Appoint the ablest man to pray, and let the sermon be slurred sooner
than the approach to heaven. Let the Infinite Jehovah be served with our
best; let prayer addressed to the Divine Majesty be carefully weighed,
and presented with all the powers of an awakened heart and a spiritual
understanding. He who has been by communion with God prepared to minister
to the people, is usually of all men present the most fit to engage in
prayer; to lay out a programme which puts up another brother in his place,
is to mar the harmony of the service, to rob the preacher of an exercise
which would brace him for his sermon, and in many instances to suggest
comparisons between one part of the service and the other which ought never
to be tolerated. If unprepared brethren are to be sent into the pulpit
to do my praying for me when I am engaged to preach, I do not see why I
might not be allowed to pray, and then retire to let these brethren do
the sermonizing. I am not able to see any reason for depriving me of the
holiest, sweetest and most profitable exercise which my Lord has allotted
me; if I may have my choice, I will sooner yield up the sermon than the
prayer. Thus much I have said in order to impress upon you that you must
highly esteem public prayer, and seek of the Lord for the gifts and graces
necessary to its right discharge.
Those who despise all extempore prayer will probably catch at these
remarks and use them against it, but I can assure them that the faults
adverted to are not common among us, and are indeed almost extinct; while
the scandal caused by them never was, at the worst, so great as that caused
by the way in which the liturgical service is often performed. Far too
often is the church service hurried through in a manner as indevout as
if it were a ballad-singer's ditty. The words are parroted without the
slightest appreciation of their meaning; not sometimes, but very frequently,
in the places set apart for Episcopal worship, you may see the eyes of
the people, and the eyes of the choristers, and the eyes of the parson
himself, wandering about in all directions, while evidently from the very
tone of the reading there is no feeling of sympathy with what is being
read.4 I have been at funerals when the burial service of the
church of England has been galloped through so indecorously that it has
taken all the grace I had to prevent my throwing a hassock at the creature's
head. I have felt so indignant that I have not known what to do, to hear,
in the presence of mourners whose hearts were bleeding, a man rattling
through the service as if he were paid by the piece, and had more work
to follow, and therefore desired to get it through as quickly as possible.
What effect he could think he was producing, or what good result could
come from words jerked forth and hurled out with vengeance and vehemence,
I cannot imagine. It is really shocking to think of how that very wonderful
burial service is murdered, and made into an abomination by the mode in
which it is frequently read. I merely mention this because, if they criticise
our prayers too severely, we can bring a formidable countercharge to silence
them. Better far, however, for us to amend our own blunders than find fault
with others.
In order to make our public prayer what it should be, the first necessary
is, that it must be a matter of the heart. A man must be really
in earnest in supplication. It must be true prayer, and if it be such,
it will, like love; cover a multitude of sins. You can pardon a man's familiarities
and his vulgarities too, when you clearly see that his inmost heart is
speaking to his Maker, and that it is only the man's defects of education
which create his faults, and not any moral or spiritual vices of his heart.
The pleader in public must be in earnest; for a sleepy prayer---what can
be a worse preparation for a sermon? A sleepy prayer---what can make people
more dislike going up to the house of God at all? Cast your whole soul
into the exercise. If ever your whole manhood was engaged in anything,
let it be in drawing near unto God in public. So pray, that by a divine
attraction, you draw the whole congregation with you up to the throne of
God. So pray, that by the power of the Holy Spirit resting on you, you
express the desires and thoughts of everyone present, and stand as the
one voice for the hundreds of beating hearts which are glowing with fervour
before the throne of God.
Next to this, our prayers must be appropriate. I do not say
go into every minute detail of the circumstances of the congregation. As
I have said before, there is no need to make the public prayer a gazette
of the week's events, or a register of the births, deaths, and marriages
of your people, but the general movements that have taken place in the
congregation should be noted by the minister's careful heart. He should
bring the joys and sorrows of his people alike before the throne of grace,
and ask that the divine benediction may rest upon his flock in all their
movements, their exercises, engagements, and holy enterprises, and that
the forgiveness of God may be extended to their shortcomings and innumerable
sins.
