With God in the World: A Series of Papers. Brent Charles Henry
spiritual development, can be satisfied with his present attainments in his life of prayer. Fortunately for us, here as well as in other departments of life the ideal is always pressing itself upon our notice and making the actual blush with shame for what it is. And it is just because this is so that there is hope of better things. The ideal beckons as well as condemns. What if long steeps of toil, strewn with the stones of difficulty, lie in between! God's home is far up on the hills, and nowhere is He so easily found as in a difficulty. As has been said, prayer is quite the most difficult task a man can undertake; but it has this gracious compensation that in no other duty does God lend such direct, face-to-face help. Man may speak wise words about prayer; the Church may bid to prayer; but God alone can unfold to souls the delicate secrets of prayer. The best help is for the hardest duty – the help that comes straight from the Lord.
Chapter II
Friendship with God – Looking
Yes, prayer is speech Godward, and worship is man's whole life of friendship with God, flowing out, as it were, of all that tide of emotion and service which is love's best speech. It is by thinking, then, of the nature of fellowship between man and man, which is the most beautiful thing in the world excepting only fellowship with God, that we can get substantial help in developing the life of prayer. Consider the Christian fellowship of two noble characters. It is "the greatest love and the greatest usefulness, and the most open communication, and the noblest sufferings, and the most exemplar faithfulness, and the severest truth and the heartiest counsel, and the greatest union of minds," – Jeremy Taylor stops here only because he has exhausted his stock of sublime phrases – "of which brave men and women are capable."3
Friendship is a full, steady stream, not intermittent or spasmodic. It is not something which lasts only when each looks into the other's eyes; for "distance sometimes endears friendship, and absence sweeteneth it." It moves and expands the life even when the mind is busied with matters prosaic and vexatious, even when there is no inward contemplation of the features or character of the absent friend. And yet, although friendship does not consist in face-to-face communication one with another, it is in this that it takes its rise, it is by this that it is fed. Fellowship is not the same as friendship, but there can be no friendship without fellowship. That is to say, there must be certain definite, formal acts, acts not made once for all, but repeated as often as opportunity is given; such form the cradle and nursery of friendship. In themselves they are not much – a grasp of the hand, a smile, a simple gift, a conventional salutation, a familiar talk about familiar things – but they introduce soul to soul, and through them each gives to the other his deepest self.
Friendship between man and man is no vague, intangible thing whose only reality is its name. Much less can one think thus of friendship with God. Friendship with God is the friendship of friendships. While it lives on strong and true even when we are not in conscious fellowship with Him, moments of conscious realization and contemplation of His person, character and presence are as essential to friendship with Him as food is necessary for the sustenance of life. There must be times of prayer and occasions of definite, formal approach to Him, the more the better, provided they be healthy and free. It is not an arbitrary enactment that declares morning, noonday and evening to be the moments of time when the soul of man should with peculiar intensity lift up its gaze unto the hills.4 One recognizes immediately the inherent fitness of having conscious fellowship with God at the opening, in the middle and at the close of day. In the morning, – because man's powers are then replete with life, his will nerved to act, his eye clear to see; never is he so well able to gain a vision of God, whether in the solitude of his room or in the quiet of the Church at an early Eucharist, as in the first hours of a new day. At noon, – because the soul like the body needs a mid-day rest; the dust of activity and the distractions of business will have dimmed the morning vision before the day is full gone, and it is good to refresh the nature by again, if it be only for a brief moment, looking straight up into the face of the Most High. At night, – for the evening shadows find God's servant with soiled soul and drooping aspirations in sore need of that cleansing and cheer which the sight of God imparts.
And the life of prayer works in a circle. The devotions of the morning give tone to those which come at noon and night, while the night prayers in turn determine the quality of the morrow's. Men usually wake in the temper of mind in which they went to sleep. It is all-important to gain a clear vision of God as the last conscious act before going to rest. The founder of French socialism was awakened every morning by a valet who said: "Remember, Monsieur le Comte, that you have great things to do." But it is not men who aspire only or chiefly in the morning that achieve great things, but rather those who aspire at night. What is of nature in the morning is of grace at night. The vision that comes easily at the beginning of the unused stretch of a new day is harder to see when disappointment and failure have clouded the eye of hope; but it means more. The men who attain the highlands of the spiritual life never "sleep with the wings of aspiration furled."
Of course God is always with us, always looking at us with searching yet loving scrutiny. It would be impossible for us to be more completely in His presence than we are; for in Him "we live, and move, and have our being." But for the most part our lives are spent without much conscious recognition of the fact. He will be no more present at the last day when we stand before His throne than He is now. The only difference will be that then we shall see Him as He sees us; we shall be so wholly absorbed by that consciousness that there will be room for no other consideration as, God grant, there will be no other desire. But before that moment comes men must practise looking into His face by faith so that it will not be unfamiliar as the face of a stranger when the last veil is swept aside.
Among men contemplation of another's personality is the requisite preliminary of fellowship with him. Fellowship can begin only when there is a mutual recognition each of his fellow's presence. Personality is the most powerful magnet the world knows; and the finer the personality the more readily will all one's best impulses be set in motion and attracted to it. How vain then is it to attempt to speak to God before the consciousness of His living, loving presence has caught the attention and absorbed the mind – or at any rate until we have done our best to see Him, attentive, sympathetic, with His gaze fixed upon us. Power to pray is proportionate to the vividness of our consciousness of His presence and personality. When a man is talking to a companion his mind is occupied with the sense of the presence of an attentive, sympathetic personality rather than with the thought of the precise words he is going to use. His fellow acts as a magnet to extract his thoughts. An orator makes his finest appeal when he is least conscious of himself and most conscious of his audience. Just so then is it with speech Godward. The moment a man is assured that God's personality is present and that His ear is opened earthward, speech heavenward is a power and a joy, and only then. Many make prayer a fine intellectual exercise or a training school for the attention – this and nothing more. They strain their utmost, and doubtless they succeed well, to understand each sentence uttered and to speak it intelligently. Their minds are on what they are saying rather than on the Person to Whom they are saying it. They reap about the same benefit as they would if they recited attentively a scene from Shakespeare.
"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills." The vision of God unseals the lips of man. Herein lies strength for conflict with the common enemy of the praying world known as wandering thoughts. Personality will enchain attention when the most interesting intellectual, moral and spiritual concerns will fail to attract. If the eye is fixed on God thought may roam where it will without irreverence, for every thought is then converted into a prayer. Some have found it a useful thing when their minds have wandered off from devotion and been snared by some good but irrelevant consideration, not to cast away the offending thought as the eyes are again lifted to the Divine Face, but to take it captive, carry it into the presence of God and weave it into a prayer before putting it aside and resuming the original topic. This is to lead captivity captive.
It is hard for those to see God's face who confine their contemplation of spiritual things to moments of formal devotion, who, while occupied with material things, do not explore what is beneath and beyond the visible, who do not strive to discern the moral and religious aspect of every phase of life. On the other hand the vision of God becomes increasingly clear to such as look not at the things which are seen but