know it; and He knows all your wants far better than you know them; but it is his will, that, under the consciousness of those wants, you shall lift up the heart to that ocean fulness that is in Him; and He has promised that if you inquire of Him for the greatest blessings, those blessings will descend in copious and refreshing showers. Let me state what prayer is: it is the filial cry of God's children to their common Father -not so much a deprecatory cry as a filial expression. While I admire the beauty, the great beauty, of the Liturgy of the Church of England and it deserves to be admired-I have often thought that there is one fault that sometimes crops out in it-apparently too much of deprecation of God's wrath; too much of praying as if we were criminals in the dock, imploring God not to let forth vengeance upon us. I do not say the Reformers meant that; I do not say that those that use it understand it so; but it strikes me, human as the composition is, as a defect that more or less runs through it; a defect no less frequent in what are called extemporaneous prayers, because the defect lies deep in our moral nature. Our true attitude when we draw near to God in prayer is not that of criminals-condemned criminals deprecating his vengeance-but that of children, of sons, of daughters; sinful sons, sinful daughters, but sons and daughters still asking forgiveness, and grace, and glory. Hence the prayer, the most beautiful of all that the Great Master taught us, begins with "Our Father." Faith plants its footing on the fatherhood of God; and then it seeks from our Father every blessing that it needs for this life, and for that which is to come. Prayer is to be offered in any place, and in every place. Some fancy that prayer can be heard in a chancel, or under a cathedral roof, or in a chapel, much more readily than on a kitchen floor, on a field of battle, on the deck of a ship, on the margin of the sounding sea. By doing so, you attach efficacy to places where there is none; all the efficacy is in the

name in which you pray; the place is nothing, the medium is all. Now, what is the medium? Christ the Mediator. Wherever He is is consecrated ground and praying place; and to attach any efficacy to place, to church, to chapel, to encaustic tiles, or tessellated pavement, is to subtract so much from Christ, and to give it where it ought not to be given-to sacred places and sacred buildings. Prayer may be offered in any language. When Christ became man, He consecrated all space for prayer; when the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost, He consecrated all tongues for prayer. How sad, then, that in the Church of Rome they should imagine, sincerely imagine I have no doubt, but most mistakenly, that prayer has its greatest efficacy in Latin, and that the very service of their Church should be in Latin! The language is nothing; the place is nothing; the heart that feels its wants, expressing those wants to God in broken words, with stammering lips, or with no words at all, but with heart-beats-which are the most fervent and eloquent utterances of all—God hears, God answers, and gives the blessing as may be most expedient. What a grand thought is this! and what a grandeur does it give to Christianity! It is not a religion of churches and chapels; it is not a religion of tongues and dialects; it is a religion for the whole world, which, after all, is but one vast cathedral; it is a religion for all tongues, which, after all, are but dialects of the common mother-tongue; it is a religion for the human heart; and wherever a human heart can beat, there a Saviour is near; there are a praying tongue and a praying place. But the great requisite to prayer is not only that it may be in any place, in any tongue, through Christ the only Mediator, but that it shall be inspired also by the Holy Spirit of God. We know not what to pray for as we ought; but this Holy Spirit "helpeth our infirmities with groanings that cannot be uttered." I have often thought of the preciousness of that truth. Sometimes when people are very ill their heads get bewildered. It is a sad thing that sickness affects the

organ through which we think. In that state, when you do not know what to pray, when you are too weary, when the whole mind is confused, and the whole heart is bewildered, and you cannot express a single want in a suitable prayer, you may fall back upon this: "The Spirit helpeth our infirmities." We know not what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit helpeth our infirmities with groanings-that is, with earnest, silent, undertoned petitions, which are not heard, and cannot be uttered by us, but have their echoes and their answers where God our Father is. It is wonderful to see how Christianity meets man in all his infirmities, in all his weaknesses, in all the varying and fugitive phases of his condition, and supplies every want, and satisfies every necessity, beyond all thought and all expectation. Here is the contingent defect in the English Church : the people use words and pray with the minister, repeating the words; the danger lies in falling into the habit of repeating words without there being any counterpart of the words ringing in the depths of their hearts. We all know, if we have joined in the liturgy of that church, we have found ourselves sometimes saying the words without attaching any definite meaning to them. The defect in the Scottish Church is of another kind: you kneel, or stand, or whatever be your attitude, and you think sometimes the minister is praying for you. That is an intensely Roman Catholic notion; you are making the minister a priest, with mediatorial virtue, interceding for you. All his duty is simply to be your mouthpiece, expressing in the simplest words common wants, common feelings, common desires, and therefore it is not he that prays. He is simply your servant, your mouthpiece, expressing in simple words what you can easily follow, and along which your ceaseless, silent Amen is constantly going. Such is the nature of prayer. The chief thing that we are to pray for is the fulfilment of that promise, "I will take away the heart of stone, and I will give you an heart of flesh : and I will put my Spirit within you." I have receive

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from American clergymen most interesting information. They tell me that the merchants' prayer-meeting in New York is still kept up; and in the middle of the day men leave Broadway, I think it is called, which is equivalent to our Royal Exchange, and meet together, simply that one or two may pray; various persons sending up to the platform what they wish specially prayed for; and the consequence has been the descent of God's Holy Spirit upon thousands. The remarkable peculiarity in America is, that this movement did not begin in the church at all; it began outside it. ministers met to pray, the merchants met. So in Ireland, in Sweden, in India, in Scotland, in Wales, a universal, deep, spiritual, and holy impression is falling with electric force upon men's hearts; and what is that? My conviction is decided. I know all will not accept it; I know the world will sneer at it, and laugh at it, and turn it into ridicule, and make merry of it, but I believe it to be truth; and everything I have said on that subject out of God's word, not on my own responsibility, for the last ten years is coming to pass. It is the bride preparing for the bridegroom. "Behold, the bridegroom cometh is the cry in the desert; the church is now trimming her lamp, girding her loins, and going forth to meet him; and the consequence of this great revival, as it has been very justly and properly called, will be this, that the church of Christ will become more distinct. I do not mean by mechanical separation, but God's people will become more decided, more distinct, more separate from the world; and by and by there will be but two great churches upon earth; the church of Christ, all that love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity and truth, by whatever name or denomination it may be called, ranged on the one side; and Antichrist, at the head of his host, absorbing all-Puseyites, Tractarians, Greek Church, Romish Church-in one mighty mass: and when the great struggle comes, and the great tribulation shall overtake the earth, we know whose is the victory, and the glory, and the power.

LECTURE XXIII.

WAITING AND WORKING.

They that pray most earnestly invariably work hard and wait patiently.

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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; and they shall walk, and not faint."-ISAIAH xl. 31.

ONE almost shrinks to pass from the beautiful picture contained in this chapter to the human exposition of a single feature of it. To pass from God's portrait to man's is like passing from a lovely garden to a desert; from viewing a beautiful flower to man's mimicry of it; the imperfection of the last contrasting most unfavourably with the perfection and the glory of the first. Let us direct our attention briefly to two features: first, a character that we all need; They that wait upon the Lord ;" and secondly, the reward of that character that we may reach; "they shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint."

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The Christian is one of those "that wait upon the Lord." The failure of our most favourite schemes upon earth is often in our real experience our most rapid advance and our richest success. When the sky above becomes dark, when the earth beneath appears barren, when its fountains, as we thought them, are discovered to be broken cisterns, the heart is driven home to God, and we seek in Him, the Creator of the ends of the earth, that which we have missed, and been bitterly