Son, recognising and ready to share in
all our attempts at worshipping the Father, however poor they may be, and
living through the separate life in daily communion with Him.

Here then is His practice, written for our guidance, given that we may be
stirred by it to aim upwards, inviting us to set our own practice side by
side with it, and see how it looks in such a juxtaposition. Let us
glance for a moment at each of these texts separately.

As regards the one which I have taken from St. Mark--"He went out, and
departed into a solitary place, and there He prayed"--we have only to
turn over the pages of this Gospel and note, as we go, the similar
allusions, and we feel that we have here what is in fact an incidental
glimpse into the habitual practice of His secret and separate life.

In this passage we read that He departed into a solitary place, and there
He prayed; in another by-and-by that He departed into a mountain to pray;
and then again that He spent the whole night in prayer; and we see all
this not in some crisis of His life, but as a part of that which
corresponds to the common daily round in your life or mine.

And the inference to be drawn, the lesson to be learnt from it, is, I
think, sufficiently obvious.

This secret separate devotional exercise of the soul was His habitual
spiritual food.

It was thus that He recruited His moral and spiritual forces, those
forces of the spiritual life which constitute at once the beauty, the
attraction, the power of His character, and His divine and awe-inspiring
separateness.

And as we read and consider, the thought must surely be pressed upon us
that if He needed these exercises, these secret and silent hours, what
shall we say of our own lives?

And what do we expect to make of our moral and spiritual character unless
we too are careful to cherish under all circumstances some such recurring
moments in our round of life and occupation, at which we retire into the
sanctuary of separate communion with God the Father?

You may take it as a moral certainty, proved by all experience, that
unless you hold to a fixed habit of thus bringing your life into the
secret and separate presence of God, in private prayer and thought, you
incur the risk of sinking to any levels that happen to be the ordinary
levels, and of drifting with any currents that happen to prevail.

If we turn now from this to the other text--that which refers to His
customary attendance on publi