^| Some of my children have learnt to feel the Presence of God, walking from here to there again and again. We move about in God. He is around us and within us. We are like tiny sponges immersed in the Ocean of God.
To gain the sense of this Presence is His gift, to be prayed for, and sought by continually doing little acts to please Him, so that almost unconscious prayer may grow more and more.
Set yourself specially to cultivate the sense of the Presence of God, i.e., that you are walking about, acting, thinking, in God. For He is nearer to us than the air which we breathe. The air 1 H. Macmillan, Gleanings in Holy Fields, 68.
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enters into our bodies and is cast forth again; God enters our souls to abide there.1
III.
The Imagination of the Open Window.
" His windows were open in his chamber toward Jerusalem." Across far leagues, beyond palace and plain and desert, lay that city of the uplands. He would never see it again. The last living link with it had been snapped long ago. He had risen to a pinnacle of power in his adopted country. Vast affairs absorbed his attention. Yet his chosen chamber looked towards the west, and in the hours which he could call his own, when his inmost life was disclosed, he pushed back the lattices and looked towards Jerusalem as he knelt to pray. That unshuttered casement was the symbol of his spirit. Beyond the pomp and pageantry of the Persian capital, he ever turned to the city of his memories and his hopes. His was a soul with a view.
1. None but a great poet could declare what the open window towards Jerusalem meant to Daniel. It was the city of his birth and of his God, the capital of his nation and the loadstone of his hopes. Prosperous and exalted, he was still the exile ; it was the city of his love and of his dreams. But it is worth while to point out that it was neither superstition nor sentimentalism that drew his gaze towards the hill city in its ruin. It was not superstition. Muhammad, when he was feeling his way towards ceremonial details of the new faith, taught his followers for a while to turn towards Jerusalem when they prayed. The Jews failing to join him, he altered the direction towards Mecca. In either case, the impulse was superstition and the result an act of ritual. Had Daniel supposed that Jehovah's influence was supreme only at Jerusalem, his faith could never have triumphed in a city of towering ziggurats from whose lofty summits looked down victorious gods. If ever he was tempted to brood upon the shattered towers and ruined homes of the city of his birth, his faith conquered. He came to that Chamber of Vision to pray, and his habitual 1 Spiritual Letters of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 296.
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prayer was thanksgiving. He "gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime." Sentimentalism is impossible to him who lives as "seeing him who is invisible." No, that outlook towards Jerusalem meant for him the tenderness which memory- awakes, impulse to present duty, the confirmation of a daunt- less hope. It meant an escape from the hardness and material- ism and idolatry that hemmed in his life. It meant an easier approach to God and a surer starting-point for faith. The soul with a view is a soul with a way of escape and a path of ascent and a fountain of courage.
Tj Just as the Scottish emigrant in Canada dreams of the mountains and moors where he was born, and sees the glen again, and the burn swollen with the rain, and the dripping bracken, and the glory of purple heather ; so Daniel in exile, heartsick if not homesick, craved for the land and the Temple that he loved. He could not see them ; they were beyond his vision. It would bring them no nearer to fling wide the lattice. Yet an instinct that every one of us can understand moved him to open the window towards Jerusalem.1
Tf Not every one is born where nature or history have enriched the soil, but there is an answering echo in most men's breasts to these words of E. L. Stevenson : —
Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying, Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, My heart remembers how.2
Tf An old lady, just returning from a visit to New Haven, said that there she sought the old homestead, to find not a vestige left except a venerable elm that had stood before her father's door. " I would have kissed it," she said, " but for the passers-by. As it was, I stood and affectionately stroked the bark of the old tree." It may be that Daniel too had often looked away through these open windows, in fond remembrance of the scenes of his former life.3
2. But Jerusalem was to Daniel more than the city of his fathers and of his birth. It was the city of his faith. It symbolized for him not indeed religion but the religious com-
1 G. H. Morrison, Sun-Rise, 212.