If you are anxious and ready, do you think that God needs to be pleaded with and entreated and besought in order to make him willing, in order to make him kind, in order to bring some sort of pressure to bear upon him so that he will do the things for his children of which they most stand in need? No scientific difficulty, no question of theories of the universe, has ever affected my practice in the matter of prayer so much as this overwhelming, blessed thought of the loving-kindness and care of the infinite Father. He does not need to be informed, he does not need to be persuaded. Has not Jesus told us that your heavenly Father is more ready to give the things which you need than you are to give good gifts to your children?
And so I came to have a difficulty with the kind of prayer- meetings in which I was brought up as a boy, and which I used to lead as a young and earnest minister. I have heard kinds of prayers which have seemed to me reflections on the goodness and the kindness of our Father in heaven. I remember one man I used to hear him over and over again, week by week who would pray, It is time for thee, O God, to work! And, as I came to think of it, it hurt my sense of reverence. I shrank from it.
And I could not believe that God was going to let thousands of souls in China or Africa perish merely because Christians in America did not pray hard enough and long enough for their salvation. Why should they meet with eternal doom on account of the lack of enthusiasm or devotion of people of whom they have never heard?
So I used to find myself troubled about this question of praying so hard for the salvation of other people's souls. If, as the old creeds tell us, it is settled from all eternity as to just who is to be saved and who is to be lost, there would hardly seem place for a vital prayer; and if, as a friend of mine, a minister, and a very liberal and broad one, though in one of the older churches, said to me, "I believe that God will save every single soul that he can save," then do you not see again that it touches this kind of prayer? If he cannot save them, then why should I beg him to do it? If he can, and loves them better than I do, again, why should I plead with him after that fashion to do it?
These, frankly and freely spoken, are some of the difficulties connected with a certain theory of prayer.
I gladly put all that now behind my back, and come to the grand and positive side of my theme. I wish to tell you what I myself believe in regard to this matter of prayer. And, in the first place, let me suggest to you that prayers, even the prayers of the past, any of them, the most objectionable types, are not made up only of petition; they are not all begging, teasing for things. There enter into their composition gratitude, adoration, reverence, aspiration, a sense of communion with the spiritual Being, a longing for higher and finer things; a sense of refuge in time of trouble, a sense of strength in time of need, a sense of hope, uplift, and outlook as we glance towards the future. A prayer, then, you see, is a very composite thing, not a simple thing, not merely made up of the element of pleading with God to give us certain things that we cannot come into possession of by ordinary means.
Right here let me stop long enough to ask you to attend a little carefully to the teaching of Jesus on the subject of prayer. You will see he chimes in almost perfectly with the things I have been saying.
If we followed his directions literally, we should never pray in public at all. He says, Enter into your chamber, and shut to the door, and commune with the Father in secret. He does not advocate long prayers, nor this kind of pleading, begging prayers that I have referred to. Do you remember the story of the unjust judge? Jesus tells this parable on purpose to enforce the point I have been speaking of. He says: Here is an unjust judge: a widow brings her case before him. She pleads with him until she tires him out; and at last he says, although I am an unjust judge, and fear neither God nor men, because with her continual praying she wearies me, I will grant her petition. Jesus does not say you are to weary God out in order to get your petitions granted, but just the opposite. How much more shall God give good gifts unto those that ask him Read once more that other story of the man who rises at night and goes to a neighbor for assistance. The neighbor, for the sake of being gracious and kind, will rise, although it gives him trouble and he does not wish to, and grant his request. But God is not like that neighbor: he does not need to be wearied or roused to make him care for our interests. This is the teaching, you will notice, of Jesus. If there is anything that appears like contrary teaching, you will find it in the supposed Gospel of John, written by an anonymous author, in which quite different doctrines are taught in regard to a good many things from those that are reported of Jesus in the other gospels.
Now I wish to come to my own personal position concerning the subject of prayer. It is fitting is it not that we should open our hearts with gratitude to God, no matter what has come to us of good or bright, of beautiful, sweet and true things, no matter through what channel, by the ministry of what friend, as the result of the working of no matter how many natural forces. Trace it to its source, and that source is always of necessity the one fountain, the one eternal Giver. And, if there be no more than courtesy in our hearts, ought it not to be easy and fitting for us to think, at least, if we do not say, Thank you, Father? Not only thanksgiving, but adoration.
