Prayer meeting theology...

I

A LITTLE Congregational church in a sequestered Welsh settlement in Pennsylvania has kept up its weekly prayer-meeting without intermission, summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, for more than half a century. The attendance is never large ; and the long series of meetings has been maintained unbroken mainly through the remarkable tenacity of a very few of the members in successive generations. There are three brethren now living who have not missed a prayer-meeting in twenty years. They have been there all by themselves more than once. They have often in busy times gone to meeting from the fields, supperless, without change of garments, and with unwashed hands. They have hurried home from distant points with much difficulty, through snow-drifts and blinding storms, in order to be found in their places at the ap-

i pointed hour. The worldly wisdom of the neighborhood pronounces such zeal intemperate and fanatical ; and a great deal of sparkling wit has from time to time been expended upon the spiritual pride and hypocrisy and inconsistency of these pillars of the church. But pillars they are after all ; and the prayer-meeting, if not the church, plainly owes its continuous life under God to their exemplary steadfastness.

At a recent meeting there were just a dozen persons present all told ; and the majority of these were children, who huddled together into one roomy pew at a chilling distance from the adult worshippers. There was no sweet singer to lead the psalmody, and no one to play on the little instrument which often keeps the musical part of the service from collapsing. Brother A read a favorite chapter from the Epistle to the Romans, and made a prayer full of scripture and sound doctrine. He was followed in prayer by B and C. Then after the three brethren had spoken a few words by way of exhortation, the meeting broke up with a painful rendering of Old Hundred. The children hurried out as fast as good manners would allow ; and the sweet chime of merry voices going up the road furnished an after-piece in curious contrast to the service just ended. As it was still early, the meeting having been unusually short, the men remained in their places to " visit " a little after the rest of the congregation had dispersed. The conversation, having lightly touched a number of every-day topics, came round to religious matters ; and they discussed for the thousandth time a question which always interests and always baffles them and their brethren throughout all Christendom : What is the matter with the prayer-meeting ? The discussion, when fairly under way, took something like the following form.

A. Of course we may receive a blessing ourselves in every meeting if our hearts are sincere. Still you must see that our meetings are not what they should be. What is it that keeps the people away ?

B. That I cannot tell. Some are sick perhaps, and some are aged and infirm. Some are pressed with many cares ; and possibly some stay away because others do, never imagining that the good Lord can do anything for them without the aid of a crowd. For myself I scarcely ever stop to think whether we are few or many here. In truth I come here to get away from a crowd rather than to look for one. The thoughts which distract a man all day even in solitude make an hour of quiet worship exceedingly grateful whether the company be great or small. I thought the other day that I should even like to come in here all alone sometimes. I was passing the Catholic church in the village when a poor lame washerwoman laid down her basket at the door and went in. Being at leisure I also stepped in from mere curiosity. At first I could see no one. The building seemed entirely deserted. But on advancing I found the woman on her knees, clasping her hands in prayer, regardless of the presence of an intruder, mindful only of the Adorable Presence before which she bowed. In the empty church she was with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.

C. That was all as it should be. The Lord is always to be found in a Catholic church and in a Protestant church likewise. But so also may He be found wherever we earnestly seek Him, in our homes, or in the fields and the woods where we ply our daily tasks. I heartily believe in public worship, not on account of any sacredness attaching to houses made with hands for the Most High, but on account of the sacredness of human souls, on account of the blessedness of the communion of saints. The true temple of God is built of living stones. We are His temple. His presence is made manifest in the life and fellowship of His people rather than in any consecrated places or forms of worship. I should be disposed to say that the people stay away from church because we, who are always here and who are responsible for the proceedings, fail to make full proof of our ministry ; because we are so stiff, so inert, so inhospitable and barren. Perhaps the very furniture of the house deemed so sacred, perhaps the order of service deemed more sacred still, may to some extent defeat the true purpose of our meetings. A gathering with such an origin and such a purpose as ours, one would think, should be, first of all, an actual meeting, an open, free, general, unconstrained, real meeting of man with man. I almost think that the informal meetings of Christian men at the corner store and at the post-office every evening copy the methods of the upper chamber in Jerusalem more closely than we do. Our meetings are too formal. We have a set performance which is always the same or nearly so. We are altogether too solemn, too little human. We want the frank question, the homely story, the smile, and the harmless laugh of real life. Or rather we want the freedom and actual contact of mind with mind, of which these are some of the commonest signs and accompaniments. It may require a peculiar temperament or a special training not possible for all Christian people, to find strength and joy in the solitary church-going of the Catholic washerwoman, or even in our own awkward and stereotyped services.

