For the Battle

Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing stedfastly in prayer.—Romans 12:12.

1. Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing stedfastly in prayer. At first sight they are three separate injunctions. Let some whose lot has fallen in pleasant places rejoice; let others whose lot is dark suffer patiently; let still others devote themselves to continual prayer. Or musing on the exhortations the idea may come to us that they are a descending scale.

If I have faltered more or less

In my great task of happiness;

If I have moved among my race

And shown no glorious morning face;

If beams from happy human eyes

Have moved me not; if morning skies,

Books, and my food, and summer rain

Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:—

Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take

And stab my spirit broad awake;

Or, Lord, if too obdurate I,

Choose Thou, before that spirit die,

A piercing pain, a killing sin,

And to my dead heart run them in!1 [Note: R. L. Stevenson, Underwoods.]

And if pain fails to waken my heart fully to God, let me cling humbly and continuously to prayer. Let me not fail of prayer so that at the end my spirit may be attuned to God’s, and my life be not in vain.

2. But St. Paul, when he wrote these words, addressed them to the Christians of the Roman Church for whom he foresaw persecution in the near future, even if they were not suffering from it at this very time. And he would have them practise hope and patience and prayer in their persecution, and all at the same time.

The old physicians tell us of two antidotes against poison, the hot and the cold, and they dilate upon the special excellence of each of these; in like manner the Apostle Paul gives us first the warm antidote, “rejoicing in hope,” and then he gives us the cool antidote, “patient in tribulation.” Either of these, or both together, will work wonderfully for the sustaining of the spirit; but it is to be observed that neither of these remedies can be taken into the soul unless it is mixed with a draught of prayer. Joy and patience are curative essences, but they must be dropped into a glass full of supplication, and then they will be wonderfully efficient.1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

3. St. Paul’s primary meaning in the word which is translated tribulation in our English version was persecution. But let us take tribulation in its usual sense of every kind of trial through which a man may have to pass. With this meaning let us see the dependence between the clauses and the possibility of the Christian following the three injunctions at the same time.

(1) “Rejoice in hope; be patient in tribulation.” This is an utter impossibility to the man whose hope is of this world, and who looks for mere ordinary happiness. To him tribulation is the supreme obstacle to hope and joy. If he suffers he cannot be joyful; he loses his hope. But for the man who is full of Christ’s hope all is different. “Hope, which comes to all, outwears the accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond the grave and death.” The Christian’s hope alters his idea of tribulation. Poverty, that is tribulation enough. But the monk embraces a life of poverty and self-denial of his own free-will.

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;

And hermits are contented with their cells.

Poverty has lost its grimness. It wears a smiling face. But, further, though the tribulation may remain very real the Christian accepts it—nay, welcomes it—as helping him on his way. And because of his great abiding hope the tribulation is dwarfed.

People may lay down their lives with cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality; but that is a different affair from giving up youth, with all its admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than improbable, old age.1 [Note: R. L. Stevenson, Crabbed Age and Youth.]

(2) Now let us take the last two clauses together. “Continue stedfastly in prayer; be patient in tribulation.” If we continue in prayer, does it follow that we shall be patient under trial? R. J. Campbell, in A Faith for To-Day, says: “I well remember the curious feeling with which I once encountered a man who prayed long and earnestly for a certain academic distinction—a distinction which could fall to one and one only. He was greatly chagrined and disappointed, and inclined to reproach God, when the honour went to another instead of himself. The earnestness of his prayers was unquestionable.” But not so did St. Paul conceive of prayer. His model was the Master who in His agony said, “Thy will be done.” So the Apostle would have these Roman Christians put themselves on God’s side in their praying.

And in all things he shall yield up his own will, saying and thinking in his heart, “Lord, I am as willing to be poor and without all those things of which Thou hast deprived me as I should be ready to be rich, Lord, if Thy will were so, and if in that state I might further Thy glory. It is not my natural will which must be done, but Thy will and the will of my spirit. Lord, I am thine, and I should be Thine as gladly in hell as in heaven, if in that way I could advance Thy glory. So then, O Lord, fulfil in me the good pleasure of Thy will.”2 [Note: Maurice Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, 135.]

