Yes, goodness is the principal thing; therefore get goodness, and with all thy getting--at the price of all that thou hast gotten (such is the true meaning of the words)[42]--get righteousness. Is this what we are doing? Goodness is the first thing; are we putting it first? Day by day are we saying to it, "Sit thou on my right hand," while we put all other things under our feet? "Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I remember thee not; if I prefer not thee above my chief joy"--is this the kind of honour that we are paying to it? "We make it our ambition," said St Paul, "to be well pleasing unto Him."[43] Where this is the master ambition, all other lawful ambitions may be safely cherished and given their place. But if some lesser power rule, whose right it is not to reign over us, the end is chaos and night. "Seek ye first His righteousness;" we subvert Christ's order at our peril. And this righteousness must be sought. As men seek wealth, as men seek knowledge, as men seek power, so must we seek goodness. "Wherefore giving all diligence"--in no other way can the pearl of great price be secured; it does not lie by the roadside for any lounger to pick up. "With toil of heart and knees and hands," so only can the "path upward" and the prize be won. "Blessed," said Jesus, "are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness." Blessed, He meant, are they who long more than anything else to be good; for all such longing shall be abundantly satisfied. Exalt righteousness, and she shall promote thee; she shall bring thee to honour when thou dost embrace her. She shall give to thine head a chaplet of grace; a crown of beauty shall she deliver to thee.

It is fitting that a chapter on righteousness should follow one on sin, for this may find some to whom the other made no appeal. At a meeting of Christian workers held some years ago in Glasgow, the chairman invited the late Professor Henry Drummond, who was present, though his name was not on the programme, to say a few words. He accepted the invitation, but said he would do no more than state a fact and ask a question. The fact was this, that in recent revival movements, in which he had had large experience, there were few indications of that deep and overwhelming conviction of sin which had been so characteristic a feature of similar revivals in past days. And this was the question, Did it mean that the Holy Spirit was in any way modifying the method of His operation? What answer the wise men of the meeting gave to the Professor's question I do not know. But fact and question alike deserve to be carefully pondered. The Spirit, when He is come, Christ said, "will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment." "Will convict the world of righteousness"--have we not sometimes forgotten this? Have we not put the full stop at "sin," as though the Holy Spirit's convicting work ended there? Nevertheless, there are many to-day whose religious life begins, not so much in a sense of their own sin and guilt and need, as rather in the consciousness of the glory and honour of Christ. It is what they find within themselves which brings some men to Christ; it is what they find in Him which brings others. Some are driven by the strong hands of stern necessity; some are wooed by the sweet constraint of the sinless Son of God. Some are crushed and broken and humbled to the dust, and their first cry is "God be merciful to me a sinner"; some when they hear the call of Christ leap up to greet Him with a new light in their eyes and the glad confession on their lips, "Lord I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest."

What, then, shall we say to these things? What but this, "There are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all." Travellers to the same country do not always journey by the same route; and for some of the heavenly pilgrims the Slough of Despond lies on the other side of the Wicket Gate. After all, it is of small moment what brings a man forth from the City of Destruction; enough if he have come out and if now his face is set toward the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God.

* * * * *

CONCERNING PRAYER

"Who seeketh finds: what shall be his relief Who hath no power to seek, no heart to pray, No sense of God, but bears as best he may, A lonely incommunicable grief?

What shall he do? One only thing he knows,
That his life flits a frail uneasy spark
In the great vast of universal dark,
And that the grave may not be all repose.
Be still, sad soul! lift thou no passionate cry, But spread the desert of thy being bare To the full searching of the All-seeing eye: Wait--and through dark misgiving, blank despair,

God will come down in pity, and fill the dry Dead plain with light, and life, and vernal air."
J.C. SHAIRP.

* * * * *

X

CONCERNING PRAYER

"_What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall ask for a fish, will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him_?"--MATT. vii. 9-11.

There has been in our day much painful disputation concerning prayer and the laws of nature. Whole volumes have been written to prove that it is possible, or that it is impossible, for God to answer prayer. I am not going to thresh out again this dry straw just now. Discussions of this kind have, undoubtedly, their place; indeed, whether we will or no, they are often forced upon us by the conditions of the hour; but they had no place in the teaching of Jesus, and I do not propose to say anything about them now. I wish rather, imitating as far as may be the gracious simplicity and directness of the argument of Jesus which we have just read, to gather up some of the practical suggestions touching this great matter which are strewn throughout the Gospels alike in the precepts and practice of our Lord.

