EFFEMINATE PRAYER.

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but a pleasurable sympathy, rather, with the grand thoughts and the grander feeling which the language portrays. The heart is buoyant with its gaseous distension to the bounds of its great swelling words.

This lover of the pride of life does not discover his self-inflation, till conscience pricks him with such goads as these: 'Are you living for the things you are praying for?'-'What one thing are you doing for Christ which costs you self-denial?'-' Are you seeking for opportunities to deny yourself, to save souls?'—'Are you willing to be like Him who had not where to lay his head?''Can ye be baptized with the baptism that He is baptized with?' If then this effeminate one is not roused to a more Christ-like life by the uncovering of his hypocrisy, what a sickly murmuring of self-reproach fills his heart at the collapse of that prayer!

Such is human nature; such, but by the

grace of God, are we all. We must be dull inspectors of our own hearts, if we have never discerned there, lurking beneath the level at which sin breaks out into overt crime, some single offence- an offence of feeling, an offence of habit in thought, which for a time has spread its infection over the whole character of our devotions. We have been self-convicted of falsehood in prayer; for, though praying in the full dress of sound words, we did not desire that our supplications should be heard at the expense of that one idol.

Perhaps that single sin has woven itself like a web over large spaces of our life. It may have run like a shuttle to and fro in the texture of some plan of life, on which our conscience has not glared fiercely as upon a crime, because the usage of the world has blindfolded conscience by the respectability of such sin. Yet it has been all the while tightening its folds around us,

DEJECTION NO MYSTERY.

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repressing our liberty in prayer, stopping the life-blood and stiffening the fibre of our moral being, till we are like kneeling corpses in our worship.

That is a deceptive notion which attributes the want of unction in prayer to an arbitrary, or even inexplicable, withdrawment of God from the soul. Aside from the operation of physical causes, where is the warrant, in reason or revelation, for ascribing joylessness in prayer to any other cause than some wrong in the soul itself? What says an old prophet? 'Behold, the Lord's ear is not heavy that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated between you and your God. Your sins have hid his face from you. Therefore, we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness. We grope for the wall like the blind; we grope, as if we had no eyes; we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places, as

dead men.'

Could words describe more

truthfully, or explain more philosophically, that phenomenon of religious experience which we call the 'hiding of God's countenance?'

It does not require what the world pronounces a great sin, to break up the serenity of the soul in its devotional hours. The experience of prayer has delicate complications. A little thing, secreted there, may dislocate its mechanism and arrest its movement. The spirit of prayer is to the soul what the eye is to the body, the eye, so limpid in its nature, of such fine finish and such intricate convolution in its structure, and of so sensitive nerve, that the point of a needle may excruciate it, and make it weep itself away.

Even a doubtful principle of life, harbored in the heart, is perilous to the peacefulness of devotion. May not many of us find the cause of our joylessness in prayer,

SUSPENSE OF CONSCIENCE.

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in the fact that we are living upon some unsettled principles of conduct? We are assuming the rectitude of courses of life, with which we are not ourselves honestly satisfied. I apprehend that there is very much of suspense of conscience among Christians upon subjects of practical life, on which there is no suspense of action. Is there not a pretty large cloud-land covered by the usages of Christian society? And may not some of us find there the sin which infects our devotions with nauseous incense?

Possibly our hearts are shockingly deceitful in such iniquity. Are we strangers to an experience like this- that when we mourn over our cold prayers as a misfortune, we evade a search of that disputed territory for the cause of them, through fear that we shall find it there, and we struggle to satisfy ourselves with an increase of spiritual duties which shall cost us no sacrifice?