If prayer is what we believe it to be, intercourse with God, it must have a marked effect upon the development of character. It is noteworthy that whilst education alone by no means invariably develops personality, sometimes rather restricting it, cutting off individual expression, and compressing it to a pale copy of conventional ideas, men of prayer, however rugged and uneducated, are always personalities. Surely if prayer is spiritual energy, its vigorous and sustained use must react upon the character of the user. Would not more attention to prayer, not simply as a habit of piety but as a life-force, result in such development of character as would better equip any man for life? If life is given from God, the art of living is living as God meant life to be lived. That can come only from communion with Him and intimacy with His will, such as prayer affords. There has been many a personality which has not fulfilled its promise. One feels bound to ask whether it has fallen short because it has grown out of touch with the life-scheme for which God created it. The prayerful, prayer-directed life can hardly fail to find the straightest path to its goal. Modern religious psychology is rebuking Christianity for not utilizing its natural resources. Neither in the depth nor in the height lies our help. It is nigh unto us, in the heart and the mouth that will pray, and pray with understanding.
1. Prayer is both discipline and education.
(1) Prayer is discipline.—We have heard of schools in which the instruction was good, but the discipline bad. It is in that sense that the word is now used. What do we mean by good discipline in a school? We mean nothing imaginary, nothing fanciful, nothing (to a practical observer) ambiguous. An experienced visitor feels rather than argues the presence or the absence of this characteristic. There is a readiness, a promptitude, an alacrity of response to the first signal of command or of prohibition; a thoroughness, a completeness, a perfection of obedience; a kind of electric or magical inter-communion between the mind that wills and the minds that obey which at once secures the performance, and yet takes out of it the whole idea of constraint or terror.
We speak of the discipline of life. It is a common figure which describes this world as a vast school, in which men are placed, for the whole of their threescore years and ten or fourscore years, to learn wisdom by experience. The essence of discipline is the schooling of the will; the correction of the natural pride, so that it shall recognize another existence and obey a higher law; the existence and the law of Him in whom all “live and move and have their being”. Discipline is the subjugation of the self-will to the will of One higher and greater and more excellent than it. And this subjugation, of which a well-ordered school furnishes an earthly type, is the object—as believing men feel—of all that system and course of the individual life which is as uniform in its principle as it is multifarious in its working.
Now, just what life is, in this respect, as a whole, that the particular ordinance of prayer is as a part: not life only, but prayer, is a discipline. Prayer is a discipline because it shows us what we are: how infirm of purpose, how irresolute in self-control, how impotent even to feel as we would, even to desire that which we know we want.
The inner chamber into which we retire for prayer is a gymnasium for the soul. The apparatus of prayer is designed by God to yield “the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby”. When we open the windows towards Jerusalem we take deep draughts of the heavenly breezes; this is a valuable form of spiritual culture.
Prayer is the Christian’s vital breath,
The Christian’s native air.
To fill the lungs of the soul with spiritual ozone from “the sea of glass mingled with fire” will cleanse from defilement and will revivify neglected tissues. The effort to realize God stretches the sinews of the soul and hardens its muscles. [Note: J. E. Roberts, Private Prayers and Devotions, 173]
A course of instruction in the school of spiritual culture is much to be commended to the average Christian. Too many believers belong to the species the Peacock Christian. This species is distinguished by a tail of magnificent proportions. The proud bird is worthy of all admiration so long as it is only required to strut along the ground. But it is ill-supplied with wings for soaring. When a bird is needed to fly to the crest of some high crag, the Peacock must retire and give place to the Eagle. There is a species of Christian to be known as the Eagle Christian. This species has no tail to speak of, but it has wonderful wings. The Peacock Christian is good at strutting; the Eagle Christian is good at soaring. Now, it should be manifest to all that soaring is a more Christian occupation than strutting. Therefore the Eagle Christian is to be preferred to the Peacock Christian. Where can the Eagle Christian be found? In the inner chamber. How can those powerful pinions be developed? By constant prayer. “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength: they shall mount up with wings as eagles.” The directions of God’s Word are plain. If we would be Eagle Christians, we must “wait upon the Lord”: we must enter into our chamber, and shut the door, and pray to the Father which is in secret. Then our wings will grow. It is possible that they may grow at the expense of the tail. Let it go! The exchange is worth making. The world can afford to dispense with some of our fine feathers; it needs sadly more soaring spirits. [Note: Ibid., 175.]