And with this spirit in prayer patience under trial will not be denied. “At this season the sun enters into the sign of Libra, for the day and night are equal, and light and darkness evenly balanced. Even so for the resigned soul Jesus Christ is in the sign of Libra; and whether He grants sweetness or bitterness, darkness or light, of whatever nature His gift may be, the man retains his balance, and all things are one to him, with the exception of sin, which has been driven out once for all.” And the more steadfast the prayer the more will the link be strengthened which binds our soul to God, and the more grace we will receive to meet each need of life.

All trouble and anguish, loss and pain,

When they’ve done their task appointed,

Vanish and fade; it is joy that lasts.

The seer, with vision anointed,

Beholds the flash of a rising dawn,

Though the midnight skies are gray

Patience, poor soul, with the present pain—

There cometh a better day.

I

Rejoicing in Hope

There are those who stigmatize Christianity as a religion of sorrow. They tell us that, like a bitter wind, it withers the flowers, that it says of laughter, It is mad, and of mirth, What doeth it? They contrast it, still ignorantly, with the gay and careless humanism of the ancient world. They dare to say—

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from Thy breath.

We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

But this is not Christianity after the mind of the Apostle Paul. “Rejoice in hope,” he says to the Roman Christians. It would be difficult to find a more decided expression of optimism. The cheery tone is never absent from St. Paul’s speech. The buoyant and “springy” movement of his life is never changed. The light never dies out of his sky. Even the grey firmament reveals more hopeful tints, and becomes significant of evolving glory. The Apostle is an optimist, “rejoicing in hope,” a child of light, wearing the “armour of light,” “walking in the light,” even as Christ is in the light.

Nor was this Apostolic optimism a thin and fleeting sentiment begotten of a cloudless summer day. It was not born of sluggish thinking or of idle and shallow observation. The first chapter of this Epistle to the Romans contains as dark and searching an indictment of our nature as the mind of man has ever drawn. Let us rehearse the appalling catalogue, that the radiance of the Apostle’s optimism may appear the more abounding: “Senseless hearts,” “fools,” “uncleanness,” “vile passions,” “reprobate minds,” “unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful.” With fearless severity the Apostle leads us through the black realms of midnight and eclipse. And yet in the subsequent reaches of the great argument, of which these dark regions form the preface, there emerges the clear, calm, steady light of this optimistic text.

What was the cause of this courageous and energetic optimism? What can we do to imitate it? We can choose what we will look at. We can choose our atmosphere like the people of Italy who in frosty weather will be seen sitting in the market-place by their stalls with a dish of embers, which they grasp in their hands, and so make themselves comfortably warm on the bitterest day.

St. Paul looked at three things:—

1. He fixed his eyes on the Redemption of Christ.—In all the spacious reaches of the Apostle’s life the redemptive work of his Master is present as an atmosphere in which his thoughts and purposes and labours found their sustaining and enriching breath. Redemption was not degraded into a fine abstract argument, to which the Apostle had appended his own approval, and then, with sober satisfaction, had laid it aside, as a practical irrelevancy, in the stout chests of mental orthodoxy. It became the very spirit of his life. To him it was not a small device, an afterthought, a patched-up expedient to meet an unforeseen emergency. The redemptive purpose lay back in the abyss of the eternities; and in a spirit of reverent questioning the Apostle sent his trembling thoughts into those lone and silent fields. He emerged with whispered secrets such as these: “fore-knew,” “fore-ordained,” “chosen in him before the foundation of the world,” “eternal life promised before times eternal,” “the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

What a wonderful consciousness St. Paul has of the sweep and fulness of redemption. We know the variations of the glorious air: “the unsearchable riches of Christ”; “riches in glory in Christ Jesus”; “all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ”; “the riches of his goodness and forbearance and long-suffering.” And what is the resultant enfranchisement? Recall those wonderful sentences beginning with the words “But now.” It is a phrase that heralds a great deliverance. “But now apart from the law a righteousness of God hath been manifested.” “But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God.” “But now are ye light in the Lord.” These represent no thin abstractions. To St. Paul the realities of which they speak were more real than the firm and solid earth. And is it any wonder that a man with such a magnificent sense of the reality of the redemptive work of Christ, who felt the eternal purpose throbbing in the dark backward and abyss of time, who conceived it operating upon our race in floods of grace and glory, and who realized in his own immediate consciousness the varied wealth of the resultant emancipation—is it any wonder that for this man a new day had dawned, and the birds had begun to sing and the flowers to bloom, and a sunny optimism had taken possession of his heart which found expression in an assured and rejoicing hope?1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

