Silliam 3par!5ane CSarbiirton 
 
 umuimMhiiilili. 
 
BV 213 .W37 1911 
 Warburton, William Parsons. 
 Prayer 
 
praipet 
 
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 'Kev.XKIlilliamIPar0ondMar&urton,/l>«!SU 
 
 late Canon V^csidcntiame of TKnincbeetec Catbc^ral 
 
 (5. p. putTiam'0 Sons 
 
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 TTfx ftnicherboclier Preee 
 
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Copyright, 1911 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM PARSONS WARBURTON 
 
 trbe imCcftcrbocftcc ptees. flew Iffiotft 
 
A paper read before the members of 
 the Winchester Clerical Association, 
 
 ui 
 
prater 
 
 You will, I trust, pardon me for intro- 
 ducing, even in a brotherly circle 
 like our own, so difficult a subject as 
 that of prayer. I do so with the great- 
 est diffidence, but not without some hope 
 that our discussion this evening may 
 help us, in the mutual exchange of ideas, 
 to profit by the experience of others on 
 this perhaps the deepest of all questions, 
 — to reap " the harvest of a quiet eye that 
 broods and sleeps on his own heart. ^" 
 An Englishman, as a rule, takes a certain 
 characteristic pride in reserve, in not 
 
 I Wordsworth. 
 
 I 
 
2 IPrasec 
 
 wearing his heart upon his sleeve, — but 
 do we not sometimes, do we not often, 
 in fact, lose valuable opportunities of 
 sympathy and mutual encouragement 
 by carrying our reticence on religious 
 subjects too far? Is it not sometimes 
 an unworthy self-consciousness which 
 makes us shrink from opening our hearts 
 to one another about things which, 
 after all is said and done, are the most 
 deeply interesting, the most urgently 
 important things in the world — not (to 
 us Christians) abstract speculations, but 
 emphatically "the things which belong 
 unto our peace. " I beheve it to be one, 
 and not the least admirable, of the fea- 
 tures of that so-called Evangelicalism 
 which did so much for the Church of 
 England in a past period, and is now 
 again reasserting itself and colouring 
 the teaching of men supposed to stand 
 
as it were at the opposite pole of ecclesi- 
 astical opinion, that it has always 
 encouraged, even to the verge of inquis- 
 itiveness, the mutual exchange among 
 Christian brethren of their experiences 
 on the needs and perils of the soul. Let 
 us speak about prayer to-night, asfratres 
 fratribus, Christiani Christianis, pericli- 
 tati periclitatis , tnorituri morituris. 
 (Brothers to brothers, Christians to 
 Christians, men on trial to men on 
 trial, men who have to die to men who 
 have to die.) 
 
 When I began to think of what I 
 should say to you I soon found that 
 prayer might well form the basis, not 
 of one of our discussions, but of a series 
 of discussions, and that it would be 
 necessary to narrow our subject in every 
 possible way in order to bring it into 
 manageable compass. Therefore, in be- 
 
4 prai2et 
 
 ginning, as I suppose we are bound to 
 do, with the position of those who ob- 
 ject altogether to the use of prayer, I 
 shall class them, neglecting minor shades 
 of difference, as either Atheistical or 
 Necessarian. The former may be dis- 
 missed at once, for in their case prayer 
 logically falls to the ground for lack of an 
 object: "He that cometh to God must 
 believe that He is.'' Of the Necessarians 
 we must make two groups : those, on the 
 one hand, who believe that the author 
 of nature has bound nature down once 
 for all by irreversible and invariable laws, 
 and then withdrawn Himself from all 
 concern with the machinery He has set 
 in motion; and, on the other hand, those 
 religious Necessarians who hold that 
 God, being supremely wise, loving, and 
 merciful, arranges everything in the best 
 possible way, and that, therefore, if the 
 
praeec 5 
 
 course of nature were altered in any- 
 particular, it could only be altered for 
 the worse. In the eyes of the former, 
 prayer is unavailing; in the eyes of the 
 latter, it is mischievous. We must 
 now, however, confine ourselves to the 
 difficulties of those who, believing that 
 there is a God, and a God at once om- 
 nipotent, omniscient, and benevolent, 
 fail to understand how the march of His 
 Eternal Providence can be affected by 
 the prayer of ignorant, capricious, and 
 short-sighted creatures of a day. Well, 
 whether or no Necessarianism be any- 
 thing more than a barren abstract specu- 
 lation, — whether that theory be true or 
 false, — every human being acts, and can- 
 not help acting, — on the hypothesis of its 
 falsehood. He acts upon the conscious- 
 ness of liberty of choice, and no argu- 
 ment will convince him that he had no 
 
