Simplicity and Detail

Still with the wish to be as practical as possible in our enquiries about Secret Prayer, let us take up in the present chapter the need of SrmPLiciTy and of DETAIL in its exercise.

i. The word Srmpticity needs little remark in connexion with the subject of Secret Prayer. Most manifestly all prayer, whether secret, social, or public, whether momentary or sustained, whether silent or raised by the voices of a multitude, should in its true idea be simple. If simplicity means the perfect opposite to affectation, dis-Joh. iv. 24. play, grandiloquence, this must be so. The true worshipper, alike in the crowded church, and alone in chamber, or garden, or wood, on the hillside or on the solitary shore, ‘‘ must worship” (not only should worship, observe, but absolutely must worship, if the worship is to be anything) “in spirit and in truth”; and those divine words imply, in their very depths, an attitude of entire simplicity before God. But when I speak of simplicity in connexion with specially Secret Prayer, I refer to certain peculiar conditions and privileges of the hour alone which in their nature do not belong to the hour of united worship. In the hour alone, very plainly, whether we do use our own words and phrases or not, we may use them. We need not think for a moment whether they will also assist and convey the thoughts of other persons; and that is a question which inevitably modifies both the contents and ‘the language of united prayer, whether in the cathedral, or in the prayer meeting, or at family worship. And this restriction and modification of united prayer is on the whole no mere necessary evil; it is a benefit, so far as it more or less concentrates prayer at such times upon the main, leading, prevailing needs and petitions of a believing company. Still, it is a restriction; and in Secret Prayer that restriction is quite gone. Whatever the solitary Christian has to deal with before God, whether the matter be the most personal or the most universal, he has no other mind and heart than his own to consider as regards the expression.

- Hence there should bea quite special kind and measure of reverent outspo-E kenness,* in the secret hour with God. I am most free of course to use then the words of others, if they best express my soul’s intention. But the point is that I am free to do so or not to do so, and that the special work of that secret act of worship is the expression, in the most individual way, of my own soul. And surely, the more I grasp the facts of the reality and the power of prayer, and the more I connect habitually @// my circumstances with God in Christ, the more must I feel the inducement, the deep tendency, to use very freely my own words in a reverent yet truly artless simplicity in speaking to Him who heareth in secret. And thistendency will become a literal necessity when the prayer descends (we may rather say, in some respects, when the prayer ascends) to

* mappynoia details, to the small things of daily life, to the particulars of spiritual and temporal need, to the names and interests of others.

What will be the best erat as regards the manner of such simplicity? Surely, the holy instincts of a soul which has indeed received the Spirit Rom. of adoption, and has access with con- ater fidence by faith in Christ, and which ™ yet remembers that the beloved Father is the King Eternal, and that the blessed Elder Brother on whom the younger leans is Jesus Christ the Righteous, x Job. Jesus Christ the Master and the Lord. Jot xiii

Those remembrances will result in a dialect, if I may call it so, perfectly unanxious, perfectly childlike and brother-like, yet never for a moment presumptuous. The holy freedom will never degenerate into a “taking of liberties.”

; Eu

A story is told of the saintly and learned Bengel which illustrates what I mean with singular beauty and pathos. Bengel had a humble friend who revered his deep personal piety and longed to witness his Secret Prayers. Somehow he contrived to get concealed in the good man’s study, and watched him from a dark nook. Bengel was labouring that night at his Gzomon, his great Exposition of the New Testament, and worked late and yet later. At length he laid aside books and pen; and now, said the peasant, I shall see him pray. He did so; but the Secret Prayer was very short: “Lord Jesus Christ,” said Bengel, looking up as to One visibly present, “d¢hengs stand between us on the old terms.” *

* Herr Jesu Christe, es steht mit uns wie beim Alten, See The Child of the Kington, p- 41.

And so. he went to rest. Here certainly was simplicity, as of friend with Friend. It was also however the simplicity of the trusted servant with the profoundly reverenced but long known Master; “Lord Jesus Christ.” And observe that the brevity of the prayer was not that of the man who salves his conscience at the close of a self-pleasing day by casting to God the dregs of a wish at night. It was the voice of a man of God whose whole life, in its purpose and its work, was surrendered to the will of his Lord. Let me instance, as at the opposite pole of the same true simplicity, the well-known incident of Martin Luther’s prayer, offered at one of the critical moments of the Reformation (1530), while he was sojourning at Coburg, and overheard by his awe-struck friend, who approached the chamber door and then stood in the corridor, holding his breath to listen; a prayer, says the narrator, ‘‘full of adoration, fear, and hope, as if he felt himself to be speaking with his Father and Friend.” “TI know that Thou art our Father and our God, and that Thou wilt scatter the persecutors of Thy children; for Thou art Thyself in peril with us. All this business is Thine; it is only under constraint from Thee that we have put our hands to it. Defend us then, O Father.”* So it went on, as that marvellous heart poured out before God itself and not another, pleading, reasoning, with just the same quality of address, as little formal, yet as little careless, as he would have used had he been pressing some great appeal upon Elector or Emperor. The simplicity which I mean, in its D’Ausicni, Hist. de la Réformation, liv. aiv., ch. vi.; KéstLin, Zadhers Leben, Pp. 440.

essential character and attitude towards God, is illustrated equally by Bengel’s one sentence and by Luther’s outpoured and sustained entreaties. In either case, I know not in which most, we see the personality of the believing man laying hold as with arms and hands upon the reality, and grace, and power, and attention, of the personally known and personally beloved Lord.

