite and difficult terms.
   Again the same number rose. Still thinking that something must be
   wrong, Mr. Moody, for the second time, asked the standing men an women
   to be seated, and then he invited all who really meant to accept Christ
   to pass into the vestry. Fully 500 people did as requested, and that
   was the beginning of a revival in that church and neighbourhood, which
   brought Mr. Moody back from Dublin, a few days later, that he might
   assist the wonderful work of God.

   The sequel, however, must be given, or our purpose in relating the
   incident will be defeated. When Mr. Moody preached at the morning
   service there was a woman in the congregation who had an invalid
   sister. On her return home she told the invalid that the preacher had
   been a Mr. Moody from Chicago, and on hearing this she turned pale.
   "What," she said, "Mr. Moody from Chicago l I read about him some time
   ago in an American paper, and I have been praying God to send him to
   London, and to our church. If I had known he was going to preach this
   morning I would have eaten no breakfast. I would have spent the whole
   time in prayer. Now, sister, go out of the room, lock the door, send me
   no dinner; no matter who comes, don't let them see me. I am going to
   spend the whole afternoon in prayer." And so while Mr. Moody stood in
   the pulpit that had been like an ice-chamber in the morning, the
   bedridden saint was holding him up before God, and God, who ever
   delights to answer prayer, poured out His Spirit in mighty power.

   The God of revivals who answered the prayer of His child for Mr. Moody,
   is willing to hear and to answer the faithful, believing prayers of His
   people today. Wherever God's conditions are met there the revival is
   sure to fall. Professor Thos. Nicholson, of Cornell College, U.S.A.,
   relates an experience on his first circuit that impresses anew the old
   lesson of the place of prayer in the work of God.

   There had not been a revival on that circuit in years, and things were
   not spiritually hopeful. During more than four weeks the pastor had
   preached faithfully, visited from house to house, in stores, shops, and
   out-of-the-way places, and had done everything he could. The fifth
   Monday night saw many of the official members at lodges, but only a
   corporal's guard at the church.

   From that meeting the pastor went home, cast down, but not in despair.
   He resolved to spend that night in prayer. "Locking the door, he took
   Bible and hymn book and began to inquire more diligently of the Lord,
   though the meetings had been the subject of hours of earnest prayer.
   Only God knows the anxiety and the faithful, prayerful study of that
   night. Near the dawn a great peace and a full assurance came that God
   would surely bless the plan which had been decided upon, and a text was
   chosen which he felt sure was of the Lord. Dropping upon the bed, the
   pastor slept about two hours, then rose, hastily breakfasted, and went
   nine miles to the far side of the circuit to visit some sick people.
   All day the assurance increased.

   "Toward night a pouring rain set in, the roads were heavy and we
   reached home, wet, supperless, and a little late, only to find no fire
   in the church, the lights unlit, and no signs of service. The janitor
   had concluded that the rain would prevent the service. We changed the
   order, rang the bell, and prepared for war. Three young men formed the
   congregation, but in that full assurance' the pastor delivered the
   message which had been prayed out on the preceding night, as earnestly
   and as fully as if the house had been crowded, then made a personal
   appeal to each young man in turn. Two yielded, and testified before the
   meeting closed.

   "The tired pastor went to a sweet rest, and next morning, rising a
   little later than usual, learned that one of the young men was going
   from store to store throughout the town telling of his wonderful
   deliverance, and exhorting the people to salvation. Night after night
   conversions occurred, until in two weeks we heard 144 people testify in
   forty-five minutes. All three points of that circuit saw a blaze of
   revival that winter, and family after family came into the church, unto
   the membership was more than trebled.

   "Out of that meeting one convert is a successful pastor in the Michigan
   Conference, another is the wife of one of the choicest of our pastors,
   and a third was in the ministry for a number of years, and then went to
   another denomination, where he is faithful unto this day. Probably none
   of the members ever knew of the pastor's night of prayer, but he verily
   believes that God somehow does for the man who thus prays, what He does
   not do for the man who does not pray, and he is certain that more
   things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.'"

   All the true revivals have been born in prayer. When God's people
   become so concerned about the state of religion that they lie on their
   faces day and night in earnest supplication, the blessing will be sure
   to fail.