6 prater 
 
 alternative. We act as if we were free, 
 and it is reasonable to suppose we shall 
 be judged as if we were free. Necessity, 
 therefore, as a theory of life and a 
 basis of conduct, falls to the ground 
 and leaves us responsible for our ac- 
 tions, and therefore all the more in 
 need of any help that we can get, to 
 make our lives conformable to the Di- 
 vine law and so fulfil the conditions of 
 salvation. 
 
 Well then, the whole of mankind, or 
 certainly the whole of the Christian 
 world, has been taught by the accumu- 
 lated testimony of millions who have 
 tried it and recorded their experience, 
 that prayer is heard and answered, 
 and that in prayer the worshipper is 
 brought into contact with a source of 
 power available for human ends. If the 
 verdict of human experience was that 
 
God neither heard nor answered prayer, 
 it would surely long since have ceased to 
 be offered; but the whole induction is 
 the other way, and indicates that God's 
 dealings with us are influenced by prayer 
 in some way which may be logically in- 
 explicable, but is sufficient to justify its 
 use, and commend it to the understand- 
 ing as well as to the heart. "Prayer 
 exists as a fact of human consciousness, 
 and it is therefore arguable that it has 
 a definite purpose in the economy of 
 nature, since, if it had no such purpose, 
 it would not and could not exist at 
 all." 
 
 Let us then consider prayer in four 
 aspects : 
 
 Firstly, in respect of its origin; 
 Secondly, of its obligations — 
 Thirdly, of its manner; and 
 Fourthly, of its proper subjects. 
 
8 prater 
 
 I — Origin of Prayer 
 
 The writer of the most fascinating book 
 since Herodotus on Eastern travel,^ after 
 describing the awful solitariness and the 
 sense of man's littleness in journeying 
 day after day across the endless sands 
 of the desert, exclaims: "The earth is 
 so samely that your eye turns towards 
 Heaven — towards Heaven, I mean, in 
 the sense of sky ' ' — for relief. He intends, 
 I suppose, by this parenthesis (heaven in 
 the sense of sky) to intimate that it is 
 not his way to "turn to Heaven" for re- 
 lief in any other sense, that he is not 
 misled by the blind instinct which 
 prompts most men to do so, when the 
 burden of human destiny seems too heavy 
 to bear alone. But I believe that the 
 writer was deceiving himself in this Ti- 
 
 ^Eothen, A. W. Kinglake. 
 
pragcr 9 
 
 tanic protest. I believe there has never 
 been a man who has not felt at some 
 time or other that he was unequal to 
 cope with the forces of destiny without 
 the aid of some unseen power outside 
 himself to which he instinctively appeals. 
 Whatever be the exact etymology of the 
 word ''religion," it bears evidence to 
 the fact that man feels bound by a 
 tie, which he acknowledges, and of 
 which he cannot rid himself, to a being 
 whom he cannot approach and cannot 
 see, but of whose power he entertains 
 no doubt. 
 
 And is not this feeling the rationale of 
 prayer? an attempt — an instinct, if you 
 will — to find a link between things visible 
 and things unseen, between earth and 
 heaven, between God and man — an at- 
 tempt to construct, as it were, an aerial 
 bridge of communication, one extremity 
 
10 prai^er 
 
 of which stands on the solid earth at our 
 feet, and the other (as we first dimly 
 surmise, then hopefully trust, and, at 
 last, believe and know with a certainty 
 amounting to conviction) is based on 
 an unseen rock beyond the void. 
 