Any uplook to something beautiful and high and fine above you partakes of the nature of worship. So that prayer which is worship, is it not altogether fitting and sweet and true? Only as we look up do we ever rise up, do we ever attain to anything finer and better.
And then there is communion. Is it true that God is Spirit, and that he is Father of his children, also spirit? Are we made in his likeness? Is there community of nature between him and us? I believe that he is human in all essential qualities, and that we are divine in all essential qualities. I believe the only difference between God and man is a difference not of kind, but of degree, and that there is, possibility of constant interchange of thought, of feeling, communion, between God and his children. Profound, wonderful truth it seems to me is expressed in those beautiful words of Tennyson's:
"Speak to him thou, for he hears, And spirit with spirit may meet.
Closer is he than breathing, And nearer than hands and feet."
Communion then possible, the very life of that which is divine within us!
Then I do not believe for one moment that prayer is only a sort of spiritual gymnastics, that it produces results in us merely by the exercise of spiritual feelings and emotions. I believe that in the moral and spiritual realms prayer does produce actual results that would not be produced in any other way. This, however, mark you carefully, not by producing any change in God, only changing our relations towards God. Can I illustrate it? I have a flower, for example, a plant in a flower-pot in my room. It seems to be perishing for the lack of something. It may be that the elements in the air do not properly feed it: it may be that it is hungry for light. At any rate, I try it: I take it out into the sunshine, I let the air breathe upon it, the dews fall upon it, the rains touch it and revive it and the plant brightens up, grows, blossoms, becomes beautiful and fragrant. Have I changed natural laws any? Not to one parunticle. I have changed the relation of my plant and the air; and I have produced a result of life and beauty where would have been ugliness and death.
So I believe in prayer in that sense, that it may and does change the spiritual attitude of the soul towards God so that we come into entirely new relations with him, and the spiritual life in us grows, unfolds, becomes beautiful and sweet, not because we have changed God, but because we have got into a new set of relations with him.
If I thought that I could change God by a prayer, that I could interfere in the slightest degree with the working of any of the natural forces, I would never dare to open my lips in prayer again so long as I live. We do not need to change God: we need simply to change our attitude towards him, change our relations to him. Is not this true in every department of human life? How is it that you produce results anywhere? You wish a mountain stream to work for you. Do you change the laws of motion? You adapt your machinery to those laws of motion, and all the power of God becomes yours. You do not change him, you change yourself, your attitude towards him. And so in every one of the discoveries, in every one of the revolutions, that have come to the world, simply by discovering God's methods, and humbly adapting our ways to those methods Thus the forces of God, which are changeless and eternal, produce for us results which they would not have produced but for adapting our lives to the working of their ways.
A great many people do not think they ever pray. I have never seen a man yet who did not pray. You cannot live, and not pray: you cannot escape it if you try. Take Montgomery's famous old definition, "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, Uttered or unexpressed, The motion of a hidden fir That trembles in the breast."
Soul's sincere desire. Yes, the body's desire, the mind's desire, the heart's desire, any desire, any outreach of life, is a prayer, an appeal for something that only the universe, that only God, can bestow.
So, no matter whether you think you are religious or not, you are a praying man so long as you are a living man; and you cannot escape the fact if you try. It is merely a question whether you are a loving praying man or some other kind.
There is another aspect of prayer to which I wish to call your attention. Prayer is the refuge of a soul in trouble. It does not mean here, again, that you change God any. Can you not understand what it means to go to God, as it were, and fling yourself, like a child, against his breast and feel yourself folded in the everlasting arms?
Your sorrow may not be removed, the burden may not be taken away, the life of your friend may not be saved, the sickness may not be healed; but there is comfort, there is strength, there is peace, there is help.