2. St. Paul fixed his mind next on the reality and greatness of his present resources.—“By Christ redeemed”—yes, but that is only the Alpha and not the Omega of the work of grace. “By Christ redeemed; in Christ restored.” St. Paul’s mental and spiritual outlook comprehended a great army of positive forces labouring in the interests of the Kingdom of God. Look at some of his auxiliaries: “Christ liveth in me.” “Christ liveth in me! He breathes through all my aspirations. He thinks through all my thinking. He wills through all my willing. He loves through all my loving. He travails in all my labours. He works within me ‘to will and to do of his good pleasure.’ ” That is the primary faith of the hopeful life. But see what follows in swift and immediate succession. “If Christ is in you, the spirit is life.” “The spirit is life!” And therefore we find that in the Apostle’s thought dispositions are powers. They are not passive entities. They are positive forces vitalizing and energizing the common life of men. To St. Paul love expressed more than a relationship. It was an energy productive of abundant labours. Faith was more than an attitude. It was an energy creative of mighty endeavour. Hope was more than a posture. It was an energy generative of a most enduring patience. All these are dynamics, to be counted as active allies, co-operating in the ministry of the Kingdom. And so the Epistles abound in the recital of mystic ministries at work. The Holy Spirit worketh! Grace worketh! Faith worketh! Love worketh! Prayer worketh! And there are other allies robed in less attractive garb. “Tribulation worketh!” “Godly sorrow worketh!”

St. Paul never mentions the enemy timidly. He never seeks to underestimate his strength. Nay, again and again he catalogues all possible antagonisms in a spirit of buoyant and exuberant triumph. However numerous the enemy, however towering and well-established the iniquity, however black the gathering clouds, so sensitive is the Apostle to the wealthy resources of God that amidst it all he remains a sunny optimist, “rejoicing in hope,” labouring in the spirit of a conqueror even when the world was exulting in his supposed discomfiture and defeat.

3. And, thirdly, he fixed his thoughts on the wonder of the glory to come.—Can we safely exile this thought from our moral and spiritual culture? We know that this particular contemplation is largely absent from modern religious life, and we know the nature of the recoil in which our present impoverishment began. “Let us hear less about the mansions of the blest, and more about the housing of the poor!” Men revolted against an effeminate contemplation which had run to seed, in favour of an active philanthropy which sought the enrichment of the common life. But we have lost immeasurably by the uprooting of this plant of heavenly contemplation. We have built on the erroneous assumption that the contemplation of future glory inevitably unfits us for the service of man.

Were Richard Baxter’s labours thinned or impoverished by his contemplation of “the saints’ everlasting rest”? When we consider his mental output, his abundant labours as Father-confessor to a countless host, his pains and persecutions and imprisonments, we cannot but think he received some of the powers of his optimistic endurance from contemplations such as he counsels in his incomparable book. “Run familiarly through the streets of the heavenly Jerusalem; visit the patriarchs and prophets, salute the apostles, and admire the armies of martyrs; lead on the heart from street to street, bring it into the palace of the great King; lead it, as it were, from chamber to chamber. Say to it, ‘Hear must I lodge, here must I die, here must I praise, here must I love and be loved. My tears will then be wiped away, my groans be turned to another tune, my cottage of clay be changed to this palace, my prison rags to these splendid robes’; ‘for the former things are passed away.’ ”

Hope, though slow she be, and late,

Yet outruns swift time and fate;

And aforehand loves to be

With remote futurity.

Hope is comfort in distress,

Hope is in misfortune bliss,

Hope in sorrow is delight,

Hope is day in darkest night.

Hope cast upward is to where

Storms do never domineer;

Trust and hope will welcome thee

There to full security.1 [Note: Francis Beaumont.]

Our thought of future glory must have several elements in it if it is to nourish our hope as it nourished his.

(1) It must have an element of personality in it. It must be a hope which means future fulfilment to me. It must not, like Buddhism, represent the loss of personality—annihilation—as the reward. It must not offer us even the stimulus of the positivists. “You desire hope,” they say; “there is hope; we will grant immortality—an immortality of influence. The good you do shall live after you.” No. There must be an immortality in the vision and communion of Him whom to serve is eternal life.

