The den they enter grows a shiine;
The gloomy sash an oriel burns; Their cup of water warms like wine;
Their speech is filled from heavenly urns.
About their brow to me appears
An aureole, traced in tend'rest light —
The rainbow hue of smiles through tears, In dying eyes, by them made bright.
Of souls that shivered on the brink Of that chill ford, repass'd no more.
And in their mercy found the pledge, And sweetness of the farther shore.^
^ Bishop Ingram, ^ Lowell,
ISAIAH 473
III.
GIVING NO REST. "And give him no rest" (marg. "silence").
" Give Him no rest " : Let there be no cessation to Him. These are bold words, which many people would not have been slow to rebuke, if they had been anywhere else than in the Bible. Those who remind God are not to suffer Him to be still. The prophet believes that they can regulate the flow of Divine energy, can stir up the strength of the Lord.
It is significant how few men there are, whatever the variety or thinness of their creed, who have not something good to say concerning what they call prayer. To its beneficial effects the witness is almost uniform. When a philosophy " falsely so called " denounces it as unreasonable, it will often confess it to be instinctive. That prayer elevates in some way and enriches the moral nature of the worshipper, is one of the conclusions that seem to be taken for granted almost everywhere, though an attempt is sometimes made to neutralise the admission by pleas of superstition or of illusion. Every Christian knows that it does infinitely more for him than that. All through the Bible God is represented as yielding to its importunity, and every sincere disciple is familiar with experiences, in which in response to his pleading God has come down to his aid. Jehovah in His righteous anger said to Moses, " Let me alone, that I may con- sume this people " ; but when Moses prayed, reminding God of His promise to the patriarchs, the record is — " The Lord repented of the evil which He thought to do unto His people." " Let me go, for the day breaketh," said the mysterious man with whom Jacob wrestled at the ford Jabbok ; and because Jacob would not let him go, he soon prevailed. It is the same still. To pray with that kind of resolved importunity that will not be diverted — to give God no rest until He opens His hand and pours down the influence of strength of grace we need : neither in heaven nor upon earth has that resource ever yet been found to fail.
How have I knelt with arms of my aspiring Lifted all night in irresponsive air.
474 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
Dazed and amazed with overmuch desiring, Blank with the utter agony of prayer ! ^
1. This prayer is intercessory prayer. Deeper than the need of men and women, deeper than the need of money, is the Ch arch's need to-day of the forgotten secret of prevaihng inter- cessory prayer. Nothing short of this will suffice for the missionary enterprises of the day. Take ye no rest, and give Him no rest. lar be it from us by that to imply that we love the imperilled world more than our Father does. We sometimes tremble lest in our supplications and in our repre- sentations to God, when we kneel at His Throne together or Jjy ourselves, we should seem to imply that there are difficulties in this business which we have fathomed but which He has not foreseen. In our grievous disappointments, when our trusted standard-bearers fall, when the work of a lifetime seems, as it were, wasted, we are apt to speak to God as if really His ways were too inscrutable for us and intended to daunt us. God forgive us if we have murmured at this, which is sometimes chastisement of our half-hearted service, or murmur at the long waiting of faithful men and women for tangible results, or at the vastness of the work which we seem to have attempted in vain.
God help us all the more to lift the whole round world, with all its freight of infinite destiny, in the arms of* our faith and cast it at His feet. But we must not be afraid to tell Him that we have at length learned the lesson of the colossal magni- tude of the stupendous difficulties and the deep mysteries of our task. Our Lord would have us thus learn the lesson which He taught at Gethsemane, and amid inhuman insults and cruelties of His dying hour. It is by prayer for missions, when it is deep and sincere, it is by prayer for missions more than anything else, I believe — one can speak only of what one knows oneself — it is by prayer for missions that we become partakers of the sufferings of Christ, and can understand a little of the travail of His soul.
A man may say, " I can quite understand the good of pray- ing for oneself ; I can quite see that, according to God's will,
1 F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul, p. 13.
ISAIAH 475
these gifts of grace are to be worked by prayer like the gifts of God in nature ; but where is the evidence that there is the slightest good in praying for others ? " He might even take this line — he might say, "It is presumptuous for me to imagine that I can affect the destiny of another soul ! It irf against what I read of the struggle for existence by each individual in nature. It is unfair, for what is to happen to those for whom no one prays ? And where is the evidence that intercession for others does any good at all ? "