e
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, d