A. I confess that our meetings are not exactly amusing, and not quite so free and easy as the nightly palaver at the corner store. But why should they be ? Cannot reasonable creatures afford to meet for a single hour in the week to worship God together in all seriousness ? The trouble is much deeper than any dryness or meagreness in our services. Christians have in other times found delight and profit in meetings very much longer and drearier than ours. The people nowadays stayaway from the prayer-meeting because they are more or less tainted with the pestilent scepticism which is spreading through the land. They are losing their interest in Christian ordinances quite naturally because they have already in a great measure lost their faith in Christian truth. There are members of this church not a few whose delight is in unchristian speculation, and who meditate in the literature of unbelief day and night. You know that the blasphemer who lectured in the hall the other evening on what he called Mother-Goose Religion, made more of a stir among the people than our good pastor has been able to make for many a year by the faithful preaching of Gospel truth.

B. I am afraid you are hitting at me now. I listened to that lecture with a good deal of interest, and I must confess that I am often slow of heart to believe what our good minister has to set before us. I agree with you that the prevailing uncertainty about Christian truth is drying the blood of our Christian life. I regret it most sincerely. But I can throw no stones at the doubters. I have felt the poison in my own soul, and I feel it more and more every day. I try to hold the faith as the spider taketh hold of her house with her hands. But some invisible current carries it away from me bit by bit. We have fallen upon evil days. Our age seems to be, by some dire necessity, an age of doubt and unbelief.

C. There is unbelief enough now and always. But our age is no worse than other ages. The distinction is frequently made, I know, between ages of faith and ages of doubt or unbelief. But faith and doubt are not sandwiched separately among the generations. They exist side by side in every age, and side by side frequently in the mind of the same individual. If the Son of Man should come now, He would probably find as much faith on the earth as He could have found at any former time. Much of what is stigmatized as doubt in our day is not doubt in any evil sense, being simply the natural movement of the mind towards truth not yet attained. And much of what was called faith in former days was not faith in any good sense, but a superstitious prostration of the mind before some external authority, or a sheer withdrawal of its active powers from religious questions. The unbelief of our time is more loquacious than that of some former ages. But this is a gain. Unbelief will have some evil issue. Is it not well that it should spend itself in talk, though the talk be blasphemous, as it necessarily must be ? You can at least reply to infidel arguments, and see clearly what they lead to. But what can you do with infidel souls which go on breeding sin and death in silence, disdaining to put forth any theoretical justification of themselves ? Even if the age seems to you an age of doubt, beware of assuming that it is such by any real necessity. Challenge the necessity boldly, and explore the dark stream which is washing away your foundations.

B. Your counsel is admirable. I particularly desire to do as you bid me. And if, with your general exhortation, you can furnish specific directions how to proceed, you will find me a ready and grateful pupil.

A. I can give you specific directions. Leave those heretical books and papers alone for a season, and don't go tagging after the vain Jack-of-the-lantern doctors who have already to Prayer- Meeting Theology.

lured you too far into the wilderness. Don't go near your advanced thinkers ; and if they come to you, put your fingers in your ears and let them prophesy to the winds of heaven. Don't be standing on tiptoe and stretching your neck over the fences to pry into fields which it is not intended, and not at all necessary, that you should know just yet. Recognize your limitations. Acknowledge also that your inheritance is rich and fair. Learn to lie down thankful and contented in green pastures and beside still waters.