Why, even in our human life do you not know how it is? You go to some friend you trust and love with your trouble. Perhaps he cannot lift it with one of his fingers; but he can tell you that he loves you, he cares, he would help you if only he were able. He can put his arm around you, he can say, God bless you; and you are stronger. You go away with lifted shoulder and with head that fronts the heavens; and you are able to bear the burden. Is there nothing akin to this in the sense of coming into intimate relations with the eternal Father, when troubled, pressed, when the outside world is dark, and feeling that here is refuge in a love deeper, higher, unspeakably more tender than that of the dearest friend that ever lived?
And this suggests another point. I have no doubt that sometimes, in my attempts to lead the devotions of this congregation, I use words which, if I were to sit down and critically analyze, I could not logically justify. I do not mean to; but, perhaps, sometimes I do. What of it?
When my children were small, and my little boy came and climbed up in my lap and expressed himself in all sorts of illogical and foolish ways, telling me every sort of thing he wanted, impossible things, unwise things, things I could not get for him, things I would not get if I could, because I thought myself wiser than he, did these things trouble me? I loved to have him pour out his whole little soul into mine, because he was my child and because I did not expect him to be over-wise. It was this simple touch of kinship, this simple communion of father and child, which was sweet and tender and true.
So I believe with my whole soul that God loves us, his little children, with an unspeakable tenderness, a tenderness infinitely beyond that with which any earthly father ever loved a child, and that we can go to him freely and pour out our hearts, whether it is wise in expression or unwise; only let us do it with the feeling, "Not my will, Father, but Thine, be done," not as though we were trying to persuade him to do things for us that he would not otherwise do, but merely as the pouring out of our gratitude, our tenderness, our love.
There is another thing that needs just a word of suggestion. I believe that we ought to pray to God, not in the sense of begging for things, but sympathetically bringing in the arms of our sympathy all those we love and all those we hate, if there are any, and all things that live on the face of the earth. There is a hint of what I mean in those beautiful words of Tennyson's:
"For what are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands in prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend? For so the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God."
Let us reach out our arms of sympathy to all the world and bring the world sympathetically into the presence of our Father. So our own hearts and loves will broaden, until they, too, are divine.
And, then, there is one other thing. What a strength prayer has been to the grandest souls of the ages! Never was truer, finer truth written than those magnificent words of Isaiah: "Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint!"
Take Jesus in his hour of agony, take Savonarola with his struggle, take Huss, Wyclif, Luther, take all the grand souls of the ages when they have simply stood with the feeling, One with God is a majority, and ready to face the world, if need be, in the conviction that they spoke for and represented the truth. The times of which Lowell speaks:
"Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."
This sense that God is for the truth and right, and, if you are standing for the truth and right, the Almighty Power is backing you up, the ground you stand on impregnable, because of that position. You do not expect God to work miracles, you do not expect him to do anything; but simply the sense that you are in his presence, that you are on his side, re- enforces you more than a thousand men could re-enforce an army in the time of its need. This is the great sense of surety that the poet Clough had in mind, when he wrote those wonderfully fine words:
"It fortifies my soul to know That, though I perish, Truth is so; That howsoe'er I stray or range, Whate'er I do, thou dost not change. I steadier step when I recall That, if I slip, thou dost not fall." Here is the confidence, the strength, that comes from prayer, from communion with God, from the sense of being in his presence, from a feeling of fellowship with the Divine.
The truest and finest, the sweetest prayer must come oft of the loving, the sympathetic, the tender soul. No selfish prayer can expect to enter into the heart of God. You will note in the words that Jesus teaches his disciples, it is not "My" Father, it is "Our" Father. And, if we wish to pray in the divine spirit, we shall broaden that "Our" until it includes not only our family, our church, our city, our State, our nation, our humanity, but until it includes all life that swims or walks or flies, feeling that it is the one life of the Father that is in us all. For, as Coleridge has finely put it, He prayeth best who loveth best All things, both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.
THE WORSHIP OF GOD
THERE are those who in religious matters, as well as in all other departments of life, are content to walk unquestioningly the path which the footsteps of previous generations have made easy and familiar. But there are others and these among the more thoughtful and earnest minds to whom it is not enough to utter earnest words concerning enthusiasm and devotion, consecration and worship. These spiritual attitudes and exercises must first be made to appear reasonable to them, fitting, fitting to their conception of God, fitting to their ideas of that which is highest and finest in man.