Simplicity, in the intercourse of man with man, is the antithesis to shyness. I hardly need remark that in human society we may be shy where we do not respect, we may be entirely at ease in thought and in expression where we most deeply revere. So let our secret chamber witness that in our profoundest reverence for our Lord and King we are yet unspeakably at home with Him, our absolute and exalted Prince, our heart’s inmost Friend.

ii. I have insensibly glided into the subject of Detrat.. What I would say further now upon it will be very briefly said.

Detail, as for instance in the enumeration of particular and shifting present needs, is to a great extent excluded necessarily from public prayer, and to a less extent from social prayer also. I heard a few years ago an incident from American ecclesiastical life which is in point here. The Protestant Episcopal Church was assembled in Synod. News burst upon the meeting that, far away in the North, Chicago was in flames. Moved by a powerful impulse the whole company fell upon their knees, and a voice began to lead in the Litany. Prayer after prayer of that great supplication went up, from many lips and souls. “We prayed,” said the distinguished clergyman who told the story to my informant, “for the afflicted, the desolate, the tempted, the imperilled; but for Chicago we did not pray.” Whether or no there was a necessity in the American Synod not to pray for Chicago, most certainly there is no such necessity in Secret Prayer. ‘For Chicago,” in secret at least, let us pray. In the hour alone let us speak quite out, into the Lord’s ears, the very thing, the very need, the very temptation, yes, and the very discovery of the grace that is for us in Christ, which then and there is present in the soul. Let us name our friends, not formally, as if the mere naming of them had an efficacy in it, but as realizing the individuals before the Lord and so presenting them to Him, Let us be freely explicit about them, about anything. Let us take our blessed Master into confidence. He invites it, He loves It.

In that most admirable book, well worth the reading of thoughtful and educated doubters, Dr David Brown’s Memoir of the late Dr John Duncan of Edinburgh, ‘‘ Rabbi Duncan,” there is a passage fully to this purpose. Duncan had sunk, through a sad process of intellectual and moral perplexity, from a merely theoretical orthodoxy into Socinian and then pantheistic error. Brought upward and backward in a wonderful way by the grace of God, he entered on an experience most strong and vivid of the blessed Personality and Presence of the Living and True God in Christ. One first result of this was an instinct to pray about everything; in other words to take his known Eternal Friend into confidence about everything. I quote from the Memoir, Pp. 155:

“« Now the temptation to daily sin was gone. I had not even to fight with it. And I was in an almost infantile state of mind — so that when I mislaid a paper in my study, I would kneel down and pray about it, and then go and seek for it.’ In fact, night after night (as he told Mr Moody Stuart), he laid himself down to rest with the infants’ prayer on his lips...

‘ This night when I lie down to sleep I give my soul to Christ to keep; If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.’”

How full the Scriptures are of precedents for Dr Duncan in his study, and for us! Read scene after scene of. the inspired and all-truthful histories, and everywhere you find Secret

Gen.
xxiv.
12-14.

Gen.
xxxil.
9-12.

x Sam. i.
10, II.

2 Kings,
xix, 14-
19.

Neh, ii.
4.

Prayer offered in simplicity and detail, because in spirit and in truth, Listen to that noble believer, Abraham’s servant, at the Mesopotamian well, taking his master’s eternal God into confidence about the well, and the camels, and Isaac, and her who was to be Isaac’s wife. Listen to Jacob at Mahanaim, telling the Almighty One about his fear of Esau, and pleading about wives and children, and reminding his Friend of the old promise. Look at Hannah, while her lips move; she is explaining to the Infinite Lord her longing to be the mother of a son. Look at Hezekiah, holding out the Pagan’s insulting letter, as if asking JEHOVAH to read it word by word and inform Himself quite directly of its contents. Hear Nehemiah, in the secrecy of his heart, though the surroundings indeed were public, requesting the God of Israel to influence at that moment the will of Artaxerxes Longimanus. Watch St Paul as he details to the Father of his Lord the particular needs of the saints of Philippi, or of Colossz, and those of ae his private friend Philemon, and as he mh tells Jesus Christ three times over Phil.4 about the thorn in his own suffering xii. 8. flesh. Read St John’s prayer that his 3 Joh. 2. dear Gaius may be as healthy as he is holy. And let us address ourselves to prayer in their spirit, by the grace of God.

It is a tenet of the Christian Mystics, from whom many precious lessons in the life of grace are to be learnt, that the truest prayer is “the Prayer of Silence”; not silent prayer, but the Prayer of Silence, in which the surrendered spirit lays itself, as it were, motionless and inarticulate before God with the single and exclusive desire that His will may be done and His glory achieved in it.* The teaching holds, deep within it, an element of the purest truth. But nevertheless nothing must shut out from the Christian’s actual communications with the Lord a loving and childlike detail, whatever be the entire submission to

the will of God, the deep union with

Phil. iv.

6, 7.

the will of God, which underlies it. For it is written, not by a Guyon, but by a Paul, that is to say by the Holy Spirit Himself, “In everything, by prayer and supplication, let your requests be made known unto God; and the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus.”

* See Mme DE LA MOTHE Guyon, Moyen Court de faire Oraison, ch. xiv., XX.

6 There is no sorrow, Lord, too light To bring in prayer to Thee; There is no anxious care too slight To claim Thy sympathy.

‘¢ Thou who hast trode the thorny road Wilt share each small distress; The love which bore the greater load Will not refuse the less.

There is no secret sigh we breathe But meets Thine ear divine, And every cross grows light beneath The shadow, Lord, of Thine.”