Preface

At the request of many I have collected these fugitive devotional pieces which at stray moments I have been contributing to an organ of the Church of Scotland — “Saint Andrew.” They have been the diversion from sustained work, and in no other light do I offer them. Yet there are some who cannot study sustained work; they have not leisure enough or they have not health enough. For such, truth must come ‘’in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” Any one of these meditations can be read in three minutes; yet three minutes may influence a whole day. Accordingly, I have consented to give them collective form. They will not all appeal equally to every mood of mind. Where one does not appeal, lay it aside, but do not throw it away; what is not your message to-day may be your message to-morrow. It is often said that devotion is a thing of the heart. I do not think it is either merely or mainly so. I hold that all emotion is based upon intellectual conviction. Even your sense of natural beauty is so based. Whence comes that joy with which you gaze on a bit of landscape you call “a picturescene “? Precisely from your intellectual conviction that it is not a picture; if you believed it to be a painting, your emotion would die altogether. A man may have faith in what he does not understand, but he cannot have emotion in what he does not understand. The heart must have a theory for its own music. Therefore the devotional writer must have a message as much as the expositor. Devotion must be the child of reflection; it may rise on wings, but they must be the wings of thought. The meditations of this little book will appeal to the instinct of prayer just in proportion as they appeal to the teachings of experience; therefore, before all things, I have endeavoured to base the feelings of the heart on the conclusions of the mind.

G. M.
Edinburgh, 1901.