Then, by way of negative canon, I should say, do not let your prayer
be long. I think it was John Macdonald who used to say, "If you
are in the spirit of prayer, do not be long, because other people will
not be able to keep pace with you in such unusual spirituality; and if
you are not in the spirit of prayer, do not be long, because you will then
be sure to weary the listeners." Livingstone says of Robert Bruce,
of Edinburgh, the famous co-temporary of Andrew Melville, "No man
in his time spoke with such evidence and power of the Spirit. No man had
so many seals of conversion; yea, many of his hearers thought no man, since
the apostles, spake with such power. He was very short in prayer when others
were present, but every sentence was like a strong bolt shot up to heaven.
I have heard him say that he wearied when others were long in prayer; but,
being alone, he spent much time in wrestling and prayer." A man may,
on special occasions, if he be unusually moved and carried out of himself,
pray for twenty minutes in the long morning prayer, but this should not
often happen. My friend, Dr. Charles Brown, of Edinburgh, lays it down,
as a result of his deliberate judgment, that ten minutes is the limit to
which public prayer ought to be prolonged. Our Puritanic forefathers used
to pray for three-quarters of an hour, or more, but then you must recollect
that they did not know that they would ever have the opportunity of praying
again before an assembly, and therefore, took their fill of it; and besides,
people were not inclined in those days to quarrel with the length of prayers
or of sermons so much as they do nowadays. You cannot pray too long in
private. We do not limit you to ten minutes there, or ten hours, or ten
weeks if you like. The more you are on your knees alone the better. We
are now speaking of those public prayers which come before or after the
sermon, and for these ten minutes is a better limit than fifteen. Only
one in a thousand would complain of you for being too short, while scores
will murmur at your being wearisome in length. "He prayed me into
a good frame of mind," George Whitfield once said of a certain preacher,
"and if he had stopped there, it would have been very well; but he
prayed me out of it again by keeping on." The abundant long suffering
of God has been exemplified in his sparing some preachers, who have been
great sinners in this direction; they have done much injury to the piety
of God's people by their long-winded orations, and yet God, in his mercy,
has permitted them still to officiate in the sanctuary. Alas! for those
who have to listen to pastors who pray in public for five-and-twenty minutes,
and then ask God to forgive their "shortcomings"! Do not be too
long, for several reasons. First, because you weary yourselves and the
people; and secondly, because being too long in prayer, puts your people
out of heart for hearing the sermon. All those dry, dull, prolix talkifications
in prayer, do but blunt the attention, and the ear gets, as it were, choked
up. Nobody would think of blocking up Ear-gate with mud or stones when
he meant to storm the gate. No, let the portal be cleared that the battering-ram
of the gospel may tell upon it when the time comes to use it. Long prayers
either consist of repetitions, or else of unnecessary explanations which
God does not require; or else they degenerate into downright preachings,
so that there is no difference between the praying and the preaching, except
that in the one the minister has his eyes shut, and in the other he keeps
them open. It is not necessary in prayer to rehearse the Westminster Assembly's
Catechism. It is not necessary in prayer to relate the experience of all
the people who are present, or even your own. It is not necessary in prayer
to string a selection of texts of Scripture together, and quote David,
and Daniel, and Job, and Paul, and Peter, and every other body, under the
title of "thy servant of old." It is necessary in prayer to draw
near unto God, but it is not required of you to prolong your speech till
everyone is longing to hear the word "Amen."
One little hint I cannot withhold--never appear to be closing, and then
start off again for another five minutes. When friends make up their minds
that you are about to conclude, they cannot with a jerk proceed again in
a devout spirit. I have known men tantalize us with the hope that they
were drawing to a close, and then take a fresh lease two or three times;
this is most unwise and unpleasant.
Another canon is--do not use cant phrases. My brethren, have
done with those vile things altogether; they have had their day, and let
them die. These pieces of spiritual fustian cannot be too much reprobated.