 Prayer cannot exist without at least 
 a rudimentary faith: luaoY)? xpoaeux'^^; 
 p(ic6pov xal xpY)xl<; tq xIctk; (of all prayer 
 the bed-rock and basis is faith). We 
 read as follows in Newman's Apologia: 
 *' Butler teaches us that probability is 
 the guide of life. The danger of this 
 doctrine in many minds is its tendency 
 to destroy in them absolute certainty, 
 leading them to consider every conclu- 
 sion as doubtful, and resolving truth 
 into an opinion which it is safe to obey 
 or profess, but not possible to embrace 
 with full internal assent. If this were 
 allowed, then the well-known prayer, * O 
 
praigct II 
 
 God, if there is a God, save my soul, 
 if I have a soul' would be the highest 
 measure of devotion, but who can really 
 pray to a being of whose existence he is 
 in doubt?" 
 
 Scarcely in advance of this absolutely 
 contingent and hypothetical position is 
 that formulated, in a moment of unac- 
 customed despondency, by the author of 
 In Memoriam: 
 
 "What am I? 
 An infant crying in the night — 
 An infant crying for the Hght, 
 And with no language but a cry!" 
 
 We cannot get beyond the barrier which 
 separates such a mere ejaculation of help- 
 lessness as this from prayer properly so- 
 called, unless we postulate that our cry 
 be at least articulate, and contain a pe- 
 tition addressed to some one with a 
 power to help us. In other words, prayer 
 
12 IPraser 
 
 must have an object as well as a subject. 
 This, however, does not carry the argu- 
 ment very far, for even Fetish worship 
 has an object, and the Athenian thief, 
 starting in the morning for a day's thiev- 
 ing, could pray "Ava^ "AxoXXov, ^6q pis 
 xXexTsiv (0 King Apollo, grant to me 
 to steal). Prayer in order to be 
 prayer must be addressed to one whom 
 we believe to be in sympathy, or to be 
 capable of sympathy, with our moral as- 
 pirations; nor do I think that it can be 
 addressed with much hope of success to 
 "a stream of tendency" or to "a some- 
 thing outside of ourselves which makes 
 for righteousness. " * * He that cometh to 
 God must believe that He is": so did 
 Lucretius believe that God is, but be- 
 tween the above clause of Scripture 
 and the next, "He is a re warder of 
 them that diligently seek Him," there 
 
Prai2cr 13 
 
 is a gulf wide enough to take in the 
 whole range of Lucretian philosophy : 
 
 ''Omnis cnim per se ,Divum natura necesse est 
 Immortali aevo summa cum pace fruatur, 
 Semota ab nostris rebus sejunctaque long^, 
 Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nihil indiga nostri, 
 Nee bene promeritis capitur neque tangitur ira." 
 
 (For of necessity the whole nature of the gods 
 
 of itself enjoys an immortal life with perfect 
 
 peace. 
 Remote and far separate from our affairs.. 
 Itself abounding in resources of its own, and 
 
 wanting nothing of ours, 
 It is neither propitiated by good deservings, nor 
 
 affected by anger.) 
 
 Remembering then the short limits 
 of our time, I would venture to offer a 
 definition, or rather a description of 
 prayer as, An appeal from a less strong 
 to a stronger being, whom the former 
 believes to have the will as well as the 
 power to help him; and, in that fuller 
 conception of prayer with which Christ- 
 
14 praiset 
 
 ians are familiar, the greater strength 
 appealed to is no less than Divine omni- 
 potence; and the will to help us can be 
 only feebly represented by the tender- 
 ness of a Father's love. 
 
 11. — Obligation of Prayer. 
 
