Contributions in aid of the Society will be thankfully received by the Hon. Arthur Kinnaird, M.P., Treasurer
and Rev. Ebenezer Prout, at the Mission House, Blomfield-street, Finsbury, London; by James S.
Mack, Esq.,
S.S.C., 2, St. Andrew Square, Edinburgh; Robert Goodwin, Esq., 235, George-street, and
Religious Institution Rooms, 12, South Hanover-street, Glasgow; and by Rev. Alex. King, Metropolitan
Hall, Dublin. Post-Office Orders should be in favour of Rev. Ebenezer Prout, and payable at the

General Post Office.

WILLIAM STEVENS, PRINTER, 37, BELL YARD, TEMPLE BAR.

THE

EVANGELICAL MAGAZINE

AND

MISSIONARY CHRONICLE.

APRIL, 1865.

On Prayer.

BY THE REV. H. R. REYNOLDS, B. A.

THE bare chance of speaking to God, the dim feeling that we are finding our way to the privacy of the Most High, is a lofty privilege. The universal belief that man may draw near to God, that he may transfer his thoughts and wishes to the mind of the Eternal, proclaims his sense of the Divine relationship between himself and God. The little child enters the kingdom of heaven, and feels small perplexity in speaking to its King. The magnetic needle will point to the unseen pole, and the soul, before it is hardened or demagnetized by the rude blows of the world, will point to the home and heart of the Great Father. The irreligious man often feels that his lips must shape a prayer, and in some rough way call upon God. There is a sense of utter helplessness which

comes over every man sooner or later, when he can only express his need in prayer. Prayer is the life-blood and vital air of the spiritual life. He who has put the worth of prayer to the greatest test, is the most conscious of spiritual desires. The greatest and noblest in the musterroll of God's Church have been fervent in spirit, strong in prayer. Every spasm of sorrow, every consciousness of sin, every disappointment and every duty, lead such to the throne of grace.

The Holy One Himself, who was ever doing the Father's will,-who could call God His own Father, so "making Himself equal with God," -"who did no sin,"-who was "holy, harmless, undefiled," ever moving onwards to sit down with His Father on the eternal throne,-could do nothing without prayer. When mothers brought their babes to Him, this stirred the deepest fountains of His great heart, and He could not touch a little child and keep back, or keep in, His prayers. Before and after his greatest works, He withdrew into Himself; He lifted up his eyes to Heaven. Amid his baptism, his transfiguration, the choice of

VOL. XLIII.

his apostles, his greatest miracles, his sacrificial sorrows, his deepest agony, He seems half shrouded from our eyes in a luminous cloud of prayer. He, of all the sons of God, felt most the necessity for prayer. There must ever have been an infinite and yet unattained possibility for His human nature, soaring far above that which He realized on earth, all the Paradise that had been lost, all the bliss from which man had fallen, all the heaven that He would reconstruct; and thus He prayed. The wants and the woes, the sorrows and the destiny of mankind, all lay heavy on his heart; and his mourning over us, his power of infinite sympathy, his fear for us, the awful agony of his soul because of our sins, and the final breaking of his heart upon the cross, were all revealed to us in the form of mighty intercessions, mysterious prayers. It was by communion with the Father that He was strengthened to bear the cross, and stand the issues of death; to do the Father's will, and finish his work. If this be so, what then should not, may not, must not his disciples feel when they, with trembling faith, with damaged nature, and vacillating purpose, strive to know his mind, to do his will, to finish his work? Indeed, the remembrance that the Holy One of God, the Great Mediator, Intercessor, and Comforter,-actually kneels at our side, prays with us and for us, and by his Spirit makes intercession in us, reveals to the Christian the vast necessity for prayer.

It is demonstrable truth that, in order to enjoy many of the most spiritual blessings, the preliminary of desire is imperatively demanded. "Hunger and thirst after righteousness" are the preparation wrought by Divine love within us, that we may enjoy all the fulness of God. Further, the great work of our Lord Jesus Christ has been to open up a new and living way unto the Father. This forms an accumulation of practical argument adapted to encourage our prayerfulness, for it shows us that one great result of His sacrificial life, atoning death, and glorious resurrection, has been to increase the facilities, the disposition, the successes of prayer.

There is a species of mysticism that yearns for "a still communion which transcends the imperfect offices of prayer and praise." There have been men who have professed to rise above the region of desire into that of "holy indifference," who have ascended into the heaven of boundless, lightless, colourless, passionless stillness; whose light has been within them, whose communion with God has been an utter losing of themselves in Him, an entire self-abnegation, the lofty exaltation of which affords an atmosphere too rare for common mortals, and surrounds them with a temperature where even the breath of ordinary piety would freeze into icy vapour.

Men have soared into this region of thought out of Persian metaphysics and Hindu theology, out of Mohammedan fatalism and the Buddhist's hopeless yearnings, out of Catholic doctrine and German transcendentalism,