Some of them are pure inventions; others are passages taken from the Apocrypha;
others are texts fathered upon Scripture, but which have been fearfully
mangled since they came from the Author of the Bible. In the Baptist Magazine
for 1861 I made the following remarks upon the common vulgarities of prayer-meetings.
"Cant phrases are a great evil. Who can justify such expressions as
the following? 'We would not rush into thy presence as the unthinking
(!!) horse into the battle.' As if horses ever did think, and as if
it were not better to exhibit the spirit and energy of the horse than the
sluggishness and stupidity of the ass! As the verse from which we imagine
this fine sentence to be derived has more to do with sinning than with
praying, we are glad that the phrase is on its last legs. 'Go from
heart to heart, as oil from vessel to vessel,' is probably a quotation
from the nursery romance of 'Ali Baba, and the Forty Thieves,' but as destitute
of sense, Scripture, and poetry, as ever sentence could be conceived to
be. We are not aware that oil runs from one vessel to another in any very
mysterious or wonderful manner; it is true it is rather slow in coming
out, and is therefore an apt symbol of some people's earnestness; but surely
it would be better to have the grace direct from heaven than to have it
out of another vessel---a Popish idea which the metaphor seems to insinuate,
if indeed it has any meaning at all. 'Thy poor unworthy dust,'
an epithet generally applied to themselves by the proudest men in the congregation,
and not seldom by the most moneyed and grovelling, in which case the last
two words are not so very inappropriate. We have heard of a good man who,
in pleading for his children and grandchildren, was so completely beclouded
in the blinding influence of this expression, that he exclaimed, 'O Lord,
save thy dust, and thy dust's dust, and thy dust's dust's dust.' When Abraham
said, 'I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and
ashes,' the utterance was forcible and expressive; but in its misquoted,
perverted, and abused form, the sooner it is consigned to its own element
the better. A miserable conglomeration of perversions of Scripture, uncouth
similes, and ridiculous metaphors, constitute a sort of spiritual slang,
the offspring of unholy ignorance, unmanly imitation, or graceless hypocrisy;
they are at once a dishonour to those who constantly repeat them, and an
intolerable nuisance to those whose ears are jaded with them."
Dr. Charles Brown, of Edinburgh, in an admirable address at a meeting
of the New College Missionary Association, gives instances of current misquotations
indigenous to Scotland, which sometimes, however, find their way across
the Tweed. By his permission, I shall quote at length. "There is what
might be called an unhappy, sometimes, quite grotesque, mingling of Scripture
texts. Who is not familiar with the following words addressed to God in
prayer, 'Thou art the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, and
the praises thereof'! which is but a jumble of two glorious texts,
each glorious taken by itself--both marred, and one altogether lost indeed,
when thus combined and mingled. The one is Isaiah lvii. 15, 'Thus saith
the high and lofty One, that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is
Holy.' The other is, Psalm xxii. 3, 'Thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest
the praises of Israel.' The inhabiting of the praises of eternity,
to say the least, is meagre; there were no praises in the past eternity
to inhabit. But what a glory is there in God's condescending to inhabit,
take up his very abode, in the praises of Israel, of the ransomed church.
Then there is an example nothing less than grotesque under this head, and
yet one in such frequent use that I suspect it is very generally regarded
as having the sanction or Scripture. Here it is, 'We would put our hand
on our mouth, and our mouth in the dust, and cry out, Unclean, unclean;
God be merciful to us sinners.' This is no fewer than four texts
joined, each beautiful by itself. First, Job xl. 4, 'Behold, I am vile;
what shall I answer thee? I will lay my hand upon my mouth.' Second, Lamentations
iii. 29, 'He putteth his mouth in the dust; if so be there may be hope.'
Third, Leviticus xiii. 45, where the leper is directed to put a covering
upon his upper lip, and to cry, Unclean, unclean. And fourth, the publican's
prayer. But how incongruous a man's first putting his hand on his mouth,
then putting his mouth in the dust, and, last of all, crying out, etc.!