 Prayer is then, as we have seen, 
 primarily a resource. In this aspect, 
 its lowest form perhaps is the cry 
 forced from thoughtless or impenitent 
 hearts in times of overwhelming distress 
 or imminent danger — in burning houses, 
 or sinking ships. I can hardly think of 
 any higher conception of prayer, in the 
 light of a resource, than what I once heard 
 of in the case of a devout and simple- 
 minded young couple who were attached 
 to each other and were forbidden to meet 
 or write; but who consoled themselves 
 by the thought that they could still re- 
 
member each other in their prayers, and 
 so communicate with each other "round 
 by Heaven." But prayer is not only 
 a resource, it is also a privilege, and a 
 privilege passing into an obligation and a 
 duty, which it is constantly enjoined 
 upon us in revelation not to let slumber, 
 but to stir up and keep alive as a gift 
 that is in us. The man without prayer 
 is likened by S. Chrysostom to a fish out 
 of water and gasping for life; to a city 
 without walls, and exposed to all assaults. 
 Prayer is, he says, the medicine expelling 
 spiritual sicknesses. It is that to the 
 soul which nerves are to the body, the 
 panis super siibstantialis (supersubstan- 
 tial bread), the staff of spiritual life. 
 
 Last December, in a blinding snow- 
 storm, a lugger ran aground on one of 
 the dangerous sand-banks at the mouth 
 of the Mersey, and two of the sailors 
 
i6 prai^er 
 
 took refuge in the rigging. Both were 
 ultimately saved, and one of them told 
 it of the other that, as the night came on, 
 and no chance of rescue appeared, he 
 heard him pray: "God Almighty, spare 
 me again this turn: it 's fifteen years 
 come next Christmas since I asked any- 
 thing from you. " This was doubtless a 
 true prayer, in all its wrong-headed sim- 
 plicity and ignorance ; God may hear and 
 answer such prayers — often does hear 
 and answer them — but these instinctive 
 cries of helpless terror, even when 
 they reach the listening ear of God, 
 are not like the ladder set up from 
 earth to Heaven with the angels of 
 prayer ascending, and the angels of 
 blessing descending from on high. 
 
 Texts might be multiplied to prove 
 that constant prayer is a confessed duty 
 of revealed religion. "Men ought al- 
 
prater 17 
 
 ways to pray, lifting up holy hands with- 
 out wrath or doubting." God enjoins 
 our prayers, and cares for our prayers, 
 and expects our prayers. He loves to 
 be importuned like the unjust judge — to 
 be disturbed by repeated insistence like 
 the friend at midnight, to be wrestled 
 with like the angel at the ford, and not 
 let go till He has bestowed a blessing 
 — Grata Deo hcec vis est (This violence 
 is pleasing to God). "The Kingdom 
 of Heaven suffereth violence and the 
 violent take it by force ' ' of prayer. It is 
 a talent which must be employed, a 
 tribute which must be paid by all the 
 citizens of Zion, a token of loyalty and 
 allegiance to our Heavenly King. What 
 says the saintly Hooker: "How could 
 any kind of service we do, or can do, 
 find greater acceptance than prayer, 
 which showeth our concurrence with 
 
i8 prager 
 
 God in desiring that wherein His very 
 nature doth most delight. Prayer is a 
 work common to the Church triumphant 
 and the Church militant, to men with 
 angels. What should we think but that 
 so much of our lives is celestial and divine 
 that we spend in prayer?" 
 
 III. — Manner of Prayer, 
 
 Next, as to the manner of prayer; 
 and first, of Public Prayer, Liturgies, 
 and Litanies. I believe that the sym- 
 pathy of numbers is a powerful help 
 to devotion, and that the simultaneous 
 prayer of many minds and many voices 
 is a " sursum corda " (Lift up your heartvs) , 
 for the thoughts of all. We can enter 
 into the feeling of the old Evangelical 
 hymn — 
 
 "Lord, how delightful 't is to see 
 A whole assembly worship Thee;" 
 
and there is, as we know, a special pro- 
 mise of Christ, that "wheresoever two or 
 three are gathered together in His name, 
 there is He in the midst of them." 
 " Multorum preces'' says Ambrose, "im- 
 possibile est contetnni." (It is impos- 
 sible that the prayers of a number of 
 persons should be despised.) I think, 
 however, that our Church has been 
 rightly guided in discouraging public 
 prayer "extempore," so called, but too 
 often wanting in spontaneity, and the 
 result of elaborate preparation to give it 
 the appearance of spontaneity, too often 
 not the effusion of a full and fervent 
 heart, but an exercise largely influenced 
 by a personal and self-conscious element, 
 both in the speaker and the congregation. 
 Not that I go quite as far as good Bishop 
 Andrewes, who talks of "the irksome 
 deformities whereby, through endless 
 
