sense of duty directly takes away the danger of infection, but it preserves the strength of the whole spiritual fibre, so that the trial does not pass into temptation to sin. A sorrow comes upon you. Omit prayer, and you fall out of God's testing into the Devil's temptation; you get angry, hard of heart, reckless. But meet the dreadful hour with prayer, cast your care on God, claim Him as your Father, though He seem cruel—and the degrading, paralysing, embittering effects of pain and sorrow pass away, a stream of sanctifying and softening thoughts pours into the soul, and that which might have wrought your fall but works in you the peaceable fruits of righteousness. You pass from bitterness into the courage of endurance, and from endurance into battle, and from battle into victory, till at last the trial dignifies and blesses your life.

And this brings me to another characteristic of the force of prayer. It is not altogether effective at once. Its action is cumulative. At first there seems no answer to your exceeding bitter cry. But there has been an answer; God has heard. A little grain of strength, not enough to be conscious of, has been given in one way or another. A friend has come in and grasped your hand—you have heard the lark sprinkle his notes like raindrops on the earth-a text has stolen into your mind you know not how. Next morning you wake with the old aching at the heart, but the grain of strength has kept you alive— and so it goes on: hour by hour, day by day, prayer brings its tiny spark of light till they orb into a star, its grain of strength till they grow into an anchor of the soul, sure and stedfast. The answer to prayer is

slow; the force of prayer is cumulative. Not till life is over is the whole answer given, the whole strength it has brought understood.

And the lady prayed in heaviness

That looked not for relief,
And slowly did her succour come
And a patience to her grief.
Oh, there is never sorrow of heart
That shall lack a timely end,
If but to God we turn and ask
Of Him to be our friend.

Again. Its force is not only cumulative, but relieving through expression. There are some griefs, some passionate moral struggles, some fatal secrets of the inner life, which we cannot speak to man. For we cannot give men that knowledge of our whole past, by which alone its secrets can be justly judged. But to our Father who knows all we can speak out. He has no conventional maxims by which to measure us, no half-experience, no harshness, no jealous injustice such as among men demands to be considered love. He cannot, therefore, mistake us—we are sure of justice; and it is that, not love alone, which we ask from Him if our souls be true.

Out of the silent loneliness of the heart, then, the prayer of confession rises to the Fatherhood of God. The weight is lifted off the soul, at least the unbearableness of it is gone. We have told it all to Him-He knew it, it is true-what was the need of telling Him? No need to Him, but comfort to us, for expression gives relief to tortured feeling. As long as we kept it, brooded over it, it was like air in a sealed room; it grew deadlier, and slowly poisoned all the heart.

;

Expressed, it was like the same air when, the windows thrown open, the sweet spring breeze came flowing in we rise up-half the horror is gone, half the weight of the secret guilt is lifted off, we begin to feel ashamed of having despaired of life; we begin to feel the duty of forgetting sin and pressing forward into the work of righteousness. This is the blessed work of prayer to God-of simply entrusting to Him all.

It is no strange mysterious work. It has its ceaseless analogies in our every-day life. The morbid youth of the German poet poured out all its sickly feeling in his first prose novel, and it was gone for ever. Burns, riding across the Highland moor, when the sky was dark with thunder and the rain fell in accumulating roar, felt his heart swell almost to breaking with passionate feeling, and sang to himself that battle-hymn in which we hear the rushing rain and the elemental war. Elijah on the mountain, his heart burning with the desertion of a whole people, felt his passion relieved by the earthquake, and wind, and fire, and the still small voice represented to him the calm which had come upon his stormy heart. Jeremiah, indignant with God,* broke into a wild cry, in which he gave expression to his pain, and relieved, he felt the fire of duty burn bright again, and took up again the work of life. And He who was Mankind, burdened with untold sorrow in the sorrowful garden, did not hide his agony from his Father, though He knew it could not be taken from Him, but expressing it, passed into the sublime peace with which He drank the cup

* Jer. xx. 7, 8, 9.

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and died. Expression relieves the o'erfraught heart, and, the pressure removed, it rebounds into the natural strength of health. Wordsworth has said it all:

To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong.

Yes, if any here are crushed with unshared sorrow, eaten with the remorse of unhealed and secret sin, chained to a trial which none can understand, and therefore wordless to man-spread it before the God of kindness and justice, before the God of human nature. The method of relief is ready to your hand.. Make use of prayer.

Lastly. It has the power of sanctifying life because it brings God into life. Twice in the day it has been for ages 'the habit of the race to use this talisman; once for the sanctification of the day, once for the sanctification of the night. The morning prayer chimes in with the joy of the creation, with the quick world as it awakes and sings. It ought to bind itself up with the rising of the sun, the opening of the flowers, the divine service of the birds, the glow of cloudy bars on which the rays of light strike like a musician's fingers, and whose notes and chords are colour. The voice of the world is prayer, and our morning worship should be in tune with its ordered hymn of praise. But in joy we should recall our weakness, and ask His presence who is strength and redemption, so that joy may be married to watchfulness by humility. Such a prayer is the guard of life. It prepares us beforehand for temptation: neglect it and

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you fall. It makes us conscious of our Father's presence, so that we hear His voice in the hour of our folly or our sin. My child, this morning you called Me to your side; do not drive Me far away. Bridle that passionate temper; restrain that excitement which is sweeping you beyond the power of will; keep back that foolish word which will sting your neighbour's heart; do not do that dishonesty; be not guilty of that cowardice. I am by your side.'

That is the thing which prayer makes real. Prayer, not only in the morning watch, but prayer sent voiceless from the heart from hour to hour. Then life is hallowed, wakeful, and calm. It becomes beautiful with that beauty of God which eye hath not seen. It is not left comfortless, for prayer brings the Saviour to our side. In the hour of our grief we hear the voice of Christ coming down the ages to our soul, tender as the morning light on flowers, 'Come unto Me, all that are weary and heavy laden: I will give you rest.' We hear Him as we sit at business, speaking as He spoke to Matthew at the receipt of custom, Follow Me;' and though we know we cannot rise as did the publican, for our work is where He has placed us, yet we know its meaning. We seem to feel his hand in ours in the passion of our endeavour to do right when duty and interest clash, and his grasp gives firmness to our faltering resolution. And when the petty troubles of life, the small difficulties which sting like gnats, the intrusions, the quarrels, the slight derangements of health, have disturbed our temper, and we are in danger of being false to that divine charity which is