B. I can appreciate all that. But I presume Brother C has another widely divergent course marked out for me in his mind.

C. I should not express myself precisely as A does, but the course which I should recommend to you may perhaps not be " another " after all. I acknowledge a man's right and duty under certain circumstances to close his ears and his eyes too, not only against error and vanity but against what may be good and true enough in its proper place and order. We shut out foreign goods, though confessedly excellent, from our markets, because we wish to build up our home industries. It may be

Prayer- Meeting Theology. i 1

necessary likewise to exclude from our minds much excellent foreign thought in order to protect and develop our own. Our senses are the doors of the mind, and doors are made to shut as well as to open, to exclude as well as to admit. I observe in some quarters a disposition to take the doors off their hinges and throw them away in rapturous hospitality ; and, when more room still is demanded, to tear down the walls also, that all the world may come in like a flood without let or hindrance. But when this is done, all house-keeping and all human living are at an end. Extravagant hospitality has ruined many a family, and too many new, vigorous, exacting ideas will devour your substance as fast as too many guests of any other description. The writer of the Fourth Gospel would not crowd his brethren's little world even with the sayings and doings of the Lord Jesus. He wished to leave them room to turn round and to do their proper work in their own world. And we certainly ought to claim the same privilege for ourselves against the greatest men and their very greatest thoughts. We must not suffer ourselves to be choked with knowledge, or to be driven i2 Prayer- Meeting Theology*

to distraction by too much learning. I agree with A also in his high estimate of our actual condition. Knowing not fully what we shall be, it seems to me a very great thing to have become what we now are. Our present life appears to me so well worth living that it seems a pity, as well as a folly, to withdraw our thoughts and strength from it and burn them up in the attempt to scale the flaming walls of the world. We can well afford to eat our bread in gladness and singleness of heart, for threescore years and ten, right here, with all our limitations. But while rejoicing in our inheritance, and accepting our limitations, we need not put up artificial limitations for ourselves. Let us by all means keep contented within the fence. But is it a virtue to confine ourselves wilfully to a little corner of our own spacious field ? I believe that the doubts which trouble us and multitudes besides us at the present day are not promptings of the enemy urging us to flee into the wilderness, but natural and honest cravings for the fresh woods and pastures new which we have left unvisited though fairly within our borders. There is surely much that is unsound, and very much that is immature, in our views of Christian truth and of the life of man. Doubt, in such circumstances, need not come from the Evil One. It may well come to us by the grace of God, which will not suffer us to remain for ever in our infancy. See to it that in repressing your doubts you do not resist the Spirit of Truth and refuse to entertain angels. Repress no honest doubts. Give them a fair hearing. Bring them with you sometimes to the prayer-meeting which you love so well. They may stir up gifts of life which lie dormant within us all. They may even help to make the prayer-meeting as interesting to the people as the corner-store conferences.

B. My doubts accompany me to the prayer-meeting and to other meetings altogether too often. But I do with them just as I do with old Shabby, my dog, when he follows me to church. I turn them back at the door if I can ; and if they baffle my efforts and slip in with me, I keep them as quiet as possible. Indeed I have little trouble with them after the service is fairly begun. They shrink away at the sound of prayer and praise ; nor can they abide the accents of the divine word.

And I would rather be the witch of Endor than think of calling up their miserable apparitions in the house of God. You are not serious in recommending it, are you ?

C. Perhaps I was too hasty. If you find so great a discord between thoughts which are familiar to you out-of-doors and the regular exercises of the prayer-meeting, probably some others might feel it still more. But it may be that our prayer-meetings, and our other religious services, have settled down on too narrow a basis. Perhaps they allow but a part of our nature to worship God, while they call the other parts common and unclean, and shut them out with the dogs. Perhaps, while our spirit prayeth, our understanding is unfruitful. But that is wrong, by the apostolic rule : " I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also." Our meetings, I believe, would be better in every respect if we brought with us all our laboring thoughts, suppressing none. But if this be more than some of us can bear, I certainly think that Christian people ought, at some suitable time and place, to consider the truths with which they have so much to do in relation to the requirements of the intellect as well as in their relation to pious emotion and active duty.

A. So you would turn the Church of Christ into a debating society, or into a school of philosophy ! You might as well shut it up at once, and bring back old heathendom in full force. Did not St. Paul renounce the wisdom of this world, and did not our Saviour say that we must become as little children if we would enter into the kingdom of God ?

C. But St. Paul and our Saviour also reasoned carefully and powerfully in their own ministry ; and much of their work consisted in liberating men from the yoke of tradition, and in establishing great principles so that they were commended to men's minds and consciences in the sight of God.