So there are many things that pass to-day as forms of worship, many ideas connected with worship, which this class of minds cannot heartily and fully accept. Some of them do not seem to them fitting, as they look upward towards God. They cannot, for example, believe that God cares for flattery, cares to sit on his throne, and be told by his creatures how great and how wonderful he is. They cannot think that he cares to have presents brought to him, gifts offered on his altar, as men say. They cannot believe that he really is anxious for many of these external forms and ceremonies, which seem to the onlooker to constitute the essential element of much that passes as popular worship.
And then, on the other hand, man has grown into a sense of dignity. He has a higher and loftier idea of his own nature and of what is fitting to a man; and he cannot any longer heartily enter into the meaning of words which speak of him as a worm of the dust, which seem to him to intimate that God cares to have him prostrate himself in utter humiliation, to speak of himself always as a miserable sinner, as one without any good in him.
Many of these things from the point of view of the man himself no longer constitute the real conviction, the real feeling of the noblest hearts; and so there are many who are troubled over this question of worship, who are not quite sure as to how much spiritual significance it may any longer retain, not quite sure as to how vital a part it may play in the development of the religious life of man.
We find an adequate and perfectly natural explanation of some of these phases of worship that trouble us to-day, as we look back and note some of the steps in the religious development of the race. I shall not raise the question as to how or where or in what way the act of human worship began. I will simply say that one of the first manifestations of that which came to be religious worship which we are able to trace at the present time is to be found in the burial-mounds of the dead.
Men reverenced the memory of the chief of the tribe who had passed into the invisible. They did not believe that he had ceased to exist: they rather looked upon him as having become, because invisible, a higher ruler. They thought of him as still interested in the welfare of the tribe, still its guardian, still its avenger, still demanding of the tribe the same reverence that it paid to him while he was yet alive; and his followers clothed him with all the human attributes with which they were familiar during the time he was among them. He was still hungry, he was still thirsty, he still wanted his old-time weapons, all those things he was familiar with during his earthly career. And so they brought food, and laid it on the burial-mound above his body; and they poured out their libations of drink to quench his spiritual thirst.
These were very real beliefs on the part of man universally during a certain stage of his mental, his moral, his spiritual growth. It was a very natural step beyond this to the origin of sacrifices. All sacrifice began right here. It was a religious meal, in which God and his worshippers equally shared. Some animal, supposed to partake of a life similar to that which distinguished the god and the worshipper, too, is sacrificed. It is cooked, and the worshippers partake of the meal; and they fully believe that the god joins in it also. And then the drink they partake of, and pour out their libation for the invisible spirit.
So the first sacrifice was a meal eaten together; and just as, for example, to-day you see a remnant of this idea when a man eats with an Arab, although the Arab may discover five minutes after that it was his bitterest foe, he finds himself at least during a little time bound to amity and peace by the fact that they have shared this sacred meal together, so in the act of sacrifice it was believed that the worshipper consecrated himself in loyalty to his God, and that the God consecrated himself in faithfulness to his worshippers as their guardian and protector. Here is given the central significance of sacrifices that have made so large a part of the religious ceremonial of the world.
These are not peculiar to what we call pagan people. Do you remember the story of how, after the flood, Noah offers a sacrifice, and God up in heaven is represented as smelling the flavor of the burning meat and as rejoicing in it, accepting the offering, and pledging himself to guard and care for his worshippers? Do you remember, also, that story of Jacob, how, when he is on his journey, he falls asleep, and has his wonderful dream, and sees the ladder starting at his feet and ending at the throne of God, up and down which the angels are passing? When he wakes in the morning, he says, "Surely, this is holy ground"; and he takes the stone on which he slept, and sets it up as an altar, and pours out the sacred oil as an offering to his God.
All the way through the Old Testament, in the history of the Hebrew people, you trace these same ideas that you find in the life of almost all the other nations of the world. It was only a step beyond this to the idea of presenting gifts to God, no matter what the nature of that gift might be. And, as men came to make him these sacred offerings, they came also to believe and in the most natural way in the world that, the more costly the gift, the more likely it was to be accepted on the part of its sublime recipient.
