Part 71

"If you want your neighbour to know what the Christ spirit will do for him, let him see what it has done for you."

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

"When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn."

EMERSON.

Prayer

OCTOBER 8

"'We do not present our supplications before Thee for our righteousness, but for Thy great mercies. O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, hearken and do.'--Dan. ix. 18, 19.

"Every true prayer has its background and its foreground. The foreground of prayer is the intense, immediate desire for a certain blessing which seems to be absolutely necessary for the soul to have; the background of prayer is the quiet earnest desire that the will of God, whatever it may be, should be done. What a picture is the perfect prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane! In front burns the strong desire to escape death and to live; but, behind, there stands, calm and strong, the craving of the whole life for the doing of the will of God.... Leave out the foreground--let there be no expression of the wish of him who prays--and there is left a pure submission which is almost fatalism. Leave out the background--let there be no acceptance of the will of God--and the prayer is only an expression of self-will, a petulant claiming of the uncorrected choice of him who prays. Only when the two, foreground and background, are there together,--the special desire resting on the universal submission, the universal submission opening into the special desire,--only then is the picture perfect and the prayer complete!"

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

Prayer

OCTOBER 9

"About prayer he said: 'The reason why men find it hard to regard prayer in the same light in which it was formerly regarded is that we seem to know more of the unchangeableness of Law. But I believe that God reveals Himself in each individual soul. Prayer is, to take a mundane simile, like opening a sluice between the great ocean and our little channels when the great sea gathers itself together and flows in at full tide.' 'Prayer on our part is the highest aspiration of the soul.'"

"A Breath that fleets beyond this iron world And touches Him who made it."

"Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet-- Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."

And

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

Tennyson--a Memoir, by his Son.

Prayer

OCTOBER 10

"There can be no objection to praying for certain special things. God forbid! I cannot help doing it, any more than a child in the dark can help calling for its mother. Only it seems to me that when we pray, 'Grant this day that we run into no kind of danger,' we ought to lay our stress on the 'run' rather than on the 'danger,' to ask God not to take away the danger by altering the course of nature, but to give us light and guidance whereby to avoid it."

CHARLES KINGSLEY.

"Special prayer is based upon a fundamental instinct of our nature. And in the fellowship which is established in prayer between man and God, we are brought into personal union with Him in Whom all things have their being.

"In this lies the possibility of boundless power; for when the connection is once formed, who can lay down the limits of what man can do in virtue of the communion of his spirit with the Infinite Spirit?"

Bishop WESTCOTT.

Prayer

October 11

"It is abundantly clear that answered prayer encourages faith and personal relations in a way which broad principles only cannot effect. As the Spectator put it many years ago, much that would be positively bad for us if given without prayer, is good if sent in answer. We feel (do we not?) that all the evil of the world springs from mistrust of God. Nothing can recover us from this state of alienated unrest like answered prayer."

Life of F. W. Crossley, RENDEL HARRIS.