(2) It must have an element of recovery in it. How we crave the recovery of lost friends! Is it all over when they leave us? The heart refuses to think so. It clings to the thought of reunion. Christ is the pledge of that—Christ the Uniter, who as on earth at the house of Jairus, at the bier of Nain, at the grave of Bethany, is the Joiner of parted hands and sundered lives, delivering divided ones to each other. We crave also the recovery of lost energies. Capacities that are checked by its ungenial conditions, aspirations that are thwarted by its narrow limits, expenditures of effort and affection that are made void by its thankless receptions, we think of them all. Has God created them only that they may be thrown away? Shall He not rather have respect to the work of His hands, and perfect that which concerneth us? Our hope is in Christ, who not only pledges their recovery, but promises that they shall be recovered by us, as the ultimate witnesses of His faithfulness, the ultimate sharers of His joy.

(3) It must have an element of catholicity in it. Hope, if it is to be true and complete, must embrace in its comprehensive sweep not only good for ourselves, in the attainment of a personal immortality and the re-establishment of personal ties, but good for the whole wide creation. It must include the purifying and the rectifying of society, the evangelizing of the nations, and the transforming of nature itself. No expectation would be perfect which does not blend with its pictures of individual and mutual blessedness the picture of a regenerate world, free from the curse and crowned with the blessing, bathed in the glory of God most precious, the brightness of His perfect purity, the beauty of His finished plan.

Lo! crowned with unutterable calm

And robed in light, came up the day-star Hope,

The virgin mother of the Christ of Joy.

Clear were her eyes with innocence, and deep

With dreams. Her lips were full with mysteries.

A crystal globe she held, wherein were seen

New vistas unimaginably fair.

Her presence seemed a kiss of God, which all

Rose up to take. In the diffused light

Of her adorable simplicity

Each man threw down his habit of disguise

And stood before his fellows, candid, brave,

Yet wearing weakness meekly, as a babe

Will wear it.1 [Note: Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, 12.]

II

Patient in Tribulation

St. Paul is his own best commentary on his own counsels. His purposes were frequently broken by tumultuous shocks. His plans were destroyed by hatred and violence. His course was twisted here, diverted there, and wrenched a hundred times from its appointed goings by the mischievous plots of wicked men. The little churches he had founded were in chronic disturbance and unrest. They were often infested with puerilities, and sometimes they were honeycombed by heresies which consumed their very life. And yet how sound and noble his patience! With what fruitful tenderness he waits for his lagging pupils! His very reproofs are given, not with the blind, clumsy blows of a street mob, but with the quiet, discriminating hand of a surgeon. This man, more than most men, had proved the hygienic value of endurance, and he, more than most men, was competent to counsel his fellow-believers to discipline themselves to patience in tribulation.

i. Tribulation

What is tribulation? Tribulation is comprehensive enough. It denotes every possible loss, cross, trouble that can enter into the mind of man; whatever we passively suffer, whatever we actively endure.

Let us look at tribulation, then, in some of its different aspects. “Patient in tribulation”? Yes. But make sure first of all that the tribulation is real, not fancied. Did we ever try to estimate the proportion in which the fanciful, the fictitious, the imaginary ills in life stand to the actual? Is it not the case that many a man makes his own sorrows, and that the things we anticipate, but which never happen, have more in them of calamity and burden than what we are forced in Providence to endure? Real tribulation we can divide into two kinds—that which comes to us from others, and that which comes from ourselves.

1. Tribulation from without.—This kind of tribulation has both a positive and a negative side. Take the positive first—that is, actual suffering caused us by others. This kind of tribulation was most immediately in the mind of the Apostle Paul when he wrote the words first to the little Roman Church. Dark clouds were gathering, threatenings of coming trouble. Days of persecution were at hand. Nero, hardening himself in vice, would soon need some one upon whom he could charge his guilt, and wreak his spite; no suffering would be too cruel with which to afflict the Church of God. To-day persecution does not take the same form. It is not so much bodily as mental persecution. The young man of to-day who follows Christ has no fear of death, imprisonment, or injury in any way to his body, but if he be thoroughgoing he is still persecuted—persecuted by jeers and laughter and even by calumny.

One of our bishops, when he was a London incumbent, was at one time deeply distressed by the persistent calumnies of a certain obnoxious parishioner. He wrote for advice to a high legal luminary, who was also a very religious man. His answer was laconic; it was a quotation: “ ‘Jesus stood before the governor.… And when he was accused of the chief priests and elders, he answered nothing, … insomuch that the governor marvelled greatly.’ Dear So-and-so, let the governor marvel greatly.”1 [Note: Basil Wilberforce.]

