Practical Religion: A Help for the Common Days

This is not a volume of essays, but a collection of chapters written out of the author’s own experience in the hope that they may do a little, at least, to make the path plainer for others. The book is all practical, without a line that is not intended to bear upon the actual life of the common days. It is not meant to show people an easy way of living — there is no easy way to live worthily — but it seeks to show why it is worth while to live earnestly, at whatever cost.

The book is designed to be a companion to Week-Day Religion, which has met with such wide and continued favor, and which appears to have been used by the Master to help many people over the hard places and up to a fuller, richer life. The hundreds of letters which have come from readers of that little book and of Silent Times have encouraged the author to prepare the present volume on the same line, and it is now sent forth in the hope that it likewise may have a ministry of encouragement, stimulus, comfort or strength in some lives of toil, care, struggle or sorrow.

J. K. M.

1334 CHESTNUT STREET,
Philadelphia.

When I look from my window at night,
And the welkin above is all white,

All throbbing and panting with stars,
Among the majestic is standing
Sandolphon, the angel, expanding

His pinions in nebulous bars.”

LONGFELLOW.

prayer is fragrant to God. This was taught in the Old Testament in one of those emblem-lessons which, when read in the light of the gospel, mean so much. The golden incense-altar was the altar of prayer, just as the altar of burnt-offering was the altar of atonement and consecration. So every believing, loving heart is now a golden altar from which rise up to God sweet odors, bathing his very throne in fragrance. In Saint John’s Apocalyptic visions we find again the emblem of incense as a feature of the heavenly state. The redeemed are represented as having in their hands “golden vials, full of odors, which are the prayers of saints.” The meaning is not that the saints in glory offer up prayers to God. Rather, the thought seems to be that earth’s supplications rise up into heaven as sweet incense — that while humble believers in this world are engaged in offering up prayers and supplications holy odors are wafted up before God. The picture seems designed to show us the heaven-side of earth’s true worship — how our hearts’ breathings of desire appear with in the veil.

For one thing, it shows that the prayers of believers are not lost. Some people tell us there is no ear to hear when we speak our words of request and desire — that our petitions merely float off into the air, and that is the end of them. But here we get a glimpse inside heaven, and find our prayers caught and preserved in golden bowls. The thought is very beautiful.

In one of the psalms there is a similar hint regarding the tears of God’s people. “Put thou my tears into thy bottle,” cries David. In ancient times tear-bottles were sometimes used. When a man was in some sore distress, his friends would visit him, and, as he wept, would gather his tears and put them in a bottle, preserving them as sacred memorials of the event. Something like this appears to have been in David’s thought when, in sore distress, he made the prayer, “Put thou my tears into thy bottle.” The words suggest the precious truth that God does indeed take notice of all our sorrows, and that he treasures up the remembrance of our griefs. Our very tears he gathers, and as it were puts them in bottles, that they may not be lost or forgotten. This is one of those incidental allusions which show us how deeply God loves us and how tender is his care.

The picture of the golden bowls in heaven containing earth’s prayers shows us like precious regard in the divine heart for the desires and supplications which believing ones put up to God. As they rise in holy breathings or in earnest cries he receives them — every sigh, every yearning, every pleading, every intercession of love, every heart-hunger — and puts them all into golden bowls, that none of them may be lost. Often our prayers may seem to remain long unanswered, for some blessings are so rich that they cannot be prepared for us in a day, but we may be sure that they are not lost nor for gotten. They are sacredly treasured and are always before God, and in due time they will receive gracious and wise answer.

The picture of the incense in the golden bowls in heaven shows, alsor that the prayers of believers are very precious in God’s sight. Burning incense made a most grateful and delicious perfume. Frequently in the Scriptures acceptable prayer is described as producing before God a sweet odor. “The Lord smelled a sweet savor” is the Bible way of saying that God was pleased with the worship rendered to him. There is an exquisite beauty in the thought that true prayer is fragrance to God as it rises from the golden altars of believing, loving hearts. The pleadings and supplications of his people on the earth are wafted up to him from lowly homes, from humble sanctuaries, from stately cathedrals, from sick-rooms and from the darkened chambers of sorrow as the breath of flowers is wafted to us from rich gardens and fragrant fields.

“There was a fitness, in the nature of things,” says Dr. MacMillan, in a sermon on fragrance, “in incense being regarded as embodied prayer. Perfume is the breath of flowers, the sweetest expression of their inmost being, an exhalation of their very life. It is a sign of perfect purity, health and vigor, it is a symptom of full and joyous existence — for disease and decay and death yield, not pleasant but revolting odors — and, as such, fragrance is in nature what prayer is in the human world. Prayer is the breath of life, the expression of the soul’s best, holiest and heavenliest aspirations, the symptom and token of its spiritual health. The natural counterparts of the prayers that rise from the closet and the sanctuary are to be found in the delicious breathings, sweetening all the air, from gardens of flowers, from clover-crofts or thymy hillsides or dim pine woods, and which seem to be grateful, unconscious acknowledgments from the heart of Nature for the timely blessings of the great world-covenant, dew to refresh and sunshine to quicken.”

This thought is very beautiful — that the fragance which rises from garden, field and wood is earth’s prayer to God — but still more beautiful is the th pught that true prayer is itself fragrance to God, that he delights in it as we delight in the perfume of sweet flowers.

There is also rich instruction for us concerning prayer in the way the incense was prepared and offered. For one thing, the ingredients for the incense were divinely prescribed: “The Lord said unto Moses, Take unto thee sweet spices, stacte, and onycha, and galbanum; these sweet spices with pure frankincense: of each shall there be a like weight: and thou shalt make it a perfume, a confection after the art of the apothecary, tempered together, pure and holy.” The priest might not prepare any sort of mixture he pleased, but must use precisely what God had commanded. Any humanly-devised compound was an abomination. In like manner are there divine instructions concerning the elements that must mingle in acceptable prayer. It must be the prayer of faith. There must be penitence and contrition in it. It must contain thanksgiving and submission. It must be the kind of prayer that God has commanded or it will not rise to heaven as sweet incense.

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