Chapter I: THE HABITUAL PRACTICE OF SECRET PRAYER.--For prayer is the bond

which links the Divine power with the human. It is the channel through which God pours His life into the soul. It is the uplifted hand of man's weakness taking hold on God's strength. It calls down from heaven the sacred fire, which alone may kindle the preacher's sacrifice. It has the most vital relations to the character and work of a pastor.

1. _The relation of secret prayer to the spirit and purpose of the ministry._

Special dangers beset the pastor. The most sacred services, from their frequent recurrence, may come to be performed in a perfunctory spirit, and his life may thus degenerate into mere professionalism. Unconsciously he comes to meditate, read, and even pray with a view only to others and its effect on others. The sense of his personal relation to God is lost. As a public speaker a desire for popularity may unduly influence his preaching, and conspicuous position tempt his ambition, obscuring his vision of the great end of his ministry--the honor of Christ and the salvation of souls. The very respect which his office secures may foster spiritual pride and make him insensible to his defection in heart from God. Few men are environed by such subtle and powerful seductions to a false life as a Christian minister, and against these only a vivid consciousness of his high calling is an adequate safeguard. He is God's ambassador, receiving his commission and his message, not from men, but from the Sovereign of heaven and earth. The souls of his congregation are entrusted to him, and the words he is charged to speak are the words of God's saving power. "In them that are saved" he is "a savor of life unto life," but "in them that perish" "a savor of death unto death" (2 Cor. ii. 15, 16). If faithful to his trust, he "shall shine as the brightness of the firmament" and "as the stars for ever and ever" (Dan. xii. 3); if unfaithful, the blood of souls will be found on him in the day of God's inquisition. Now, only a distinct realization of these responsibilities as an ever-present, living force pervading his spirit will hold the minister in his inmost life true to Christ and to his work.

It is here prayer has its mightiest reflex power. It gives a vital sense of God and of spiritual realities. It lifts the life above the control of lower motives to a loftier moral elevation, with a purer atmosphere and a broader horizon. The whole man is elevated, ennobled, transfused with Divine life, as he holds communion with God. When Moses had been with God in the mount, his face shone with a glory such that Israel could not steadfastly look on it. It was when Jesus was praying that he was transfigured, "and His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light" (Matt. xvii. 2). God imprints His own image on the soul that comes face to face with Him.

The inner life of a preacher always stands revealed in the pulpit; it transfuses itself through his preaching. No mere declamation, no arts of rhetoric, no dramatic simulation of emotion, can conceal the absence of spiritual life. Moral earnestness can never be assumed; it is the attribute only of a soul profoundly feeling the power and reality of Divine truth. The man, therefore, who would speak God's Word with the pungency and fervor of a Bunyan, a Baxter, a Flavel, or a Payson must, like them, be constant and fervent in prayer. The springs of spiritual life opened in the closet will pour forth never-failing streams of life in the pulpit. Luther said: "Prayer, meditation, and temptation make a minister." He himself is said to have spent three hours daily in prayer, and those mighty words which thrilled the heart of Christendom were the utterances of a soul thus glowing with the flames of devotion.

2. _The relation of secret prayer to the apprehension of spiritual truth._

Spiritual truth is revealed only to the spiritual mind: "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; . . . neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Cor. ii. 14). Spiritual susceptibility is the essential condition of apprehending spiritual truth. A soul instinct with Divine life, sensitive to Divine impressions, in sympathy with Divine things--this, and this only, can enter in to a realization of those great truths which constitute the Gospel. Without this the very message the pastor is charged to preach he himself will fail to apprehend. He may, indeed, see the Christian doctrines through the eye of an impassive logic, but such a lifeless intellectualism, even when abstractly correct, has no power. The theology of the pulpit is a theology vitalized by prayer and glowing in the heart as a great, living reality. The hearts of men are most surely moved by living truths vividly realized in the speaker's soul. The love of God in the incarnation and death of His Son, the guilt and danger of the souls of men, the glories of the saved and the miseries of the lost,--these are not matters of cold intellection. To him who lives in the atmosphere of prayer they stand out as vivid realities. Such men, like Paul, "believe, and therefore speak;" and in words of burning fervor they utter these great truths and press them on the souls of men. Payson, on his death-bed, said: "Prayer is the first thing, the second thing, the third thing, necessary for a minister." Whitefield spent hours of each day on his knees with God's Word open before him, and it was from the audience-chamber of heaven he went forth to speak those marvelous words of power which stirred the souls of the multitude. These eternal truths thus passed in him beyond mere intellections; they took possession of the whole man, and he could but speak with tender pathos and holy boldness, as he saw light in God's light, and the spiritual world was thus all ablaze with light around him.

Jesus Himself, the Chief Pastor, lived a life of ceaseless prayer. Pressed under the burden of souls, he waked while others slept. Sometimes He spent the whole night in prayer; at others, "rising up a great while before day," He sought communion with the Father.

"Cold mountains and the midnight air
Witnessed the fervor of His prayer."

And if He, the Sinless One, the God-man, must needs thus pray, if prayer was essential even to His inner life and to His power in the work assigned Him, how much great necessity must press on His weak, sinful servants! If communion with God filled so large a place in the life of the Chief Pastor, it surely should not have less place in the life of the under-shepherds.