There is a kind of negative tribulation which also comes from without. It is the disappointment that others cause us—the things we have to do without. Some glowing purpose has been suddenly frustrated; some bit of found work has been rudely broken. We suffer profound disappointment. And disappointment is apt to kindle irritation, and when that fire begins to burn much valuable furniture is in danger of being consumed.

One of the greatest crises in Principal Rainy’s life was when the House of Lords delivered judgment against the United Free Church. Rainy had given the strength of his life to promoting the union between his own Church and the United Presbyterian Church, and now it seemed as though he had only brought his own Church into grave trouble. He was in the House of Lords when judgment was given. After the decision he took Mr. Haldane’s arm and passed out with him. He was his guest in London. Mr. Haldane says that on the way home he never spoke. When they reached home he sat down and without any bitterness or resentment spoke, and “the one expression of regret that fell from his lips was that he was old.”

Loitering progress is tribulation of an allied kind. Things are walking, and we want them to run; or they are running, and we want them to fly. We hear one and another say: “Things don’t go fast enough for me”; or “Things are too slow for me.” And we become irritated, and then irritable, and we lose our patience, and in losing our patience we lose the very spirit and instrument of progress. How true this is in our relationship to little children, and especially to little children who are not highly gifted, and who have the misfortune to be dull-witted and slow. How fatal is the mistake to become impatient with them. To become impatient is to deprive them of the very atmosphere they require for journeying at all; impatience never converts dull-wittedness into quick-wittedness, and the teacher or parent who becomes impatient is robbing the child of its heritage, increasing its load of disadvantage, and making its little pilgrim journey prematurely dark and hard.

O comrade bold, of toil and pain!

Thy trial how severe,

When sever’d first by prisoner’s chain

From thy loved labour-sphere!

Say, did impatience first impel

The heaven-sent bond to break?

Or, couldst thou bear its hindrance well,

Loitering for Jesu’s sake?

O might we know! for sore we feel

The languor of delay,

When sickness lets our fainter zeal,

Or foes block up our way.

Lord! who Thy thousand years dost wait

To work the thousandth part

Of Thy vast plan, for us create

With zeal a patient heart.1 [Note: J. H. Newman.]

2. Tribulation from within.—Quite as much of our tribulation is internal; it is not occasioned by others. Such trouble may be physical, as St. Paul’s own “thorn in the flesh.” Or it may be mental and spiritual. There is no one who does any thinking at all but has entered the dark, cold, chilling circle of apparently insoluble mystery. It may be the burdensome presence of immediate and palpable realities, such as the presence of suffering and pain. Or it may be those problems lying upon the borderland, or well within that mysterious realm where we seem to have neither eyes nor ears, hands nor feet: the mystery of God, the mystery of Providence, the mystery of Jesus Christ—His incarnation, His resurrection, His glorification, His relation to sin and hope and human endeavour and the veiled to-morrow; and all the great pressing problems of human birth, and human life, and human destiny. What shall we do with them? Or, what shall we not do with them? Let us make it an essential in all our assumptions that a prerequisite to all discovery is patience in tribulation. Do not let us deal with them as though they were Christmas puzzles, to be taken up at odd moments and cursorily examined, and then thrown aside again in irritation and impetuous haste.

Dr. Jowett says, “I am amazed to observe how hastily men and women drop these things; they ‘cannot be bothered with them,’ and so they retreat into a perilous indifference or into a fruitless agnosticism. George Eliot dropped her vital faith in the course of eleven days. Robert Elsmere dropped his vital faith with almost equal celerity. I heard from one young fellow who was burning all his boats and refusing to sail these vast, mysterious, glorious seas, and all because he had read a little pamphlet of not more than fifty pages from cover to cover!”

O why are darkness and thick cloud

Wrapped close for ever round the throne of God?

Why is our pathway still in mystery trod?

None answers, though we call aloud.

The seedlet of the rose,

While still beneath the ground,

Think you it ever knows

The mystery profound

Of its own power of birth and bloom,

Until it springs above its tomb?

The caterpillar crawls

Its mean life in the dust,

Or hangs upon the walls

A dead aurelian crust;

Think you the larva ever knew

Its gold-winged flight before it flew?

When from the port of Spain

Columbus sailed away,

And down the sinking main

Moved towards the setting day,

Could any words have made him see

The new worlds that were yet to be?

The boy with laugh and play

Fills out his little plan,

Still lisping, day by day,

Of how he’ll be a man;

But can you to his childish brain

Make aught of coming manhood plain?

