Thee—the Spirit of the Lord replying, 'Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude, for the battle is not yours, but God's?' If you want to see the passage, open my Bible, it will turn of itself to the place. I sincerely believe that prayer was the cause of that division; and I am confirmed in this by knowing that we by no means calculated on the effect. The course we took appeared to be right, and we followed it blindly."

In these examples is illustrated, in real life, the working of these two forces in a spirit of prayer, which must naturally exist or die together-intensity of desire and specificness of object.

Let a man define to his own mind an object of prayer, and then let him be moved by desires for that object which impel him to pray, because he cannot otherwise satisfy the irrepressible longings of his soul; let him have such desires as shall lead him to search out, and dwell upon, and treasure in his heart, and return to again, and appropriate to himself anew, the encouragements to prayer, till his Bible opens of itself at the right places—and think you that such a man will have occasion to go to his closet, or come from it with the sickly cry, Why, oh, why is my intercourse with God so irksome to me?" Such a man must experience, at least, the joy of uttering hopefully emotions which become painful by repression.

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On the contrary, let a man's object of thought at the throne of grace be vague, and let his desires be languid, and from the nature of the case his prayers must be both languid and vague. Says Jeremy Taylor:-" Easiness of desire is a great enemy to the success of a good man's prayer. It must be an intent, zealous, busy, operative prayer. For, consider what a huge indecency it is that a man should speak to God for a thing that he values not. Our prayers upbraid our spirits, when we beg tamely for those things for which we ought to die; which are more precious than imperial sceptres, richer than the spoils of the sea, or the treasures of Indian hills."

The scriptural examples of prayer have, most of them, an unutterable intensity. They are pictures of struggles, in which more of suppressed desire is hinted than that which is expressed. Recall the wrestling of Jacob,-" I will not let thee go till thou hast blest me;" and the "panting" and "pouring out of soul" of David, "I cried day and night; my throat is dry with calling upon my God;" and the importunity of the Syro-Phenician woman, with

her " Yes, Lord, yet the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs ;" and the persistency of Bartimeus, crying out "the more a great deal," "Have mercy on me!" and the strong crying and tears of our Lord, "If it be possible-if it be possible!" There is no "easiness of desire" here.

The scriptural examples of prayer, also, are clear as light in their objects of thought. Even those which are calm and sweet, like the Lord's Prayer, have few and sharply-defined subjects of devotion. They are not discursive and voluminous, like many uninspired forms of supplication. They do not range over everything at once. They have no vague expressions; they are crystalline; a child need not read them a second time to understand them. As uttered by their authors, they were in no antiquated phraseology; they were in the fresh forms of a living speech. They were, and were meant to be, the channels of living thoughts and living hearts.

Let a man, then, be negligent of both scriptural example and the nature of his own mind; let him approach God with both vagueness of thought and languor of emotion; and what else can his prayer be but a weariness to himself and an abomination to God? It would be a miracle if such a suppliant should enjoy success in prayer. He cannot succeed, he cannot have joy, because he has no object that elicits intense desire, and no desire that sharpens his object. He has no great, holy, penetrative thought in him, which stirs up his sensibilities; and no deep, swelling sensibility, therefore, to relieve by prayer. His soul is not reached by anything he is thinking about, and, therefore, he has no soul to pour out before God. Such a man prays because he thinks he must pray; not because he is grateful to God that he may pray. There is an unspeakable difference between "must" and " may." It is his conscience that prays; it is not his heart. His language is the language of his conscience. He prays in words which ought to express his heart, not in those which do express it. Hence arises that experience, so distressful to an ingenuous mind, in which devotion is prompted by no vividness of conception, rolling up a force of sensibility to the level of the lips, so that it can flow forth in childlike, honest speech.

Such an experience, so far from rendering prayer a joy either sweet and placid, or ecstatic, can only cause the time spent in the closet to be the season of periodical torture to a sensitive conscience, like that of a victim daily stretched on a rack. For it is

in such prayer that such a conscience is most vehement in its reproaches, and guilt seems to be heaped up most rapidly. Oh, wretched man that he is! Who shall deliver him?