and senseless effusions of indigested 
 prayers, they oftentimes disgrace in in- 
 sufferable manner the worthiest part 
 of Christian duty." But extempore 
 prayer, even at its best, is liable, as it 
 seems to my mind, to a fatal initial de- 
 fect, namely, that the silent listening 
 worshipper, not knowing what is coming, 
 cannot assent to the petition, — cannot 
 make it his own, — till he who is praying 
 has passed on to something else, so that 
 in this way the principle of simultaneous 
 supplication is sacrificed, and the fulfil- 
 ment of the promise endangered, "that 
 if two of you shall agree on earth as 
 touching anything that they shall ask, 
 it shall be done for them of my Father 
 which is in heaven. " In the case of an 
 exposition, the hearer can agree or dis- 
 agree, can exercise his judgment, and 
 give or withhold his assent, but before 
 
addressing a prayer to the Almighty we 
 ought surely to have made up our minds 
 whether the petition is one which we 
 would ourselves put up, and put up in 
 that form at the throne oi grace. In the 
 case of fixed and familiar formularies like 
 our own, if we feel an imperfect sym- 
 pathy with any portion of them, we are 
 at liberty, I suppose, to abstain from 
 joining in it, while recognising the fact 
 that this very portion may be a vehicle 
 of grace to others differently constituted ; 
 but we are saved from the inopportune- 
 ness of exercising the critical and select- 
 ive faculty at the moment when the 
 heart should be outpouring itself to God. 
 Another great advantage of our fami- 
 liar Prayer Book liturgy seems to me to 
 be that, by what we may surely venture 
 to call inspiration from on high, it is so 
 framed as to supply a model for all prayer, 
 
22 prater 
 
 whether public or private. Take for 
 example the order of Morning Prayer. 
 It begins with a Scripture motto giving 
 the key to the sacred season — an exhor- 
 tation to repentance followed by con- 
 fession of sins, and declaration of their 
 forgiveness through Christ, enabling 
 contrite and absolved hearts to join with 
 all saints in the blessed filial confidence 
 of the Lord's Prayer, and then in the 
 universal hymn of praise of a redeemed 
 and rejoicing people. Then follow the 
 Psalms and the selected studies from the 
 Bible, and the repetition of the Creed of 
 the Apostles and of all true servants of 
 Christ since them. Then follows the 
 Litany, in which the Church undoubted- 
 ly sanctions prayers for temporal ob- 
 jects (see below), and winding up with 
 the General Thanksgiving for our crea- 
 tion, preservation, and all the blessings 
 
prater 2$ 
 
 of this life, — thanksgiving, the flower 
 and crown of all human access to the 
 Presence Chamber of God. 
 
 It would, of course, be undesirable 
 that private prayer should be of this 
 formal, or, indeed, of any formal charac- 
 ter at all, but it is most important to 
 bear in mind that whenever we approach 
 the obvious and inevitable Christian 
 duty of saying our prayers, they should 
 appropriately begin with confession, 
 ascend through the Lord's Prayer to 
 joyful adoration; then might follow our 
 meditation on the teachings of Scripture 
 — the declaration of our faith, our 
 petitions for particular needs, and inter- 
 cessions for the Church and for individ- 
 uals, and our thanksgivings for mercies 
 received. Thanksgiving and praise are 
 two distinct duties, or perhaps one duty 
 regarded from two opposite points of 
 
24 prater 
 
 view, the subjective and the objective. 
 We give God thanks for His mercies to 
 ourselves, but we also give Him thanks 
 as our Heavenly King, for His "own 
 great glory." 
 
