Christ in Retirement
OH RIST is with you in — retwemeni and solitude. It was in this path of loneliness, consecrated to contemplation and prayer, that our blessed Lord was the most effectually trained and girded for His mission of love. He frequently and habitually sought retirement. Sequestered from the world, withdrawn from His disciples, He would thread the mountain defiles and seek in its deep ravines and hidden recesses the solitary place for prayer. Entering that lonely garden ‘’ over the IrooTc Kedron’’ amidst its hallowed shades, its leafy grottoes, and its solemn stillness. He spent the night preceding His crucifixion in agonizing prayer, imploring strength from His Father for the morrow. How simple and concise, yet how pregnant with meaning, the narrative of Christ’s habits of solitude; And in the morning rising up a great ichile lefore day He went out and departed into a solitary place and there prayedr How holy and instructive, and how melting the pathos of, this spectacle! Child of solitude! whose social position, or whose mental idiosyncrasy, or whose refined and sensitive nature, or whose bodily infirmities separate you from your fellows, cloister you from the world, oh, deem not your path untrodden by your Lord! He walked it before you, and He will delight to come, and by the soothing of His love, and the succourings of His grace, and the manifestations of His glory re-tread again those foot prints He has left upon your shaded way, cheering and comforting you with His presence. Oh, you cannot be alone: alone with Christ! Blessed loneliness, hallowed solitude, shared and sweetened and sanctified by Jesus! Around that sleepless pillow, by that couch of pain, in that room of stillness Christ’s presence hovers. Holy the lessons He will now teach you, sweet the truths He will now unfold to you, soothing the words He will now speak to you, unutterable the blessings, into the experience of which He will now briijg your soul. It has pleased Him, perhaps, to deny you home and friends and means, thus severing and separating you from all but Himself. Be it so. He still is yours. In separation and solitude He will unfold to you the secret of His covenant, the secret of His love. And now your soul, unclasping her pinions, rises nearer to heaven, nearer to God. Disengaged from the world, severed from the creature, cut off from resources, Christ will have more of your heart, and YOU will have more of His, than ever. Solitude shared with His presence and sunned with His smile, supplies more immediately traced to His hand, will increase your knowledge of God, strengthen your drooping faith, deepen your personal holiness, give development, symmetry, and perfection to your entire Christian character; and, when you emerge from it, thus trained and disciplined, you will go forth to active duty, a hridegroom coining out of his chamher rejoicing as a strong man to run a raceP
ILLUSTRATIONS.
Many a soldier has gone back to his fond mother’s instructions in his last moments. The last words have often been the j)rayers which a mother taught him.
THE soldier’s PRAYER.
It was the evening after a great battle. All day long the din of strife had echoed far, and thickly strewn lay the shattered forms of those so lately erect and exultant in the flesh and strength of manhood. Among the many who bowed to the conqueror Death that night, was a youth in the first freshness of mature life. The strong limbs lay listless, and the dark hair was matted with gore on the pale broad forehead. His eyes were closed. As one who ministered to the sufferer bent over him, he at first thought him dead; but the white lips moved, and slowly in weak tones he repeated,
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take;
And this I ask for Jesus’ sake.”
As he finished he opened his eyes, and meeting the pitying gaze of a brother soldier, he exclained, ‘’My mother taught me that when I was a little boy, and I have said it every night since I can remember. Before the morning dawn I believe God will take my soul for ‘Jesus ’ sake; ’ but before I die, I want to send a message to my mother.”
He was carried to a temporary hospital, and a letter was written to his mother, which he dictated, full of Christian faith and filial love. He was calm and peaceful. Just as the sun arose, his spirit went home, his last articulate words being,
“I pray the Lord my soul to take;
And this I ask for Jesus’ sake.’*
So died William B of the Massachusetts volunteers. The prayer of childhood was the prayer of manhood. He learned it at his mother’s knee in his far distant northern home, and he whispered it in dying, when his young life ebbed away on a southern battle field. It was his nightly petition in life, and the angel who bore his spirit home to heaven, bore the sweet prayer his soul loved so well.
God bless the saintly words, alike loved and repeated by high and low, rich and poor, wise and ignorant, old and young, only second to our Lord’s prayer in beauty and simplicity. Happy the soul that can repeat it with the holy fervor of our’dying soldier.