The only other example I give is an expression nearly universal among us,
and, I suspect, almost universally thought to be in Scripture, 'In thy
favour is life, and thy lovingkindness is better than life.' The fact is,
that this also is just an unhappy combination of two passages, in which,
the term life is used in altogether different, and even incompatible
senses, namely, Psalm lxiii. 3, 'Thy lovingkindness is better than life,'
where, evidently, life means the present temporal life.
"A second class may be described as unhappy alterations of Scripture
language. Need I say that the 130th Psalm, 'Out of the depths,' etc., is
one of the most precious in the whole book of the Psalms? Why must we have
the words of David and of the Holy Ghost thus given in public prayer, and
so constantly that our pious people come all to adopt it into their social
and family prayers, 'There is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be
feared, and plenteous redemption that thou mayest be sought after,'
or 'unto'? How precious the simple words as they stand in the Psalm (verse
4), 'There is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared' (verses
7, 8); 'With the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption;
and he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities!' Again, in this blessed
Psalm, the words of the third verse, 'If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities,
O Lord, who shall stand?' too seldom are left us in their naked simplicity,
but must undergo the following change, 'If thou wert strict to
mark iniquity,' etc. I remember in my old college days, We used to have
it in a much more offensive shape, 'If thou wert strict to mark and rigorous
to punish!' Another favourite change is the following, 'Thou art in
heaven, and we upon earth; therefore let our words be few and well
ordered.' Solomon's simple and sublime utterance (full of instruction,
surely, on the whole theme I am dealing with) is, 'God is in heaven, and
thou upon earth; therefore let thy words be few.' Eccles. v. 2.
For another example under this class see how Habakkuk's sublime words are
tortured, 'Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look
on sin without abhorrence.' The words of the Holy Ghost are (Heb.
i. 13), 'Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil. and canst not look
on iniquity.' Need I say that the power of the figure, 'canst not look
on iniquity' is nearly lost when you add that God can look on it, only
not without abhorrence!
"A third class is made up of meaningless pleonasms, vulgar, common-place
redundancies of expression, in quoting from the Scriptures. One of these
has become so universal, that I venture to say you seldom miss it, when
the passage referred to comes up at all. 'Be in the midst of us' (or, as
some prefer to express it, somewhat unfortunately, as I think, 'in our
midst'), 'to bless us, and to do us good.' What additional idea
is there in the last expression, 'and to do us good'? The passage referred
to is Exodus xx. 24, 'In all places where I record my name, I will come
unto you, and I will bless you.' Such is the simplicity of Scripture. Our
addition is, 'Bless us, and do us good.' In Daniel iv. 35, we read the
noble words, 'None can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?'
The favourite change is, 'None can stay thy hand from working.'
'Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart
of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love him!' This
is changed, 'Neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive
the things.' Constantly we hear God addressed as 'the hearer and answerer
of prayer,' a mere vulgar and useless pleonasm, for the Scripture idea
of God's hearing prayer is just his answering it--'O thou that hearest
prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come;' "Hear my prayer O Lord;'
, I love the Lord because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.'
Whence, again, that common-place of public prayer, 'Thy consolations are
neither few nor small'? The reference, I suppose, is to those words of
Job, 'Are the consolations of God small with thee?' So one scarce ever
hears that prayer of the seventy-fourth Psalm, 'Have respect to the covenant,
for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty,'
without the addition, 'horrid cruelty;' nor the call to prayer
in Isaiah, 'Keep not silence, and give him no rest, till he establish,
and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth,' without the addition,
'the whole earth;' nor that appeal of the Psalmist, 'Whom have
I in heaven but thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire beside
thee,' without the addition, 'none in all the earth.' These last
may seem small matters, indeed. And so they are, nor were worth finding
fault with, did they occur but occasionally. But viewed as stereotyped
common-places, weak enough in themselves, and occurring so often as to
give an impression of their having Scripture authority. I humbly think
they ought to be discountenanced and discarded--banished wholly from our
Presbyterian worship. It will, perhaps surprise you to learn that the only
Scripture authority for that favourite, and somewhat peculiar expression,
about the 'wicked rolling sin as a sweet morsel under their tongue,' is
the following words in the book of Job (xx. 12), 'Though wickedness be
sweet in his mouth, though he hide it under his tongue.'"