 IV. — Subjects of Prayer, 
 
 Up to this point I may venture to 
 hope that my brethren have not seriously 
 dissented from any of the common and 
 well-known views to which I have called 
 attention, but we now come to a question 
 upon which very different opinions have 
 been expressed. The old orthodox be- 
 lief that the prayer of Faith can prevail 
 with the Almighty to alter the details 
 of His temporal Providence in His deal- 
 ings with each of us from day to day, is 
 still held by some of the best and holiest 
 amongst us, and it may indeed be held 
 
praeec 25 
 
 unblamably by all, originating as it does 
 in a deep sense of our own personal 
 relations with God, of His tender Father- 
 hood, His daily discipHne, and unceasing 
 care. It is, in fact, something more than 
 a pious opinion; for prayer is undoubt- 
 edly the attitude of the soul in which we 
 do receive blessings of all kinds, temporal 
 no less than spiritual, at the hands of 
 God. But the whole theory of Divine in- 
 terpositions, and of special Providences, 
 when regarded from the point of view of 
 the individual, presents grave difficulties 
 to modem thought. It comes into 
 collision (i) with the fact that we are 
 members of a commimity , the individuals 
 composing which have often different, 
 and even conflicting, interests, so that 
 what would be to the benefit of one, 
 would be to the detriment of another; 
 and (2) with the growing belief that God, 
 
26 prance 
 
 in His government of the external world, 
 acts by fixed laws, which it is our duty 
 to investigate, and our highest wisdom 
 to obey. In His temporal dealings with 
 His children, it is said, we must rely 
 upon His gracious promise that all things 
 shall work together for our good; and if, 
 instead of submitting our wills to His 
 will, we supplicate our Heavenly Father 
 for this or that modification in the cir- 
 cumstances of our lives, or pray like 
 Rachel, for that which He, in loving 
 wisdom withholds, we make our sorrows 
 an answer to our prayers. But in the 
 spiritual world the case is wholly differ- 
 ent, — there we can be dealt with indi- 
 vidually; to each one of us, as we Pro- 
 testants beheve, is committed the care 
 of his own soul, each of us is, in his 
 spiritual relations, alone with God; and 
 when we pray to Him — and we need not 
 
pragcr 27 
 
 surely be on our knees to pray — when we 
 pray to Him to make us holier, gentler, 
 purer, more submissive, more heavenly- 
 minded, we cannot go wrong, we cannot 
 ask amiss, for we are "desiring that 
 which He doth promise. " And what we 
 pray for ourselves we may pray in Inter- 
 cession for others also, — for all who are 
 near, and dear to us, and for all, far off or 
 near, for whom Christ died, that they 
 may be kept from temptation or carried 
 safely through it; that they may not 
 fall into sin, or having fallen, may merci- 
 fully be restored; that they may grow 
 in grace and in the knowledge of Christ ; 
 that they may love Him and be loved 
 of Him, and daily becoming more and 
 more like Him, may be admitted to dwell 
 in His presence for ever. And if this 
 is the proper sphere of prayer, and these 
 its legitimate objects, prayer may be- 
 
38 ptai^er 
 
 come, as the Apostle says, "unceasing"; 
 or, as Origen writes in his beautiful 
 tract on this subject, xaq 6 ^ioq av sTtq 
 (Ata pLeyaXTQ xal auvaxTO^eviQ Tupoaeuxni (the 
 whole life might be one great and con- 
 tinuous prayer) : or, as Tennyson, in 
 unconscious imitation: 
 
 "Thrice blest, whose lives are faithful prayers." 
 
 The silent longing for a closer walk 
 with God, the sursum corda of an habit- 
 ual contentment, the labour which is 
 itself a prayer ; all these are as acceptable 
 in the sight of God as bended knees and 
 suppliant hands, and the incense of 
 morning and evening sacrifices. 
 
 But some one may ask with the 
 Roman poet, "Nil ergo potabunt 
 homines? " Are men to ask no 
 gifts of heaven? I would answer in his 
 own words (of course, mutatis mutandis) ; 
 
"Si consilium vis, 
 
 Permittas ipsis expendere numinibus quid 
 
 Conveniat nobis, rebusque sit utile nostris. 
 