A. Exactly. And why can we not rest in the principles which they established so firmly? What is established needs no further debating. Do you doubt the great truths which, through the blessed labors of Christ and His apostles have been commended to every man's conscience in the sight of God?

C. Some of those great truths have been obscured and overladen with conflicting speculations before our time. If there were but one statement of Christian truth, we might receive it without discussion. But a thousand contradictory voices, all professing to teach the truth as it is in Jesus, call for something of a debating society or even of a school of philosophy, to separate the precious from the vile, the true from the false. Even supposing the pure sifted truth is before us, our minds must still be allowed to take hold of it before they can be nourished by it ; and the mind takes hold of truth, not by passive assent, but by an active process in which a measure of doubt and speculation may be legitimate and even necessary. The attitude of some of your grim defenders of the faith towards Christian truth reminds one of the miser who, once for all, bought a piece of cheese for his dinner, and put it in a glass bottle to keep, and for ever after at meal time licked the bottle and saved the cheese. You protect the truth of the Gospel too much, turning the minds of men away from it, and so making it of none effect. Besides, our Lord had many things to say to His disciples which He did not say because the disciples were not prepared to receive them.

What He did not say unto them He may by His Spirit make known unto us if so be that we refuse not His communications through distrust and fear, or through a stolid disparagement of all truth but that to which we have already attained. If we are prepared to welcome new truth, we must be prepared to revise and restate old doctrines, so that the old and the new may be joined together in harmonious and vital unity. It is my firm conviction as to all the great Christian doctrines that the half has not been told concerning them ; that the progress of thought will manifest their glory and their fruitfulness more and more throughout all the time to come ; that honest doubt and the freest inquiry are therefore to be regarded as means of grace by which we may humbly consult the Master and receive from time to time His latest word.

B. I am glad to hear you put the matter so, and I trust that you may be right. But I have often felt that to call any accepted religious doctrines in question publicly, even with a view to restatement merely, brings doubt upon the whole system of Christian truth in the minds of many ; and I have sometimes thought that it may be better to subscribe to the whole mass of received opinion, with the inevitable mental reservations, than to run the risk of undermining the faith of any, and of bringing the truth itself into jeopardy with the error which we would disown.

C. It is a poor faith that can be undermined by the truth, or by any earnest and reverent seeker after truth. And it is a poor precarious truth that cannot be stated as correctly as possible by its friends without being put in jeopardy by their painstaking loyalty. You fear a remote and doubtful evil. To avoid that you propose to walk meekly into a hurtful snare here present. Perish the thought ! If you have positive convictions at variance with those of others, be true to your own, and have no fear. Shake boldly the things that can be shaken by the highest, purest form of truth which you can attain to. The things which cannot be shaken will come more distinctly into view ; and they alone are worth caring about seriously.

B. I have thought so many times, and I have often begun to survey my position in order to make an honest statement. But I have been frightened by my own thoughts every time. Let us go over the ground together before we mention our difficulties in the prayer-meeting or in any public place.

A. I cannot understand what you would be at. The Christian faith seems to me so simple. And when you depart from the simplicity of the Gospel, you embark on a trackless and immeasurable sea. What do you look for as the fruit of your labors, — a new Gospel?

C. Perhaps nothing new. Perhaps a clearer understanding and a firmer grasp of the old.

A. But is the Christian faith, in any sense, to be put on trial ? Is everything to be regarded as merely provisional until you have finished your inquiries and declared the result ? And, as coming ages will hardly accept your finding as authoritative and final, are the souls of men to be fed for ever upon inquiries instead of truth ? Is the Lord and Redeemer of men come, or do you look for another, or don't you know whether you look for another or not ? I should like to know where you are going to stand while you try the old foundations.