I

First of all, then, let us get fixed in our minds the saying of Jesus that "men ought always to pray and not to faint." The very form of the saying suggests that Christ knew how easy it is for us to faint and grow weary in our prayers. Men cease from prayer on many grounds. Some there are in whom the questioning, doubting spirit has grown so strong that for a time it has silenced even the cry of the heart for God. Some there are who are so busy, they tell us, that they have no time for prayer; and after all, they ask, Is not honest work the highest kind of prayer? And some there are who have ceased to pray, because they have been disappointed, because nothing seemed to come of their prayers. They asked but they did not receive, they sought but they did not find, they knocked but no door was opened to them; there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded; and now they ask, they seek, they knock no more. And some of us there are who do not pray because, as one of the psalmists says, our soul "cleaveth unto the dust." The things of God, the things of the soul, the things of eternity--what Paul calls "the things that are above"--are of no concern to us; we have sold ourselves to work, to think, to live, for the things of the earth and the dust.

Nevertheless, be the cause of our prayerlessness what it may, Christ's word remains true. Man made in the image of God ought always to pray and not to faint. And even more than by His words does Christ by His example prompt us to prayer. Turn, _e.g._, to the third Gospel. All the Evangelists show us Jesus at prayer; but it is to Luke that we owe almost all our pictures of the kneeling Christ. Let us glance at them as they pass in quick succession before our eyes:

"Jesus having been baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened" (iii. 21).

"He withdrew Himself in the deserts, and prayed" (v. 16).

"It came to pass in these days, that He went out into the mountain to pray; and He continued all night in prayer to God". (vi. 12).

"It came to pass, as He was praying alone, the disciples were with Him" (ix. 18).

"It came to pass about eight days after these sayings, He took with Him Peter and John and James and went up into the mountain to pray. And as He was praying the fashion of His countenance was altered, and His raiment became white and dazzling" (ix. 28, 29).

"It came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that when He ceased, one of the disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also taught his disciples" (xi. 1).

"Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you as wheat; but I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not" (xxii. 32).

"And He kneeled down and prayed, saying, Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from Me: nevertheless not My will, but Thine be done.... And being in an agony He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling down upon the ground" (xxii. 41, 44).

"And Jesus said, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (xxiii. 34).

And if thus He, the Redeemer, prayed, how much greater need have we, the redeemed, always to pray and not to faint?

"But we are so busy, we have no time." Then let us look at another picture. This time it is Mark who is the painter. He has chosen as his subject our Lord's first Sabbath in Capernaum. The day begins with teaching: "He entered into the synagogue and taught." After teaching comes healing: "There was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit;" him, straightway, Jesus healed. Then, "straightway, when they were come out of the synagogue, they came into the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon's wife's mother lay sick of a fever, and straightway they tell Him of her; and He came and took her by the hand, and raised her up." So the day wore on toward evening and sunset, when "they brought unto Him all that were sick, and them that were possessed with devils. And all the city was gathered together at the door. And He healed many that were sick with divers diseases and cast out many devils." So closed at last the long day's busy toil. "_And in the morning, a great while before day, He rose up and went out and departed into a desert place, and there prayed_;" as if just because He was so much with men the more did He need to be with God. _Laborare est orare_, we say, "work is prayer." And, undoubtedly, "work may be prayer"; but we are deceiving ourselves and hurting our own souls, if we think that work can take the place of prayer. And if there is one lesson that these earthly years of the Son of Man--busy as they were prayerful, prayerful as they were busy--can teach us, it is surely this, that just because our activities are so abounding, the more need have we to make a space around the soul wherein it may be able to think, and pray, and aspire.

One of the best-known pictures of the last half century is Millet's "Angelus." The scene is a potato-field, in the midst of which, and occupying the foreground of the picture, are two figures, a young man and a young woman. Against the distant sky-line is the steeple of a church. It is the evening hour, and as the bell rings which calls the villagers to worship, the workers in the field lay aside the implements of their toil, and with folded hands and bowed heads, stand for a moment in silent prayer. It is a picture of what every life should be, of what every life must be, which has taken as its pattern the Perfect Life in which work and prayer are blent like bells of sweet accord.

II

Another saying of Christ's concerning prayer, not less fundamental is this: "When ye pray, say, Our Father, which art in heaven." How essential to prayer is a right thought of God it can hardly be necessary to point out. "When ye pray say----" what? All depends on how we fill in the blank. Our thought of God determines the character of all our intercourse with Him. If "God" is only the name which we give to the vast, unknown Power which lies behind the visible phenomena of the universe, if He is only a dim shadow projected by our own minds, or a collection of attributes whose names we have learned from the Catechism, our prayers will soon come to an end. When Jesus prayed He said always "Father"; and the Father to whom He prayed, and whom He revealed, He it is to whom our prayers should be offered.