Let heaven be just above us,

Let God be e’er so nigh,

Yet howsoe’er He love us,

And howe’er much we cry,

There is no speech that can make clear

The thing “that doth not yet appear.”

’Tis not that God loves mystery.

The things beyond us we can never know,

Until up to their lofty height we grow,

And finite grasps infinity.1 [Note: Minot Hudson Savage.]

ii. Patience

That which passes muster for the spirit of patience is sometimes only constitutional amiability, or lymphatic indifference and stagnation.

1. Let us look first, then, at this spirit—the spirit of indolence. Perhaps its most frequent cause is a want of sensitiveness. The person is not finely developed, and so does not feel the tribulation, unless it is very material indeed—or at least does not feel it to anything like the same extent as his more sensitive brother. To the superficial onlooker he seems to be bearing his trial with patience; but he makes no progress, his capacity for sympathy is still dormant. Or his apparent patience may be the result of mere idleness.

Browning in The Statue and the Bust teaches the paltriness of this kind of patience. From mere indolence the “Bride of the Riccardi” did not leave her husband and flee to the “Great Duke Ferdinand” whom she loved. It was no thought that she would be committing a sin that deterred her, and so her patience was worthless. She says:—

If I spend the night with that devil twice,

May his window serve as my loop of hell

Whence a damned soul looks on Paradise!

I fly to the Duke who loves me well,

Sit at his side and laugh at sorrow

Ere I count another ave-bell.

’Tis only the coat of a page to borrow,

And tie my hair in a horse-boy’s trim,

And I save my soul—but not to-morrow.

And he on his part argues:—

Yet my passion must wait a night, nor cool—

For to-night the Envoy arrives from France,

Whose heart I unlock with thyself, my tool.

Be sure that each renewed the vow,

No morrow’s sun should arise and set

And leave them then as it left them now.

But next day passed, and next day yet,

With still fresh cause to wait one day more

Ere each leaped over the parapet.

I hear you reproach, “But delay was best

For their end was a crime”—Oh, a crime will do

As well, I reply, to serve for a test,

As a virtue golden through and through,

Sufficient to vindicate itself

And prove its worth at a moment’s view!

The counter our lovers staked was lost

As surely as if it were lawful coin:

And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost

Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,

Though the end in sight was a vice, I say

You of the virtue, (we issue join)

How strive you? De te, fabula!

2. But there is a finer spirit—the spirit of stoicism—which animates some. It also, however, is a spirit of stagnation. It is no more than a surrender to the inevitable.

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever Gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud,

Under the bludgeonings of chance,

My head is bloody but unbowed.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.1 [Note: W. E. Henley.]

3. The spirit of progress. Wherein, then, lies the difference between the Christian spirit of progress and this old pagan spirit of stoicism?

(1) Take the two attitudes towards death. Seneca, like a Stoic, argues thus: “Death is universal, all men have died; death is inevitable, we must die. It is no good for any man to complain about the inevitable and the universal. It is better for us simply to submit to what we cannot alter.” Now here stands St. Paul, face to face with death. It is not a pleasant death, any more than it was a pleasant life. But St. Paul says, To me to die is gain. I have a wish to depart and be with Christ, which is far better. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness. If the earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved we have a house, builded of God, eternal in the heavens.

Such was the patience of Lazarus after his resurrection when “his heart and brain moved there “in glory, and “his feet stay here.”

“How, beast,” said I, “this stolid carelessness

Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march

To stamp out like a little spark thy town,

Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?”

He merely looked with his large eyes on me.

The man is apathetic, you deduce?

Contrariwise he loves both old and young,

Able and weak—affects the very brutes

And birds—how say I? flowers of the field—

As a wise workman recognizes tools

In a master’s workshop, loving what they make.

Thus is the man as harmless as a lamb:

Only impatient, let him do his best,

At ignorance and carelessness and sin—

An indignation which is promptly curbed.1 [Note: Browning, Epistle of Karshish.]

(2) Now if we have this spirit of patience in tribulation our pilgrim journey will be furthered; for to Christian patience there are two sides, a passive but also an active. We usually think of patience as a passive virtue, resignation, calm waiting for something to happen, as in Shakespeare’s classic lines:

She sat like patience on a monument

Smiling at grief.

But the word has an active side, even in our common speech, as in the phrase “a patient investigator,” implying untiring industry. It carries with it the idea of fortitude and high courage, willing to suffer, to endure, working out great ends undiscouraged, without repining or fretfulness.

