In Answer to Prayer

by William Boyd Carpenter; Theodore L. Cuyler; W. J. Knox-Little; Ian Maclaren; William Quarrier

On another occasion, I was summoned from my study to see a girl who was dying of acute peritonitis. I hurried away to the chamber of death. The doctor said that he could do nothing more. The mother stood there weeping. The girl had passed beyond the point of recognition. But as I entered the room, a conviction seized me that the sentence of death had not gone out against her. I proposed that we should kneel down and pray. I asked definitely that she should be restored. I left the home, and learned afterwards that she began to amend almost, at once, and entirely recovered; she is now quite strong and well, and doing her share of service for our Lord.

And on yet another occasion I was hastily called from my study to see an elderly man, who had always been delicate since I knew him; now he was prostrated with bronchitis, and the doctor did not think that he could live. It chanced that I had just been studying the passage which contains the prayer of Hezekiah and the promise made to him of fourteen additional years of life. I went to the sick man and told him that I had just been reading this, and asked if it might not be a ground for definite prayer. He assented, and we entreated our God for His mercy in the matter. The man was restored and is living still.

These are only typical instances of what I have frequently seen. Many times, no doubt, I have prayed for the recovery of the sick and the prayer has not been answered. And you, dear and skeptical reader, may say if you will that this is proof positive that the instances of answered prayers are mere coincidences. You may say it and, if you will, prove it, but you will not in the least alter my quiet conviction; for the answers were given to me. I do not know that even the subjects of these recoveries recognise the agency which was at work. To me all this is immaterial. The subjective evidence is all that was designed, and that is sufficient, and to the writer conclusive.

With reference to money for Christian work, I have laboured to induce my own church to adopt the simple view that we should ask not men, but in the first instance God, the owner of it all, for what we want. I am thankful to say that some of them now believe this, and bring our needs to Him very simply and trustfully. I could name many instances of the following kind: there is a threatened deficit in the funds of the mission, or an extension is needed and we have not the money. The sound of misgiving is heard; we have not the givers; the givers have given all they can. "Why not trust God?" I have urged. "Why not pray openly and unitedly—and believe?" The black cloud of debt has been dissipated, or the necessary extension has been made.

Oddly enough, some people have said to me, "Ah, yours is a rich church," as if to imply one can very safely ask God for money when one has the people at hand who can give it. But surely this is a question of degree. My church is not rich enough to give one-tenth of what it gives, if we did not first ask God for it. And there are churches which could give ten times what they do give, if only the plan were adopted of first asking God instead of going to the few wealthy people and trusting to them.

But this is a matter of statistics and a little wearisome. I confess I am unsatisfied with answers to prayer when the prayer is only for these carnal and visible things, which are often, in boundless love and pity, withheld. The constant and proper things to pray for are precisely those the advent of which cannot be observed or tabulated; that the kingdom may come, that they who have sinned, not unto death, may be forgiven, that the eyes of Christian men may be enlightened, and their hearts expanded to the measure of the love of Christ. Such prayers are answered, but the answers are not unveiled. I remember a strange instance of this. I was staying with a gentleman in a great town, where the town council, of which he was a member, had just decided to close a music-hall which was exercising a pernicious influence. The decision was most unexpected, because a strong party in the council were directly interested in the hall. But to my friend's amazement the men who had threatened opposition came in and quietly voted for withdrawing the licence. Next day we were speaking about modern miracles; he, the best of men, expressed the opinion that miracles were confined to Bible times. His wife then happened to mention how, on the day of that council meeting, she and some other good women of the city had met and continued in prayer that the licence might be withdrawn. I ventured to ask my friend whether this was not the explanation of what he had confessed to be an amazing change of front on the part of the opposition. And, strange to say, it had not occurred to him—though an avowed believer in prayer—to connect the praying women and that beneficent vote.

The truth is, all the threads of good which run across our chequered society, all the impulses upward and onward, all the invisible growths in goodness and grace, are answered prayers. For our prayers for the kingdom are not uttered on the housetops; and the kingdom itself cometh not with observation.

