XIX

_This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not

in body. More solitude and earlier hours! I suspect I have been

allotting habitually too little time to religious exercises, as private

devotion and religious meditation, Scripture-reading, etc. Hence I am

lean and cold and hard. I had better allot two hours or an hour and a

half daily. I have been keeping too late hours, and hence have had but

a hurried half hour in a morning to myself. Surely the experience of

all good men confirms the proposition that without a due measure of

private devotions the soul will grow lean. But all may be done through

prayer—almighty prayer I am ready to say—and why not? For that it is

almighty is only through the gracious ordination of the God of love and

truth. O then, pray, pray, pray!_—WILLIAM WILBERFORCE.

Our devotions are not measured by the clock, but time is of their

essence. The ability to wait and stay and press belongs essentially to

our intercourse with God. Hurry, everywhere unseeming and damaging, is

so to an alarming extent in the great business of communion with God.

Short devotions are the bane of deep piety. Calmness, grasp, strength,

are never the companions of hurry. Short devotions deplete spiritual

vigour, arrest spiritual progress, sap spiritual foundations, blight the

root and bloom of spiritual life. They are the prolific source of

backsliding, the sure indication of a superficial piety; they deceive,

blight, rot the seed, and impoverish the soil.

It is true that Bible prayers in word and print are short, but the

praying men of the Bible were with God through many a sweet and holy

wrestling hour. They won by few words but long waiting. The prayers

Moses records may be short, but Moses prayed to God with fastings and

mighty cryings forty days and nights.

The statement of Elijah's praying may be condensed to a few brief

paragraphs but doubtless Elijah, who when "praying he prayed," spent

many hours of fiery struggle and lofty intercourse with God before he

could, with assured boldness, say to Ahab, "There shall not be dew nor

rain these years, but according to my word." The Bible record of Paul's

prayers is short, but Paul "prayed night and day exceedingly." The

"Lord's Prayer" is a divine epitome for infant lips, but the man Christ

Jesus prayed many an all-night ere His work was done; and His all-night

and long-sustained devotions gave to His work its finish and perfection,

and to His character the fulness and glory of its divinity.

Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying, true

praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which flesh

and blood do not relish. Few persons are made of such strong fibre that

they will make a costly outlay when surface work will pass as well in

the market. We can habituate ourselves to our beggarly praying until it

looks well to us, at least it keeps up a decent form and quiets

conscience—the deadliest of opiates! We can curtail our praying, and not

realize the peril till the foundations are gone. Hurried devotions make

weak faith, feeble convictions, questionable piety. To be little with

God is to be little for God. To cut short the praying makes the whole

religious character short, scrimp, niggardly, and slovenly.

It takes good time for the full flow of God into the spirit. Short

devotions cut the pipe of God's full flow. It takes time in the secret

places to get the full revelation of God. Little time and hurry mar the

picture.

Henry Martyn laments that "want of private devotional reading and

shortness of prayer through incessant sermon-making had produced much

strangeness between God and his soul." He judged that he had dedicated

too much time to _public_ ministrations and too little to _private_

communion with God. He was much impressed with the need of setting apart

times for fasting and to devote times for solemn prayer. Resulting from

this he records: "Was assisted this morning to pray for two hours." Said

William Wilberforce the peer of kings: "I must secure more time for

private devotions. I have been living far too public for me. The

shortening of private devotions starves the soul; it grows lean and

faint. I have been keeping too late hours." Of a failure in Parliament

he says: "Let me record my grief and shame, and all, probably, from

private devotions having been contracted, and so God let me stumble."

More solitude and earlier hours were his remedy.

More time and early hours for prayer would act like magic to revive and

invigorate many a decayed spiritual life. More time and early hours for

prayer would be manifest in holy living. A holy life would not be so

rare or so difficult a thing if our devotions were not so short and

hurried. A Christly temper in its sweet and passionless fragrance would

not be so alien and hopeless a heritage if our closet stay were

lengthened and intensified. We live shabbily because we pray meanly.

Plenty of time to feast in our closets will bring marrow and fatness to

our lives. Our ability to stay with God in our closet measures our

ability to stay with God out of the closet. Hasty closet visits are

deceptive, defaulting. We are not only deluded by them, but we are

losers by them in many ways and in many rich legacies. Tarrying in the

closet instructs and wins. We are taught by it, and the greatest

victories are often the results of great waiting—waiting till words and

plans are exhausted, and silent and patient waiting gains the crown.

Jesus Christ asks with an affronted emphasis, "Shall not God avenge His

own elect which cry day and night unto Him?"

To pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must be

calmness, time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the

smallest and meanest of things. True praying has the largest results for

good; and poor praying, the least. We cannot do too much of real

praying; we cannot do too little of the sham. We must learn anew the

worth of prayer, enter anew the school of prayer. There is nothing which

it takes more time to learn. And if we would learn the wondrous art we

must not give a fragment here and there—"A little talk with Jesus," as

the tiny saintlets sing—but we must demand and hold with iron grasp the

best hours of the day for God and prayer, or there will be no praying

worth the name.

This, however, is not a day of prayer. Few men there are who pray.

Prayer is defamed by preacher and priest. In these days of hurry and

bustle, of electricity and steam, men will not take time to pray.

Preachers there are who "say prayers" as a part of their programme, on

regular or state occasions; but who "stirs himself up to take hold upon

God?" Who prays as Jacob prayed—till he is crowned as a prevailing

princely intercessor? Who prays as Elijah prayed—till all the locked-up

forces of nature were unsealed and a famine-stricken land bloomed as the

garden of God? Who prayed as Jesus Christ prayed as out upon the

mountain he "continued all night in prayer to God?" The apostles "gave

themselves to prayer"—the most difficult thing to get men or even the

preachers to do. Laymen there are who will give their money—some of them

in rich abundance—but they will not "give themselves" to prayer, without

which their money is but a curse. There are plenty of preachers who will

preach and deliver great and eloquent addresses on the need of revival

and the spread of the kingdom of God, but not many there are who will do

that without which all preaching and organizing are worse than

vain—pray. It is out of date, almost a lost art, and the greatest

benefactor this age could have is the man who will bring the preachers

and the church back to prayer.