from Him, they may indeed give us; but after they have done their
best or their worst, all depends on the personal act of our own
innermost being. Man or angel can affect that, but from without. The
old mystics called prayer 'the flight of the lonely soul to the only
God.' It is the name for all religion. These two, God and the soul,
have to 'transact,' as our Puritan forefathers used to say, as if
there were no other beings in the universe but only they two. Angels
and principalities and powers may stand beholding with sympathetic
joy; they may minister blessing and guardianship in many ways; but
the decisive act of union between God and the soul they can neither
effect nor prevent.

And as for them, so for men around us; the limits of their power to
harm us are soon set. They may shut us out from human love by
calumnies, and dig deep gulfs of alienation between us and dear ones;
they may hurt and annoy us in a thousand ways with slanderous
tongues, and arrows dipped in poisonous hatred, but one thing they
cannot do. They may build a wall around us, and imprison us from many
a joy and many a fair prospect, but they cannot put a roof on it to
keep out the sweet influences from above, or hinder us from looking
up to the heavens. Nobody can come between us and God but ourselves.

Or, we may turn this general thought in another direction, and say,
These blessed spirits around the throne do not absorb and intercept
His love. They gather about its steps in their 'solemn troops and
sweet societies'; but close as are their ranks, and innumerable as is
their multitude, they do not prevent that love from passing beyond
them to us on the outskirts of the crowd. The planet nearest the sun
is drenched and saturated with fiery brightness, but the rays from
the centre of life pass on to each of the sister spheres in its turn,
and travel away outwards to where the remotest of them all rolls in
its far-off orbit, unknown for millenniums to dwellers closer to the
sun, but through all the ages visited by warmth and light according
to its needs. Like that poor, sickly woman who could lay her wasted
fingers on the hem of Christ's garment, notwithstanding the thronging
multitude, we can reach our hands through all the crowd, or rather He
reaches His strong hand to us and heals and blesses us. All the
guests are fed full at that great table. One's gain is not another's
loss. The multitudes sit on the green grass, and the last man of
the l