how much of what we call Christian Experience is only a dialect of the
Churches, a mere religious phraseology with almost nothing behind it
in what we really feel and know.
To some of us, indeed, the Christian experiences seem further away
than when we took the first steps in the Christian life. That life has
not opened out as we had hoped. We do not regret our religion, but we
are disappointed with it. There are times, perhaps, when wandering
notes from a diviner music stray into our spirits; but these
experiences come at few and fitful moments. We have no sense of
possession in them. When they visit us, it is a surprise. When they
leave us, it is without explanation. When we wish their return, we do
not know how to secure it.
All which means a religion without solid base, and a poor and
flickering life. It means a great bankruptcy in those experiences
which give Christianity its personal solace and make it attractive to
the world, and a great uncertainty as to any remedy. It is as if we
knew everything about health--except the way to get it.
I am quite sure that the difficulty does not lie in the fact that men
are not in earnest. This is simply not the fact. All around us
Christians are wearing themselves out in trying to be better. The
amount of spiritual longing in the world--in the hearts of unnumbered
thousands of men and women in whom we should never suspect it; among
the wise and thoughtful, among the young and gay, who seldom assuage
and never betray their thirst--this is one of the most wonderful and
touching facts of life. It is not more heat that is needed, but more
light; not more force, but a wiser direction to be given to very real
energies already there.
The usual advice when one asks for counsel on these questions is,
"Pray." But this advice is far from adequate. I shall qualify the
statement presently; but let me urge it here, with what you will
perhaps call daring emphasis, that to pray for these things is not the
way to get them. No one will get them without praying; but that men do
not get them by praying is the simple fact. We have all prayed, and
sincerely prayed, for such experiences as I have named; prayed,
believing that that was the way to get them. And yet have we got them?
The test is experience. I dare not limit prayer; still less the grace
of God. If you have got them in this way, it is well. I am speaking to
those, be they few or many, who have not got them; to ordinary men in
ordinary circumstances. But if we have not got them, it by no means
follows that prayer is useless. The correct conclusion is only that it
is useless, or inadequate rather, for this particular purpose. To make
prayer the sole resort, the universal panacea for every spiritual ill,
is as radical a mistake as to prescribe only one medicine for every
bodily trouble. The physician who does the last is a quack; the
spiritual adviser who does the first is