The rock upon which the water drops, abides amidst the flux of the tides of the water, and is firm; but the camel, patient, moving across the thirsty desert, scenting by its wondrous instinct the oasis, or the city that is afar, is patient—endures.

(3) And, lastly, let us note that there are stages in Christian patience. We must begin with the true perspective and the feeling towards God of children to a Father, but after that we must sedulously cultivate the grace, advancing from step to step. Trustful acceptance of the will of God as the best possible for us—how difficult it is. But there are those who have risen to a still greater height and who not only accept the tribulation with patience, but feel actual joy in it.

Dr. Griffith John has told us that one day, when he was surrounded by a hostile Chinese crowd, and violence was used, he put up his hand to his smitten face, and when he withdrew it, and saw it bathed in blood, he was possessed by an extraordinary sense of exaltation, and he rejoiced that he had been “counted worthy to suffer shame for his name.” David Hill records a similar experience of unspeakable ecstasy, when his hand hung limp from a brutal blow. But, indeed, the witnesses are multitudinous; they can be found in every corner of the great fields of service, suffering men and women, wearing their scars like medals, feeling as though there had been conferred upon them some heavenly title and degree, and stepping out in the assured companionship of the once crucified but risen Lord.

III

Continuing Stedfastly in Prayer

The essence of prayer consists in drawing nigh; in other words, holding communion. The simplest and best test of a good prayer is: Did we draw nigh? Did we enter God’s Presence? Were we conscious that God was very nigh? Many times we have said our prayers but have never prayed; and this because our hearts were far from God. At other times, perhaps, we said no words but we entered the Presence with longing hearts. We looked, we thirsted, we wanted, and so we very truly prayed.

Prayer is intercourse; it is praise; it is congratulation; it is adoration of the Infinite Majesty; it is a colloquy in which the soul engages with the All-wise and the All-holy; it is a basking in the sunshine, varied by ejaculations of thankfulness to the Sun of Righteousness for His light and His warmth. In this larger sense, the earlier part of the “Te Deum” is prayer as much as the latter part; the earliest and latest clauses of the “Gloria in Excelsis” as truly as the central ones; the “Sanctus” or the “Jubilate” no less than the Litany; the “Magnificat” as certainly as the fifty-first Psalm.

St. Paul is addressing Christians, and so he does not simply say “pray.” He takes it for granted that they pray. But what he fears in them is a relaxing of their efforts, a losing of their first zeal in prayer, and so his exhortation is “Continue stedfastly in prayer.” Do not let the strength of your prayerful spirit escape, and do not let your acts of prayer, your special seasons diminish or grow less strenuous. It is an exhortation to hold fast.

Let us look at the prayerful spirit; and then at occasions of prayer. It is almost impossible to separate them, for they act and react the one on the other.

1. The prayerful spirit.—We cannot fulfil the Apostle’s exhortation even if we keep our regular seasons of prayer unless we have the prayerful spirit, the spirit of harmony with the will of God. It is the aspiration after all good, the wish, stronger than any earthly passion or desire, to live in His service only. It is the temper of mind which says in the evening, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”; which rises up in the morning, “to do thy will, O God”; and which all the day regards the actions of business and of daily life as done unto the Lord and not to men—“Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” The trivial employments, the meanest or lowest occupations may receive a kind of dignity when thus converted into the service of God. This is the life of prayer, or rather the life which is itself prayer, which is always raised above this world, and yet is always on a level with this world; the life which has lost the sense of consciousness of self, and is devoted to God and to mankind, which may almost be said to think the thoughts of God, as well as do His works.

2. Acts of prayer.—But the prayerful spirit cannot exist unless special acts of prayer are practised. A passive desire to live in the atmosphere of prayer is dangerous, unless it finds its proper activity in definite exercises of prayer. We shall succeed in maintaining the spirit of constant prayer only when we foster it by stated periods of devotion.

If a man is right, and puts the practice of praying in its right place, then his serving and giving and speaking will be fairly fragrant with the presence of God. The great people of the earth to-day are the people who pray. I do not mean those who talk about prayer; nor those who say they believe in prayer; nor yet those who can explain about prayer; but I mean those people who take time to pray. They have not time. It must be taken from something else. This something else is important. Very important, and pressing, but less important and less pressing than prayer.1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Prayer, 12.]

