ver
spring a surprise upon a man on his knees alone and in broad daylight? I
did the other day. It was between eleven and twelve o'clock in the
forenoon when I asked a clerk if his master was in. Yes, he said, and
opened his master's door. When, before I was aware, I had almost fallen
over a man on his knees and with his face in his hands. "I pray thee,"
said Valiant-for-truth, "tell us what it was that drew thee to thy knees
even now. Was it that some special mercy laid its obligations on thee,
or how?" I did not say that exactly to my kneeling friend, though it was
on the point of my tongue to say it. My dear friend, I knew, had his own
difficulties, though he was not exactly as poor as a howlet. And it
might have been about some of his investments that had gone out of joint
that he went that forenoon to Him who had said that He would help. Or,
like the author of the _Christian Perfection_ and _The Spirit of Prayer_,
it was the sixth hour of the day, and he may have gone to his knees for
his clerks, or for his boys at school, or for himself and for the man in
the same business with himself right across the street. I knew that my
friend had the charming book at home in which such counsels as these
occur: "If masters were thus to remember their servants, beseeching God
to bless them, letting no day pass without a full performance of this
devotion, the benefit would be as great to themselves as to their
servants." And perhaps my friend, after setting his clerks their several
tasks for the day, was now asking grace of God for each one of them that
they might not be eye-servants and men-pleasers, but the servants of
Christ doing the will of God from the heart. Or, again, he may have read
in that noble book this passage: "If a father were daily to make some
particular prayer to God that He would please to inspire his children
with true piety, great humility, and strict temperance, what could be
more likely to make the father himself become exemplary in these
virtues?" Now, my friend (who can tell?) may just that morning have lost
his temper with his son; or he may last night have indulged himself too
much in eating, or in drinking, or in debate, or in detraction; and that
may have made it impossible for him to fix his whole mind on his office
work that morning. Or, just to make another guess, when he opened the
book I had asked him to buy and read, he may have lighted on this
heavenly passage: "Lastly, if all p