But if it were not too delicate a subject I could recite instances, to me the most remarkable answers to prayer in my experience, of changed character and enlarged Christian life, resulting from definite intercession. It is an experiment which any loving and humble soul can easily make. Take your friends, or better still the members of the church to which you belong, and set yourself systematically to pray for them. Leave alone those futile and often misguided petitions for temporal blessings, or even for success in their work, and plead with your God in the terms of that prayer with which Saint Paul bowed his knees for the Ephesians. Ask that this person, or these persons, known to you, may have the enlightenment and expansion of the Spirit, the quickened love and zeal, the vision of God, the profound sympathy with Christ, which form the true Christian life. Pray and watch, and as you watch, still pray. And you will see a miracle, marvellous as the springing of the flowers in April, or the far-off regular rise and setting of the planets,—a miracle proceeding before your eyes, a plain answer to your prayer, and yet without any intervention of your voice or hand. You will see the mysterious power of God at work upon these souls for which you pray. And by the subtle movements of the Spirit it is as likely as not that they will come to tell you of the divine blessings which have come to them in reply to your unknown prayers.

But there are some whose eyes are not yet open to these invisible things of the Spirit, which are indeed the real things. The measure of faith is not yet given them, and they do not recognise that web,—the only web which will last when the loom of the world is broken,—the web of which the warp is the will of God, and the woof the prayers of men. For these, to speak of the whole as answered prayer is as good as to say that no prayer is answered at all. If they are to recognise an answer it must be some tiny pattern, a sprig of flower, or an ammonite figure on the fabric. Let me close, therefore, by recounting a very simple answer to prayer,—simple, and yet, I think I can show, significant.

Last summer I was in Norway, and one of the party was a lady who was too delicate to attempt great mountain excursions, but found an infinite compensation in rowing along those fringed shores of the fjord, and exploring those interminable brakes, which escape the notice of the passengers on board the steamer. One day we had followed a narrow fjord, which winds into the folds of the mountains, to its head. There we had landed and pushed our way through the brush of birch and alder, lost in the mimic glades, emerging to climb miniature mountains, and fording innumerable small rivers, which rushed down from the perpetual snows. Moving slowly over the ground—veritable explorers of a virgin forest—plucking the ruby bunches of wild raspberry, or the bilberries and whortleberries, delicate in bloom, we made a devious track which it was hard or impossible to retrace. Suddenly my companion found that her golosh was gone. That might seem a slight loss and easily replaced; not at all. It was as vital to her as his snowshoes were to Nansen on the Polar drift; for it could not be replaced until we were back in Bergen at the end of our tour. And to be without it meant an end of all the delightful rambles in the spongy mosses and across the lilliputian streams, which for one at least meant half the charm and the benefit of the holiday. With the utmost diligence, therefore, we searched the brake, retraced our steps, recalled each precipitous descent of heather-covered rock, and every sapling of silver birch by which we had steadied our steps. We plunged deep into all the apparently bottomless crannies, and beat the brushwood along all our course. But neither the owner's eyes, which are keen as needles, nor mine, which are not, could discover any sign of the missing shoe. With woeful countenances we had to give it up and start on our three miles' row along the fjord to the hotel. But in the afternoon the idea came to me, "And why not ask our gracious Father for guidance in this trifle as well as for all the weightier things which we are constantly committing to His care? If the hairs of our head are all numbered, why not also the shoes of our feet?" I therefore asked Him that we might recover this lost golosh. And then I proposed that we should row back to the place. How magnificent the precipitous mountains and the far snow-fields looked that afternoon! How insignificant our shallop, and our own imperceptible selves in that majestic amphitheatre, and how trifling the whole episode might seem to God! But the place was one where we had enjoyed many singular proofs of the divine love which shaped the mountains but has also a particular care for the emmets which nestle at their feet. And I was ashamed of myself for ever doubting the particular care of an infinite love. When we reached the end of the fjord and had lashed the boat to the shore, I sprang on the rocks and went, I know not how or why, to one spot, not far from the water, a spot which I should have said we had searched again and again in the morning, and there lay the shoe before my eyes, obvious, as if it had fallen from heaven!