Some Christians do not cultivate the temperament of prayer. Devout joy is more facile to some temperaments than to others; yet, in all, it is susceptible of culture. Especially is it true, that prayer is in its nature emotive. It is an expression of feeling: not necessarily of tumultuous feeling, but naturally of profound and fluent feeling, and, in its most perfect type, of habitual feeling. To enjoy prayer, we must be used to it. Therefore we must be used to the sensibility of which it is the expression. Devotion should spring up spontaneously from an emotive state, rather than be forced out in jets of sensibility on great occasions.

The necessity of this is often overlooked by Christians, whose lives, in other respects, are not visibly defective. They do not possess desires which may very naturally be expressed in prayer. They have no deep subsoil of feeling, from which prayer would be a natural growth. The religion of some of us—whatever may be true of our opposites in temperament-is not sufficiently a religion of emotion. We have not sufficiently cherished our Christian sensibilities. We have not cultivated habits of religious desire which are buoyant in their working. We have not so trained our hearts, that a certain emotive current is always ebullient, welling up from the depths of the soul, like the springs of the deepest sea. We think more than we believe. We believe more than we have faith in. Our faith is too calm, too cool, too sluggish. Our theory of the Christian life is that of a clear, erect, inflexible head, not of a great heart, in which deep calleth unto deep.

This clear-headed type of piety has invaluable uses, if it be tempered with meekness, with gentleness, with "bowels of mercies." But we must confess that it does not always bear well the drill which the world gives it in selfish usage. It too often grows hard, solid, icy. It reminds one of the man with a "cold heart," whose blood never ran warm, whose eye was always glassy, whose touch was always clammy, and whose breath was always like an east wind. Such a religious temperament as this will never do for the foundation of a life of joy in communion with God. We must have more of the earnest nature of the loved disciple, more of the spirit of the visions of Patmos.

Our Northern and Occidental constitution often needs to be restrained from an excess of phlegmatic wisdom. I must think

that we have something to learn from the more impulsive working of the Southern and the Oriental mind. I must believe that it was not without a wise forecast of the world's necessities, and an insight into human nature all around, that God ordained that the Bible, which should contain our best models of sanctified culture, should be constructed in the East, and by the inspiration of minds of an Eastern stock and discipline; whose imaginative faculty could conceive such a poem as the Song of Solomon; and whose emotive nature could be broken up like the fountains of a great deep. I must anticipate that an improved symmetry of character will be imparted to the experience of the Church, and more of the beauty of holiness will adorn her courts, when the Oriental world shall be converted to Christ, and Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God, Our unimpassioned, taciturn, and often cloudy temperament in religion, does need an infusion of the piety which will grow up in those lands of the sun.

Such an infusion of the Oriental life-blood into the stock of our Christian experience, would bring us into closer sympathy with the types of sanctification represented in the Scriptures. It would be like streams from Lebanon to our culture. We need it to render the Psalms of David, for instance, a natural expression of our devotions. We need a culture of sensibility which shall demand these Psalms as a medium of utterance.

We need habits of feeling, disciplined indeed, not effervescent, not mystic, but, on the other hand, not crushed, not fearful of outflow, not bereaved of speech. We need a sensitiveness to the objects of our faith, which shall create desire for the objects of prayer, not passionate, not devoid of self-possession, but fluent and self-forgetful in its earnestness, so that it shall have more of the grace of a child in its outgoings.

Of such an experience, intercourse with God in prayer would be the necessary expression. It could find no other so fit. Joy in that intercourse would be like the swellings of Jordan.

A. PHELPS.

THE LIVING FATHER.

"As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father; so he that

eateth me, even he shall live by me."-JOHN vi. 57.

THIS very remarkable, instructive, and encouraging chapter clearly shows the very deep interest the

ever-blessed God takes in our welfare, and it ought to encourage us to put our trust in Him as the God