as the statement that,
"He could do no mighty works there because of their unbelief." There
are other kinds of miracle recorded in scripture which are not so
easily credible, but I am not always prepared to brush them aside as
mere childish fancies. As a rule it will be found that they belong to
the poetry of religious experience, and that some valuable truth is
contained in this particular form of statement. To this order belong
the accounts about the horses and chariots of fire on the hillside
round about Elisha, the whirlwind in which Elijah ascended to heaven,
and Jesus walking on the sea. These accounts are forms in which the
oriental imagination is, even to-day, wont to clothe truths too great
for prosaic statement; they are poetry, not history, and the western
mind ought to make allowance for the fact. Sometimes we can discern in
scripture records of an event, which to the stolid western imagination
seems utterly incredible, a genuine historical truth. Such, for
instance, are the passage of the Red Sea--a stirring and dramatic
incident, thoroughly well told--and Joshua commanding the sun and moon
to stand still. In the latter case we have two lines of poetry from a
book which has been lost, and a comparison with similar poetry in
almost any literature gives us a clew to its meaning. The poet
represents the old warrior as declaring in magnificent style that the
sun of Israel shall not go down, and that day and night shall be alike
to him until her enemies are discomfited. Any reader with a shred of
sympathetic imagination ought to be able to feel the force of the
sentiment which provoked this utterance without either accepting or
rejecting it as a literal statement of fact; the best things which have
been written in the books of the world are seldom literal and exact
statements of fact. It has been well pointed out that myth and legend
are truer than history, for they take us to the inside of things,
whereas history only shows us the outside.

+Prayer.+--Prayer is a vital necessity to religious experience, and
without it no religious experience has ever existed or ever can. It is
not primarily petition but communion with God. Our intercourse with
our friends does not chiefly consist in asking them for things! But
when communion does become petition, there is a real place for it as
well as for the answer to such prayer. It is not too much to say that
no true prayer has ever gone without its answer.