Are there any prayers like the old psalms in their intense sincerity? In the times when our heart is wounded within us we turn to these ancient human cries, and we find what we want in them.
Let us pray for the children of this generation being trained now "to continue the succession," whom nothing less than a Divine interposition can save. The hunters on these mountains dig pits to ensnare the poor wild beasts, and they cover them warily with leaves and grass: this sentence about the succession is just such a pit, with words for leaves and grass. Let us pray for miracles to happen where individual children are concerned, that the little feet in their ignorance may be hindered from running across those pits, for the fall is into miry clay, and the sides of the pit are slippery and very steep.
Let us Pray
More and more as we go on, and learn our utter inability to move a single pebble by ourselves, and the mighty power of God to upturn mountains with a touch, we realise how infinitely important it is to know how to pray. There is the restful prayer of committal to which the immediate answer is peace. We could not live without this sort of prayer; we should be crushed and overborne, and give up broken-hearted if it were not for that peace. But the Apostle speaks of another prayer that is wrestle, conflict, "agony." And if these little children are to be delivered and protected after their deliverance, and trained that if the Lord tarry and life's fierce battle has to be fought—and for them it may be very fierce—all that will be attempted against them shall fall harmless at their feet like arrows turned to feather-down; then some of us must be strong to meet the powers that will combat every inch of the field with us, and some of us must learn deeper things than we know yet about the solemn secret of prevailing prayer.
FOOTNOTES:
[F] To-day (February 16, 1912) as I go through proofs of the second edition, I hear by post of a young girl in a distant city who lately escaped to a missionary, and asked for what he could not give her—protection. She had to return to her own home. In her despair, she drowned herself.