This is a matter the practical importance of which it would be hard to exaggerate. Think, _e.g._, of the questions concerning prayer which would be answered straightway, had we but made our own Christ's thought of God. We are all familiar with the little problems about prayer with which some good people are wont to tease themselves and their friends and their ministers: Is it right to pray for rain, for fine weather for the recovery of health, for the success of some temporal enterprize, and so forth? How shall we meet questions of this sort? Shall we draw a line and say, all things on this side of the line we may pray about, all things on that side of the line we may not pray about? This will not help us. Rather we must keep Christ's great word before us: "When ye pray, say, Father." There or nowhere is the answer to be found. Just as every wise father seeks to train his child to make of him his confidant, to have no secrets from him, to trust him utterly, and in everything, so would God have us feel towards Him; as free, as frank, as unfettered, should our fellowship with Him be. To put it under constraint, to fence it about with rules, would be to rob it of all that gives it worth, And, therefore, I cannot tell any man, and I do not want any man to tell me, what we may pray for, or what we may not pray for. "When ye pray, say, Father;" and for the rest let your own heart teach you. But if we are left thus free shall we not ask many things which we have no right to ask, which God cannot grant? Undoubtedly we shall, just as a boy of five will ask many things that his father, because he loves him, must refuse. Nevertheless, no wise father would wish to check the childish prattle. There is nothing that he values more than just these frank, uncalculating confidences, for he knows that it is by means of them that the shaping hands of love can do their perfect work. And the remedy for our mistakes in prayer is not a set of little man-made rules, telling us what to pray for and what not to pray for, but rather a deeper insight into, and a fuller understanding of, the glory and blessedness of the Divine Fatherhood.

III

Passing now from these preliminary counsels concerning prayer, let us note how great is the importance which, both by His precepts and His example, Christ attaches to the duty of intercessory prayer. I have been much struck of late in reading several books on this subject, to note how one writer after another judges it needful to warn his readers against the idea that prayer is no more than petition. What they say is, of course, true; prayer is much more than petition. But, unless I misread the signs of the times, this is not the warning which just now we most need to hear. Rather do we need to be told that prayer is more than communion, that petition, simple asking that we may obtain, is a part, and a very large part of prayer. "Who rises from prayer a better man," says George Meredith, "his prayer is answered." This is true, but it is far from being the whole truth. The duty of intercession, of prayer for others, is writ large on every page of the New Testament; but intercession has simply no meaning at all unless we believe that God will grant our requests as may be most expedient for us and for them for whom we pray. Let me illustrate the wealth of Christ's teaching on this matter by two or three examples.

(1) We have all read Tennyson's question--

"What are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friends?"

For themselves and those who call them friends--but Christ will not suffer us to stop there. "Bless them that curse you," He said; "pray for them that despitefully use you." So He spoke, and on the Cross He made the great word luminous for ever by His own prayer for His murderers: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."

(2) Christ prayed for His disciples and for His Church: "I pray for them ... neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on Me through their word." "I will pray the Father and He shall give you ----." Only once are the actual words recorded, but they cover, we are sure, great stretches of Christ's intercourse with God. And when once in their work for Him they had failed, He puts His finger on the secret of their failure thus: "This kind can come out by nothing save by prayer." Do we pray for our Church? We find fault with it; but do we pray for it? We blame its office--bearers and criticize its ministers; but do we pray for them? We go to the house of God on the Sabbath day; but no fire is burning on the altar, the minister has no message for us, we come away no whit better than we went. Whose is the blame? Let the man in the pulpit take his share; but is it all his? Must not some of it be laid at the door of his people? How many of them during the week had prayed for him, that his eyes might be opened and his heart touched, that as he sat and worked in his study he might get from God to give to them? Dr. Dale used to say that if ever he preached a good sermon, a sermon that really helped men, it was due to the prayers of his people as much as to anything he had done himself. If in all our churches we would but proclaim a truce to our bickerings and fault-findings, and try what prayer can do!

(3) Christ prayed for the children: "Then were there brought unto Him little children that He should lay His hands on them, and pray.... And He took them in His arms, and blessed them, laying His hands upon them." It is surely needless to dwell on this. What man is there who, if he have a child, will not speak to God in his behalf? "And all the people said unto Samuel, Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God that we die not.... And Samuel said unto the people, God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you." God have mercy on him who has little children who bear his name, but who never cries to heaven in their behalf! "He blessed them," _i.e._ He invoked a blessing, God's blessing, upon them. And we are sure the prayer was heard, and the little ones were blessed. And will not God hear our prayers for our children? When Monica, the saintly mother of Augustine, besought an African bishop once and again to help her with her wilful, profligate son, the good man answered her, "Woman, go in peace; it cannot be that the child of such tears should be lost." "God's seed," wrote Samuel Rutherford to Marion M'Naught about her daughter Grizel, "shall come to God's harvest." It shall, for the promise holds, and what we have sown we shall also reap.