3. Such continuance will not be without its effects. Its effects will be twofold.

(1) The effect on the man who prays.—No one denies that prayer has a subjective effect. It has an intellectual effect. Thus 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 otherwise 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.

It has also a moral effect. 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.

It has a social effect. Prayer makes men, as members of society, different in their whole bearing from those who do not pray. It gilds social intercourse and conduct with a tenderness, an unobtrusiveness, a sincerity, a frankness, an evenness of temper, a cheerfulness, a collectedness, a constant consideration for others, united to a simple loyalty to truth and duty, which leavens and strengthens society.

It is not too much to say that prayer has even physical results. The countenance of a Fra Angelico reflects his spirit no less than does his art; the bright eye, the pure elevated expression speak for themselves It was said of Keble that in his later years his face was like that of an illuminated clock; the colour and gilding had long faded away from the hands and figures, but the ravages of time were more than compensated for by the light which shone from within.

(2) The effect on those prayed for.—The subjective effect of prayer does not cover the whole ground. Prayer has also an objective effect. A man may say, “I can quite understand the good of praying for oneself; I can quite see that, according to God’s will, these gifts of grace are to be worked for by prayer, like the gifts of God in nature; but where is the evidence that there is the slightest good in praying for others?” He might even take this line—he might say, “It is presumptuous for me to imagine that I can affect the destiny of another soul! It is against what I read of the struggle for existence by each individual in nature. It is unfair, for what is to happen to those for whom no one prays? And where is the evidence that intercession for others does any good at all?”

Gilmour of Mongolia said: “Unprayed for, I feel like a diver at the bottom of a river, with no air to breathe; or like a fireman with an empty hose in a blazing building.”

For nearly twenty years it was the daily practice of Cardinal Vaughan’s mother to spend an hour—from five to six in the afternoon—in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament asking this favour—that God would call every one of her children to serve Him in the Choir or in the Sanctuary. In the event all her five daughters entered convents, and of her eight sons six became priests; even the two who have remained in the world for a time entered ecclesiastical seminaries to try their vocations.1 [Note: J. G. Snead-Cox, Life of Cardinal Vaughan, i. 11.]

4. The encouragement.—Be sure that no true prayer remains unanswered, though thousands of prayers remain ungranted. He who alone knows all the things we have need of sees fit again and again to refuse the thing we ask, or to deny even the most unselfish of requests, and to delay satisfaction of the purest desires on behalf of those whose sins or sorrows we have carried to His Throne of Grace. And yet, assuredly, all such prayer enters into His ears, and all such prayer is duly answered, if not granted, by Him. Do we not sometimes discover, it may be long after, how, in ways we little dreamt of, through channels of which we knew nothing, the blessing for which we pleaded in vain was vouchsafed at last? And when there is no such discovery, where the refusal of the good we asked seems absolutely decreed and final, is it not our wisdom to leave all in the Father’s hands, and believe that what we know not now we shall know hereafter? No disclosure which awaits us behind the veil could surpass in interest the revelation of what has been achieved for ourselves and others by genuine yet ungranted prayer.

Two brothers freely cast their lot

With David’s royal Son;

The cost of conquest counting not,

They deem the battle won.

Brothers in heart, they hope to gain

An undivided joy;

That man may one with man remain,

As boy was one with boy.

Christ heard; and will’d that James should fall,

First prey of Satan’s rage,

John linger out his fellows all,

And die in bloodless age.

Now they join hands once more above,

Before the Conqueror’s throne;

Thus God grants prayer, but in His love

Makes times and ways His own.1 [Note: J. H. Newman.]

For the Battle

Literature

Berry (C. A.), Vision and Duty, 99.

Black (H.), Christ’s Service of Love, 130.

Body (G.), The Guided Life, 101.

Candlish (R. S.), The Two Great Commandments, 183.

Drury (T. W.), The Prison-Ministry of St. Paul, 105.

Gray (W. A.), Laws and Landmarks of the Spiritual Life, 137.

James (F.), A National Pentecost, 44.

Jowett (J. H.), Apostolic Optimism, 1.

Jowett (J. H.), The Transfigured Church, 149.

Keenleyside (C. B.), God’s Fellow-Workers, 115.

Liddon (H. P.), Some Elements of Religion, 168.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Romans, 273.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxv. (1879), No. 1480.

Wilberforce (B.), Sanctification by the Truth, 160.

Christian World Pulpit, x. 250 (Jarvie); xlvii. 248 (Fairbairn).