 Carior est illis homo quam sibi," 
 
 (If you ask for advice, let the gods themselves 
 deal out to us what is most suitable for us, and 
 useful for our affairs. To them man is dearer 
 than to himself. — Juvenal.) 
 
 which last clause I may remark in 
 passing, always strikes me as one of 
 the most wonderful utterances of 
 heathen antiquity. I confess I myself 
 shrink from directly asking specific tem- 
 poral gifts from God, but I know I am in 
 a minority, and have no doubt that 
 those who "can receive" the doctrine of 
 special interventions in answer to prayer 
 have greater happiness in their prayers; 
 but I have always thought that Socrates 
 was right in saying ''eu^effOs Touq 6eou^ 
 axXd)^ Ta dyaGa 5iB6vai; (Pray to the 
 gods simply to give us what is good;) " 
 and Origen, when he says, quoting the 
 
30 lptai2cr 
 
 words which the Apocryphal gospel of 
 the Nazarenes treats as a lost saying of 
 Christ, "atTetTe toc jAeyccXa, xal Ta ^ixpa ujjiiv 
 xpoaT£0T(5a£Tat. aiTStTS Ta Ixoupavta, xai toj 
 lictyela u^lTv xpoaTeGTJffeTat, " (Ask for the 
 great things and the small shall be added 
 unto you; ask for the heavenly things 
 and the earthly things shall be added 
 unto you). If we make mention of spe- 
 cific temporal wishes to God in prayer, 
 must it not always be with an ex- 
 pressed or implicit condition, "Thy 
 will not mine be done"? and does it 
 not seem even more dutiful and natural 
 simply to lay our case before Him, and 
 ask Him to deal with it "in the way His 
 wisdom sees the best"? When Heze- 
 kiah read the threatening letter of Sen- 
 nacherib, he went up into the House of 
 God ''and spread it before the Lord." 
 When he was told he must die, "he 
 
pragec 31 
 
 turned his face to the wall and prayed, " 
 and what was his prayer? '"Lord, re- 
 member how I have walked before Thee 
 in truth and with a perfect heart;' and 
 Hezekiah wept sore." This was his 
 ''case:' 
 
 Let me once more illustrate my mean- 
 ing by a very homely parable — almost 
 Socratic in its homeliness — from real life. 
 The Archdeacon of Umtata told us in a 
 lecture at Bishop Sumner's house that 
 once, being at a distance from home, he 
 received his customary report from the 
 head native boy in training to be a Mis- 
 sionary ; which wound up by saying that 
 his trousers had a hole in them which 
 would cost ^}/2d. to mend; ''But mind, 
 dear sir," he added, "I am not begging, 
 I am only reporting." 
 
 I said a little while ago that prayer is 
 the attitude of the soul in which we re- 
 
32 ptaiget 
 
 ceive blessings of all kinds, temporal as 
 well as spiritual, at the hands of God. 
 I firmly believe that no humble, faithful 
 prayer falls to the ground, but that it 
 always receives an answer, though not 
 always the direct or expected answer. 
 For example, we may pray against a dis- 
 appointment, and the answer may come 
 in the shape of unexpected strength to 
 bear it. We may pray for the prolonga- 
 tion of an ebbing life, and the answer 
 may be, not an arrestation of the fatal 
 disease, but the gift of "a long life^ even 
 for ever and ever." 
 
 "An answer, not what you long for, 
 But diviner — will come some day. 
 
 Your eyes are too dim to see it, 
 But strive and wait and pray."' 
 
 You have borne with my prose parable 
 
 — may I conclude with a little parable 
 
 ^ Adelaide Procter. Strive and wait and pray. 
 
prager 33 
 
 in verse which I cut out from an old 
 American magazine? 
 
 "Years ago, 'way up in heaven 
 
 Bloomed a shining star, 
 And to it there came an Angel 
 
 Flying from afar, 
 
 "For she heard the star complaining 
 
 Of its bitter fate,— 
 'T was so small, and ! its Maker 
 
 Made so many great. 
 
 '"Hasten quickly,' said the Angel, 
 
 *To Jerusalem; 
 God hath made thee, thankless spirit, 
 
 Star of Bethlehem.'" 
 
Princeton Theological 
 
 Seminary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1 
 
 012 01042 0059