(2) Prayer is education.—Education is not instruction. The best instructed man in the world might be the worst educated. Education is the bringing up. Education is the training for life. Education is the calling out of powers, the strengthening of faculties, the counteraction of faults, the controlling and coercing of vices, the preparation of the whole man for the whole of being, the presentation of body, soul, and spirit, equipped for the work of time and for the enjoyment of eternity.
All God’s dealings with us are of the nature of an education. God educated the world by a succession of Divine revelations, training it gradually, by elements and rudiments, by types and symbols, by precepts and prophecies for the full illumination of the gospel and of the Spirit. He formed habits in man of thought and judgment, of principle and action, that He might bring him out at last, in the fulness of grace and knowledge, to be His representative and His witness on an earth too long debased by his fall and defiled by his sin. And God educates each man by a system of personal dealing, of which the characteristic is the same; it is an education; it is a formation of habits, whether of thought or of action, under the direction of His Providence, His Word, His Church, His Spirit. And prayer is one chief part of this education.
A perfect Christian character is a very beautiful product. It includes a bunch of Christian graces, each of them exquisitely lovely, and each of them delicately harmonized with all the others. Such a character cannot be developed easily. “Come and learn of me,” said the great Teacher. No sooner do we come than we discover how much we have to learn. He is so fair that it will take us a long time to become like Him. We have to cultivate many graces; faith, hope, love, humility, reverence, meekness, gentleness, long-suffering, unselfishness, spirituality—these are some of the flowers that bloom in the garden of the Lord, and that must flourish in our soul if it is to become as a watered garden wherein the Beloved of our souls delights to walk. There is no universal recipe for cultivating all the graces. But it is certain that prayer provides a marvellously congenial soil for their healthy growth. [Note: J. E. Roberts, Private Prayers and Devotions, 177.]
2. Prayer, earnest and continued, has its influence on our faculties.
(1) It strengthens the mind.—It has been observed that persons without natural ability have, through the earnestness of their devotional habits, acquired in time powers of sustained thought, and an accuracy and delicacy of intellectual touch, which would not else have belonged to them. The intellect being the instrument by which the soul handles religious truth, a real interest in religious truth will of itself often furnish an educational discipline; it alone educates an intellect which would otherwise be uneducated.
One day, a student, interviewing him privately, was propounding to him some theological enigmas, perhaps a little self consciously and perhaps half hoping to entangle the Professor in speculative toils. After listening to him for a while, Dr. Rainy suddenly said, “Did you ever take this difficulty to God in prayer, Mr. ______ ?” Then he went on to discuss it, not with mere dialectic, but out of his own religious experience, and, after some talk, knelt down and gave utterance to the simplest and devoutest prayer. [Note: P. C. Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, i. 211.]
(2) Prayer invigorates the will.—Habitual prayer constantly confers decision on the wavering, and energy on the listless, and calmness on the excitable, and disinterestedness on the selfish. It braces the moral nature by transporting it into a clear, invigorating, unearthly atmosphere; it builds up the moral life, insensibly but surely, remedying its deficiencies, and strengthening its weak points, till there emerges a comparatively symmetrical and consistent whole, the excellence of which all must admit, though its secret is known only to those who know it by experience.
Prayer, in so far as it implies that the mind has been uplifted towards an ideal of all goodness, a going out into the infinite, is invaluable to man, and marks the great distinction between him and the lower animals. It is answered so far as it is high and holy inspiration, being an exercise of mind which thereby creates the condition it prays for. After all, we do not know that mind power has not a material existence somewhere, just as much as electricity has. If will-power could be brought together as a concentrated force, it might have very astonishing results. At present it is too broken up. [Note: George Frederick Watts, ii. 223.]
3. What are the virtues which prayer produces? Let us look at some of them separately.
(1) It produces a sense of sinfulness.—Whenprayer once brings man into the felt presence of his God and reveals to him something of God’s own infinite holiness, His awe-inspiring purity and His perfect hatred of sin, there, if anywhere, will he who prays learn to abhor himself, to loathe his own deep sinfulness, to repent, to cleanse his hands and purify his heart, “perfecting holiness in the fear of the Lord”.