   It is the same all down the ages. Every revival of which we have any
   record has been bathed in prayer. Take, for example, the wonderful
   revival in Shotts (Scotland) in 1630. The fact that several of the then
   persecuted ministers would take a part in solemn convocation having
   become generally known, a vast concourse of godly persons assembled on
   this occasion from all quarters of the country, and several days were
   spent in social prayer, preparatory to the service. In the evening,
   instead of retiring to rest, the multitude divided themselves into
   little bands and spent the whole night in supplication and praise. The
   Monday was consecrated to thanksgiving, a practice not then common, and
   proved the great days of the feast. After much entreaty, John
   Livingston, chaplain to the Countess of Wigtown, a young man and not
   ordained, agreed to preach. He had spent the night in prayer and
   conference--but as the hour of assembling approached his heart quailed
   at the thought of addressing so many aged and experienced saints, and
   he actually fled from the duty he had undertaken. But just as the kirk
   of Shotts was vanishing from his view, those words, "Was I ever a
   barren wilderness or a land of darkness?" were borne in upon his mind
   with such force as compelled him to return to the work.

   He took for his text Ezekiel 36:25, 26, and discoursed with great power
   for about two hours. Five hundred conversions were believed to have
   occurred under that one sermon, thus prefaced by prayer. "It was the
   sowing of a seed through Clydesdale, so that many of the most eminent
   Christians of that country could date their conversion, or some
   remarkable confirmation of their case, from that day."

   Of Richard Baxter it has been said that, "he stained his study walls
   with praying breath; and after becoming thus anointed with the unction
   of the Holy Ghost he sent a river of living water over Kidderminster."
   Whitfield once thus prayed, "O Lord, give me souls or take my soul."
   After much closet pleading, "he once went to the Devil's fair and took
   more than a thousand souls out of the paw of the lion in a single day."

   Mr. Finney says: "I once knew a minister who had a revival fourteen
   winters in succession. I did not know how to account for it till I saw
   one of his members get up in a prayer meeting and make a confession.
   "Brethren," he said, "I have been long in the habit of praying every
   Saturday night till after midnight for the descent of the Holy Ghost
   among us. And now, brethren (and he began to weep), I confess that I
   have neglected it for two or three weeks." The secret was out. That
   minister had a praying church."

   And so we might go on multiplying illustration upon illustration to
   show the place of prayer in revival and to demonstrate that every
   mighty movement of the Spirit of God had its source in the
   prayer-chamber. The lesson of it all is this, that as workers together
   with God we must regard ourselves as in not a little measure
   responsible for the conditions which prevail around us today. Are we
   concerned about the coldness of the Church? Do we grieve over the lack
   of conversions? Does our soul go out to God in midnight cries for the
   outpouring of His Spirit?

   If not, part of the blame lies at our door. If we do our part, God will
   do His. Around us is a world lost in sin, above us is a God willing and
   able to save; it is ours to build the bridge that links heaven and
   earth, and prayer is the mighty instrument that does the work.

   And so the old cry comes to us with insistent voice, "Pray, brethren,
   pray."
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      XIII

   Lord Jesus, cause me to know in my daily experience the glory and
   sweetness of Thy name, and then teach me how to use it in my prayer, so
   that I may be even like Israel, a prince prevailing with God. Thy name
   is my passport, and secures me access; Thy name is my plea, and secures
   me answer; Thy name is my honour and secures me glory. Blessed Name,
   Thou art honey in my mouth, music in my ear, heaven in my heart, and
   all in all to my being!--C. H. Spurgeon

   I do not mean that every prayer we offer is answered exactly as we
   desire it to be. Were this the case, it would mean that we would be
   dictating to God, and prayer would degenerate into a mere system of
   begging. Just as an earthly father knows what is best for his
   children's welfare, so does God take into consideration the particular
   needs of His human family, and meets them out of His wonderful
   storehouse. If our petitions are in accordance with His will, and if we
   seek His glory in the asking, the answers will come in ways that will
   astonish us and fill our hearts with songs of thanksgiving. God is a
   rich and bountiful Father, and He does not forget His children, nor
   withhold from them anything which it would be to their advantage to
   receive.--J. Kennedy Maclean

   The example of our Lord in the matter of prayer is one which His
   followers might well copy. Christ prayed much and He taught much about
   prayer. His life and His works, as well as His teaching, are
   illustrations of the nature and necessity of prayer. He lived and
   laboured to answer prayer. But the necessity of importunity in prayer
   was the emphasised point in His teaching about prayer. He taught not
   only that men must pray, but that they must persevere in prayer.

   He taught in command and precept the idea of energy and earnestness in
   praying. He gives to our efforts graduation and climax. We are to ask,
   but to the asking we must add seeking, and seeking must pass into the
   full force of effort in knocking. The pleading soul must be aroused to
   effort by God's silence. Denial, instead of abating or abashing, must
   arouse its latent energies and kindle anew its highest ardor.