C. The patent facts of human life and history are not to be questioned. The place of Christianity at the head of the spiritual progress of mankind is a simple matter of fact. Christianityhas no serious competitor on the face of the earth. The thought of displacing it cannot enter a human head which is not either blind or greatly bewildered. Christianity is obviously the dispensation of the fulness of times. Our difficulty is to distinguish between the essential and the accidental in what has been handed down to us as Christianity. I feel at liberty to discuss without reserve every question of detail, because I am fully persuaded that the central question of the place and future of Christianity is for ever beyond discussion, except for men who are prepared to destroy the temple of history and to raise it up again from the foundations without the actual materials. But if our manner of approaching the subject seems to you to recognize and tolerate doubt too much, there is another way of proceeding which will suit us just as well, and perhaps be more free from offence to you. Instead of examining our doubts, let us make a confession of our faith. Let us see what we do believe without wavering.

A. That certainly can be done without offence : and, so far as I am concerned, it is done quickly. My faith is the simple faith of my fathers ; and I seek no better form of confession than the old creed — " I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth ; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord." If you will say this creed with me, we can confess our faith together with little ado : if you cannot, then I certainly shall not care to follow you in quest of any other faith.

B. I also am quite prepared to say that, if we cannot retain this faith, I care little about any other. But it is a wonder to me that you find it so easy to mount the lofty stairs of that glorious creed. It does not seem right that you should find it quite so easy. It appears to me that keeping the faith should require some high endeavor, some earnest wrestling ; and that he who keeps it to the end may well say that he has fought a good fight.

A. You are quite right. Keeping the faith is a great duty. But it is to be done by steadfastness, not by argumentation. And by steadfastness, please God, I will keep it to the end. Thomas said, " I will not believe" ; and many still say the same without rebuke. Why should not I also be wilful in a better cause ? If there are two sides, as there surely must be, I will take the side of faith, and there abide.

C. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed ! We will not ask you to be a partner to our doubts in any wise. But do not give us up. Watch us, and when we seem to you more erratic than usual, lift up your warning voice. The steady resistance of a friend's unquestioning faith is a great safeguard in religious speculation.

B. We can hardly do any kind of justice to the subject to-night. Can we not meet some day soon and devote a few quiet hours to this matter? I have often given entire days to matters which interested me far less.

C. My eldest boy celebrates his thirteenth birthday to-morrow. He expects the children of both of you to spend the day with him. If you two will also come and bring your wives with you, it will make the celebration quite imposing, and we can doubtless make room for a little theology in the course of the day.

B. That will suit me perfectly. Brother A, you also can spare the time, can you not ? A. I should like to honor the boy's birthday ;

but I have already heard more than I can carry of your theology.

After some further talk, not bearing directly on the subject of these papers, the friends parted for the night, without a clear understanding whether A would join the party on the morrow or not.

II

When B arrived at C's house, he was afraid that he had come too early for the convenience of the family ; and it was with no small relief that he found A and C waiting for him in the little reading-room upstairs, a room memorable to C as the scene of many hot debates with principalities and powers as well as with himself. A had been there an hour or more. B laughed as he entered, and, just bowing to his host, he shook hands playfully with A, and the conversation began and proceeded nearly as follows :

B. I am glad to see that you are eager for battle. I was somewhat afraid that C and I would have to set our faces against each other and fight a tedious duel all day, or patch up a peace and devote the day to relaxation and feasting.

A. My wife wanted to come with the children ; and I thought that I might as well come and hear what you have to say. But I am not eager for battle. You can have your tedious duel yet. I shall sit here at my ease and watch the fray. And, judging from your drift last night and on many former occasions, I think I shall be quite willing to see you mangle and maul one another as barbarously as possible. I pray that each of you may have the victory, and that neither may show any mercy. Raze each other's strongholds to the ground. Plough up their foundations, and sprinkle them with salt.

C. We have apparently every preparation for a great struggle excepting the first and most essential of all, a just cause of war. We have no real quarrel to settle. We live in the same world, with the same faculties, and the same hopes and fears. The facts of human life and history are the same for us all, and the thoughts of our hearts are the same. The questions between us are simply, whether we shall turn and look at our own thoughts or not, and, if we do, which of those thoughts shall preoccupy the mind and govern the order of all the rest. As it seems to me, we have not come to a battle-field at all, but to a sort of singing-school, to see if we cannot sound a common keynote and sing together harmoniously the divine old song which we all love best of any. But let us begin. " I believe in God," is the first article of our creed. Can we all say that together without any discord ?