(2) It produces humility of mind—so ornamental to Christian character. Paul was like the rest of us in one respect—in danger of being “exalted above due measure”. Job had a good deal to say about himself. It was all Job, what Job was and what Job had done, until God took him to task, told him to gird up his loins and answer a few questions, when Job learned his lesson—that he was but a worm as compared with God, and he went down in the dust and said, “I abhor myself”. When we see God’s greatness we recognize our own littleness.
Humility is not the contempt of self for self’s sake, it is the forgetfulness of self for love’s sake. And it evidences itself first in that largeness of soul which gives us leisure and liberty to honour all men, to contemplate their excellences, to consider their virtues, to acquaint ourselves with their worthiness, until we learn to esteem them more highly than we esteem ourselves, until we joyfully give God thanks for the grace which He has bestowed upon them.
The motto of the Gottesfreunde was, “Love to be unknown, and desire to be little esteemed”. A like temper is encouraged in the Church of the Unitas Fratrum, which used to put this prayer into the lips of its members: “From the unhappy desire of becoming great, preserve and keep us, gracious Lord and God”. [Note: D. M. McIntyre, Waymarks in the Pursuit of God, 122.]
(3) It produces that submission of will which is one of the chief conditions of acceptable approach unto God. More elements than one enter into true religion. To be truly religious is to do the will of God. But Liddon has shown us how prayer is also religion in action. To pray is to put not only the affections in motion, the will in motion, but the understanding in motion as well. Thus in prayer a man comes to see that other interests than his own are in the hands of God, that what he asks might not in the end be best, and that in view of God’s infinite wisdom He must know what is best, in view of His infinite justice He must do what is best, and in view of His perfect love He must desire what is best; and so believing with all his heart that even as God hath said, “All things work together for good to them that love God,” he can say with becoming grace, “Thy will, O God, and not mine, be done”. God is always on our side; it is necessary sometimes to pray ourselves over to His side.
Prayer is essentially submission. To pray is to submit, and to submit is to pray. Nothing could well be more wide of the heavenly mark than the vulgar and commonplace conception of prayer—the conception which supposes prayer to be a kind of spiritual and resistless agency for inducing God to do what we wish; to avert our calamities and fulfil our desires. Nothing could be more remote from the truth than this selfish notion of the character of prayer. True prayer is not selfishness but submission. Selfishness is destructive of prayer; prayer is victorious over selfishness. They never truly pray who pray that their own will may be done, and that they themselves may have their way. In the truest prayer there is no will except the will of God, no way except the way of Heaven. To submit to the way of Heaven, to surrender to the will of God, this, and this only, is truly to pray; to pray in the name, and after the manner, of Christ.
The pull of our prayer may not move the everlasting throne, but, like the pull on a line from the bow of a boat, it may draw us into closer fellowship with God and fuller harmony with His wise and holy will.
(4) One of the chief fruits of prayer in the daily life is peace. “In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” A life of prayer is a life of peace. There may be plenty of outward trials and troubles in such a life, but there will be inward peace—peace of heart and mind. Not alike perhaps and equally in all, for calmer natures realize peace more easily than others, and at times even natural quietude of disposition may be mistaken for true peace. But in all who truly pray, some degree of peace will be found. Even restless, eager, unquiet, passion-tossed souls are not without their visions of peace, if they truly pray. Their natural restlessness may mar and interrupt it continually; yet at the bottom of their hearts there will be a blessed sense of peacefulness which they can realize in their calmer moments, and especially in the hour of prayer.
In the most emphatic exhortations to be found in Scripture for having recourse to this solace, the relief promised has respect rather to the peace which follows on the putting up of our prayers than to any promise that, in our time and way at least, the prayer itself should be granted. “In everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Here everything, you see, turns upon the resulting peace. It is as if the apostle had said, to anxious parents, for instance: “I do not promise that, in answer to your prayers, your child shall be raised up from a bed of sickness: only that while it lies there you shall have peace”. Or as if to a family in great trouble, he had said: “I do not promise that that black cloud which is now gathering over you and around you, with such thick and disastrous gloom, shall dissipate; but that in the cloud, and through the cloud, and even while there seems no way out of the cloud, you shall have peace”. You have made your requests known unto God. They may be wise, or they may be unwise. The time may be too soon for granting them, or too late. Whether of the twain you know not, and must not be careful to know. The matter is before the throne. Grief, trouble, disappointment, a bright result or a sad, —they are all in the ordering of Him who upholds the world. Enough that you say with David, “Lord, I make my prayer unto thee in an acceptable time”. If it be granted, I bless. If it be postponed, I wait. If it be denied, I bow. [Note: Daniel Moore, Aids to Prayer, 36.]