   In the Sermon on the Mount, in which He lays down the cardinal duties
   of His religion, He not only gives prominence to prayer in general and
   secret prayer in particular, but He sets apart a distinct and different
   section to give weight to importunate prayer. To prevent any
   discouragement in praying He lays as a basic principle the fact of
   God's great fatherly willingness--that God's willingness to answer our
   prayers exceeds our willingness to give good and necessary things to
   our children, just as far as God's ability, goodness and perfection
   exceed our infirmities and evil. As a further assurance and stimulant
   to prayer Christ gives the most positive and iterated assurance of
   answer to prayers. He declares: "Ask and it shall be given to you; seek
   and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you." And to make
   assurance doubly sure, He adds: "For every one that asketh, receiveth;
   and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be
   opened."

   Why does He unfold to us the Father's loving readiness to answer the
   prayers of His children? Why does He asseverate so strongly that prayer
   will be answered? Why does He repeat that positive asseveration six
   times? Why does Christ on two distinct occasions go over the same
   strong promises, iterations, and reiterations in regard to the
   certainty of prayer being answered? Because He knew that there would be
   delay in many an answer which would call for importunate pressing, and
   that if our faith did not have the strongest assurance of God's
   willingness to answer, delay would break it down. And that our
   spiritual sloth would come in, under the guise of submission, and say
   it is not God's will to give what we ask, and so cease praying and lose
   our case. After Christ had put God's willingness to answer prayer in a
   very clear and strong light, He then urges to importunity, and that
   every unanswered prayer, instead of abating our pressure should only
   increase intensity and energy. If asking does not get, let asking pass
   into the settled attitude and spirit of seeking. If seeking does not
   secure the answer, let seeking pass on to the more energetic and
   clamorous plea of knocking. We must persevere till we get it. No
   failure here if our faith does not break down.

   As our great example in prayer, our Lord puts love as a primary
   condition--a love that has purified the heart from all the elements of
   hate, revenge, and ill will. Love is the supreme condition of prayer, a
   life inspired by love. The 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians is the law
   of prayer as well as the law of love. The law of love is the law of
   prayer, and to master this chapter from the epistle of St. Patti is to
   learn the first and fullest condition of prayer.

   Christ taught us also to approach the Father in His name. That is our
   passport. It is in His name that we are to make our petitions known.
   "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me, the works
   that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do;
   because I go unto the Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in My name,
   that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye
   shall ask Me anything in My name, that will I do."

   How wide and comprehensive is that "whatsoever." There is no limit to
   the power of that name. "Whatsoever ye shall ask." That is the Divine
   declaration, and it opens up to every praying child a vista of infinite
   resource and possibility.

   And that is our heritage. All that Christ has may become ours if we
   obey the conditions. The one secret is prayer. The place of revealing
   and of equipment, of grace and of power, is the prayer-chamber, and as
   we meet there with God we shall not only win our triumphs but we shall
   also grow in the likeness of our Lord and become His living witnesses
   to men.

   Without prayer the Christian life, robbed of its sweetness and its
   beauty, becomes cold and formal and dead; but rooted in the secret
   place where God meets and walks and talks with His own, it grows into
   such a testimony of Divine power that all men will feel its influence
   and be touched by the warmth of its love. Thus, resembling our Lord and
   Master, we shall be used for the glory of God and the salvation of our
   fellow men.

   And that, surely is the purpose of all real prayer and the end of all
   true service.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    Indexes
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Scripture References

   Ezekiel

   [1]36:25   [2]36:26

   Romans

   [3]8:15   [4]8:26-27

   Galatians

   [5]4:6

   Ephesians

   [6]2:18   [7]6:18

   1 Timothy

   [8]2:1-3

   James

   [9]1:14-18

   Jude

   [10]1:20-21
     __________________________________________________________________

            This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal
               Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org,
                   generated on demand from ThML source.

References

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   3. file:///ccel/b/bounds/purpose/cache/purpose.html3#XI-p2.2
   4. file:///ccel/b/bounds/purpose/cache/purpose.html3#XI-p2.2
   5. file:///ccel/b/bounds/purpose/cache/purpose.html3#XI-p2.2
   6. file:///ccel/b/bounds/purpose/cache/purpose.html3#XI-p2.1
   7. file:///ccel/b/bounds/purpose/cache/purpose.html3#XI-p2.2
   8. file:///ccel/b/bounds/purpose/cache/purpose.html3#VIII-p7.1
   9. file:///ccel/b/bounds/purpose/cache/purpose.html3#XI-p29.1
  10. file:///ccel/b/bounds/purpose/cache/purpose.html3#XI-p2.2