But enough of this. I am only sorry to have felt bound in conscience
to be so long upon so unhappy a subject. I cannot, however, leave the point
without urging upon you literal accuracy in all quotations from the word
of God.
It ought to be a point of honour among ministers always to quote Scripture
correctly. It is difficult to be always correct, and because it is difficult,
it should be all the more the object of our care. In the halls of Oxford
or Cambridge it would be considered almost treason or felony for a fellow
to misquote Tacitus, or Virgil, or Homer; but for a preacher to misquote
Paul, or Moses, or David, is a far more serious matter, and quite as worthy
of the severest censure. Mark, I said a "fellow," not a freshman,
and from a pastor we expect, at least, equal accuracy in his own department
as from the holder of a fellowship. You who so unwaveringly believe in
the verbal-inspiration theory (to my intense satisfaction), ought never
to quote at all until you can give the precise words, because, according
to your own showing, by the alteration of a single word you may miss altogether
God's sense of the passage. If you cannot make extracts from Scripture
correctly, why quote it at all in your petitions? Make use of an expression
fresh from your own mind, and it will be quite as acceptable to God as
a scriptural phrase defaced or clipped. Vehemently strive against garblings
and perversions of Scripture, and renounce for ever all cant phrases, for
they are the disfigurement of free prayer.
I have noticed a habit among some--I hope you have not fallen into it--of
praying with their eyes open. It is unnatural, unbecoming, and disgusting.
Occasionally the opened eye uplifted to heaven may be suitable and impressive,
but to be gazing about while professing to address the unseen God is detestable.
In the earliest ages of the church the fathers denounced this unseemly
practice. Action in prayer should be very little used, if at all. It is
scarcely comely to lift and move the arm, as if in preaching; the outstretched
arms however, or the clasped hands, are natural and suggestive when under
strong holy excitement. The voice should accord with the matter, and should
never be boisterous, or self-asserting: humble and reverent let those tones
be in which man talketh with his God. Doth not even nature itself teach
you this? If grace does not I despair.
With special regard to your prayers in the Sabbath services, a few sentences
may be useful. In order to prevent custom and routine from being enthroned
among us, it will be well to vary the order of service as much as possible.
Whatever the free Spirit moves us to do, that let us do at once. I was
not till lately aware of the extent to which the control of deacons has
been allowed to intrude itself upon ministers in certain benighted churches.
I have always been accustomed to conduct religious services in the way
I have thought most suitable and edifying, and I never have heard so much
as a word of objection, although I trust I can say I live on the dearest
intimacy with my officers; but a brother minister told me this morning,
that on one occasion, he prayed in the morning service at the commencement
instead of giving out a hymn, and when he retired into the vestry, after
service, the deacons informed him that they would have no innovations.
We hitherto understood that Baptist churches are not under bondage to traditions
and fixed rules as to modes of worship, and yet these poor creatures, these
would-be lords, who cry out loudly enough against a liturgy, would bind
their minister with rubrics made by custom. It is time that such nonsense
were forever silenced. We claim to conduct service as the Holy Spirit moves
us, and as we judge best. We will not be bound to sing here and pray there,
but will vary the order of service to prevent monotony. Mr. Hinton, I have
heard, once preached the sermon at the commencement of the service, so
that those who came late might at any rate have an opportunity to pray.
And why not? Irregularities would do good, monotony works weariness. It
will frequently be a most profitable thing to let the people sit quite
still in profound silence for two or five minutes. Solemn silence makes
noble worship.
Justin Martyr, Apol. I, c. 68, p. 270. Ed Otto.