4. Let us illustrate the effect of prayer on the soul by borrowing the words of two modern writers of fiction, the one American, the other English. For the facts of the spiritual life have, for better or worse, come into the common speech of men. The old primness is gone, and a novelist no longer hesitates to preach, or to handle the things of religion.
(1) James Lane Allen, in The Choir Invisible, speaking of an old face which retains the freshness of Easter lilies, says: “For prayer will in time make the human countenance its own divinest altar; years upon years of fine thoughts, like music shut up within, will vibrate along the nerves of expression until the lines of the living instrument are drawn into correspondence and the harmony of visible form matches the unheard harmony of the mind”. This exquisite carving of the face of one who is habitually in prayer cannot be mistaken; it is a sacrament, “the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. The beauty gained in this way survives the flight of youth, and is clearest in old age; nay, after death, the face of a praying soul in the stillness and the expectation shines with a light which seems at once to beam out of it and to fall upon it.
Jesus in the act of prayer was transfigured; He became radiant and even His garment glistened. In their degree, all praying souls are so transfigured. The tranquil joy, assured against storm and sorrow; the suggestion of that peace which the world neither gives nor takes away; the rest of the soul in the bosom of God; the sense of the legions of invisible angels at hand; the circumambient atmosphere of another world; these are the marks of those who are exercised in prayer. So Percival saw in the eyes of the holy maid praying for the Holy Grail,
Beyond my knowing of them, beautiful,
Beyond all knowing of them, wonderful,
Beautiful in the light of holiness. [Note: R. F. Horton, My Belief, 183.]
(2) But even when this outward effect is not yet produced, the inward reality may be already there. And this the English novelist, Mr. A. C. Benson, refers to in Beside Still Waters. The speaker has discovered the effectiveness of a certain kind of prayer: “This was not a mechanical repetition of verbal forms, but a strong and secret uplifting of the heart to the Father of all. There were moments when one seemed baffled and powerless, when one’s own strength seemed utterly unequal to the burden; prayer on such occasions did not necessarily bring a perfect serenity and joy, though there were times when it brought even that; but it brought sufficient strength; it made the difficult, the dreaded thing possible. . . . It seemed to reveal a dim form moving behind the veil of things, which in the moment of entreaty seemed to suspend its progress, to stop, and draw near, to smile.”
Whoever has made it a practice to spend certain hours or half-hours in the day alone with God knows the extraordinary effect produced by the gradual accumulation of experiences, and the settled habit of the soul. Many of those hours seem dry and listless; there is no sign or sound; many of them are burdened and sad with the sense of sin and the weight of sorrow. Only now and then does prayer become so limpid and spontaneous and vocal that one is constrained to write down the words of the illuminated moments. And yet the habit in long years secures a remarkable result. The assured presence of God; the fact of redemption in the cross; the knowledge of a life hidden with Christ in God; the ready recourse to God in a moment of surprise or danger; the conscious connexion between the soul, as a small fact in time and space, and the infinite and eternal God; these become the very atmosphere and meat and drink of the inward life. [Note: R. F. Horton.]
“I have known men,” says Goodwin—it must have been himself —“who came to God for nothing else but just to come to Him, they so loved Him. They scorned to soil Him and themselves with any other errand than just purely to be alone with Him in His presence. Friendship is best kept up, even among men, by frequent visits; and the more free and defecate those frequent visits are, and the less occasioned by business, or necessity, or custom they are, the more friendly and welcome they are.” [Note: A. Whyte, Santa Teresa, 21.]
In the quietness of life,
When the flowers have shut their eye,
And a stainless breadth of sky
Bends above the hill of strife,
Then, my God, my chiefest Good,
Breathe upon my lonelihood:
Let the shining silence be
Filled with Thee, my God, with Thee. [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, The Threshold Grace, 85.]