So human sacrifices arose; for there could be no more sacred gift than for a man to offer his own child or his own wife to God. The gods were looked upon as sometimes demanding these tremendous sacrifices as the conditions of their mercy or their care. I refer you for illustration to one of the most striking and touching of Tennyson's poems. I think it is entitled "The Victim." There had been famine in the land, and the priests have announced that they have learned that the gods demand as an offering that which is most sacred and most dear to the heart of the king; and the question is as to whether it is his son, his boy, or his wife. They think it must be the boy, because he was the one that would continue the kingly line; but the wife detects the gladness of her husband when he sees that the boy is to be selected, and knows by that sense of relief that passes over his face that the priests have made a mistake, and that she herself is to be the victim. And so, in her love for him and for the people, she rushes upon the sacrificial knife.
All these ideas, you see, are perfectly natural in certain stages of human development, logically reasoned out in view of their thought of the gods and of their relations to them and of what these gods must desire at their hands. It is not only among the very early beliefs that you find these ideas controlling the thought and action of men. Study the ancient classical times as they are reflected in the Iliad, in the Odyssey, or in Virgil's Aeneid, and you will find that the gods were very human in all their feelings, their thoughts, their passions. As, in the Old Testament, Yahweh is reported to have been a jealous God, not willing that respect should be paid to anybody but himself, so you find the old Greek and Roman deities very jealous as to what were regarded as their rights, as to what the people must pay to them; and, if they are angry, they can be appeased if an offering rare and costly enough be brought by the worshipper. You can buy their favor; you can ward off their anger, if only you can offer them something which is precious enough so that they are ready to accept it at the worshipper's hands.
These are not merely Old Testament ideas, nor only pagan ideas. Some years ago, when I was in Rome, I visited among others one of the many churches dedicated to Mary under one name or another; and there was a statue of the Virgin by the altar, and it impressed me very much to see that it was loaded down with gifts. Every place on the statue itself to which anything could be attached, anything on the altar around it, was weighted down with gold chains, with jewels, with precious gifts of every kind. These had been brought as thank-offerings, expressions of worship, or pledges connected with a petition, because I have brought thee this gift, have mercy, do this for me which I need.
So these old ideas are vital still, and live on in the modern world.
And yet modern and magnificent are those utterances of the old Hebrew prophet, who had so completely outgrown the common customs even of his time, when he represents God as saying that he is weary of all these external offerings. He says: I do not want the cattle brought to my temples. Those that wander on a thousand hills are already mine. If I were hungry, I would not ask thee. He does not want the rivers of oil poured out. What does he want? The old prophet says, What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God? And some of the later writers caught a glimpse of the same spiritual truth when they said, Not burnt- offerings, not calves of a year old; when they cry out, Shall I bring the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? No, it is a broken and contrite heart, a heart sorry for its sin, a heart consecrating itself to righteousness and truth, this inner, spiritual worship.
The prophets, you see, were climbing up to that magnificent ideal so finely set up by Jesus as reported in the Gospel from which I read our lesson this morning. They had not only believed that God was to be worshipped after these external fashions, but that there was some special place, not only where it was easier to think of him, but where he demanded the offering should be brought. He said to the woman at the well: You think it is Mount Gerizim where the people ought to worship, and the Jews think it is Mount Moriah; but I say unto you that neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem shall men worship the Father. God is spirit, the universal spirit, every place a temple, every spot hallowed, if only those that worship him do so in spirit and in truth.
You see, then, how up these stairways of gradual approach the human race, in the person of its highest and finest representatives, has climbed, how near it has come to the spiritual ideal of God and the spiritual thought of that which he requires at our hands.
Is worship, then, so far as external form is concerned, to pass away?
By no manner of means, as I think. As you analyze any one of these old primitive acts of worship, no matter how crude, no matter how cruel, how bloody, how repulsive it may be to-day from the outlook of our higher civilization, you will note that it has in it an element which, I believe, is permanent, and can never be outgrown. Whatever else there is, there is always the sense of a Presence, Invisible, mighty, high, and, from the point of view of the worshipper, holy and set apart.