(4) And, lastly, Christ prayed for individuals: "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you,--all of you," that is; the pronoun is plural-- "that he might sift you as wheat; but I made supplication for thee"-- "thee, Peter"; now the singular pronoun is used--"that thy faith fail not." The words point to a definite crisis in the experience of Peter, when the onset of the Tempter was met by the intercession of the Saviour. To me Gethsemane itself is not more wonderful than this picture of Christ on His knees before God, naming His loved disciple by name, and praying that, in this supreme hour of his life, his faith should not utterly break down. "Making mention of thee in my prayers"--does this not bring us near to the secret of prevailing prayer? We are afraid to be individual and particular; we lose ourselves in large generalities, until our prayers die of very vagueness. There is surely a more excellent way. "My God," Paul wrote to the Philippians, "shall fulfil"--not merely "all your need," as the Authorized Version has it, but--"every need of yours." There is a fine discrimination in the Divine love which sifts and sorts men's needs, and applies itself to them one by one, just as the need may be. And when in prayer we speak to God, let it be not only of "all our need," flung in one great, careless heap before Him, but of "every need of ours," each one named by its name, and all spread out in order before Him.

IV

And as Christ teaches us to pray for others, so also does He teach us to pray for ourselves. Two points only in this connection can be noted.

(1) Let us pray when we enter into our Gethsemane; for every life has its Gethsemane. Some there are who have not yet entered it; they are young, and their way thus far has teen among the roses and lilies of life. But for them, too, the path leads to Gethsemane, and some day they also will lie prostrate in an agony, under the darkening olive trees. And some there are to whom life seems but one long Gethsemane. In that dread agony God help us to pray! Nay, what else then can a man do but, as Browning says, catch at God's skirts and pray? But that he can do. Death may build its dividing walls great and high, such as our feet can never scale; it cannot roof them over and shut us out from God. We remember how it was with Enoch Arden, stranded on an isle, "the loneliest in a lonely sea":--

"Had not his poor heart Spoken with That, which being everywhere Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone, Surely the man had died of solitude."

Were it not for the doors opened in heaven what should man that is born of a woman do? But when in our Gethsemane we offer up "prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears," it is after Christ's manner that we must pray. I said just now that there are some to whom life seems one long Gethsemane. Can it be because hitherto they have only prayed, "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me"? Not until with Christ we bow our heads and say, "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt," will the iron gates unfold and the shadows of the Garden lie behind us.

(2) "Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation." And if there be some to whom my last word had little or no meaning, here, at least, Christ speaks to all. And this time I have nothing of my own to add by way of comment; but I copy out this passage from Charles Kingsley's _Yeast_, for every young man who reads these words to lay to heart: "I am no saint," says Colonel Bracebridge, "and God only knows how much less of one I may become; but mark my words--if you are ever tempted by passion, and vanity, and fine ladies, to form liaisons, as the Jezebels call them, snares, and nets and labyrinths of blind ditches, to keep you down through life, stumbling and grovelling, hating yourself and hating the chain to which you cling--in that hour pray--pray as if the devil had you by the throat--to Almighty God, to help you out of that cursed slough! There is nothing else for it!--pray, I tell you!"

* * * * *

CONCERNING THE FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES

"She, who kept a tender Christian hope,
Haunting a holy text, and still to that
Returning, as the bird returns, at night,
'Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,'
Said, 'Love, forgive him:' but he did not speak;
And silenced by that silence lay the wife,
Remembering her dear Lord who died for all,
And musing on the little lives of men,
And how they mar this little by their feuds."
TENNYSON.

* * * * *

XI

CONCERNING THE FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES

"_Then came Peter, and said to Him, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? until seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven times; but, until seventy times seven._"--MATT, xviii. 21, 22.

This would seem to be plain enough, even though we had nothing more from the lips of Jesus concerning the duty of forgiveness. In point of fact, however, the lesson of these words is repeated a full half-dozen times throughout the Gospels. It may be well, therefore, to begin by bringing together our Lord's sayings on the subject.

I

We turn first to the Sermon on the Mount: "Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you." Then, in the Lord's Prayer we have the familiar petition, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us." And it is surely a fact full of significance that at the close of the prayer our Lord should single out this one petition from the rest with this emphatic comment: "For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." The words quoted thus far are taken from the first Gospel. Similar teaching is found in the second and third. Thus, in Mark, we read: "And whensoever ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any one; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses;" and in Luke: "If thy brother sin, rebuke him, and if he repent, forgive him. And if he sin against thee seven times in the day, and seven times turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him." Again, we have the teaching recorded by Matthew, out of which Peter's question sprang--"If thy brother sin against thee, go, show him his fault between thee and him alone; if he hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother"--followed by the parable of the Unforgiving Servant, with its solemn warning of inimitable doom: "So shall also My heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not every one his brother from your hearts." And, finally, all these words are made fast for ever in the minds and consciences of men, by the great act on the Cross when the dying Redeemer prayed for the men who slew Him: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."

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