^ Thoreau's love of mountains is exemplified in many passages of his diary, and the occasional excursions which he made to the
^ J. H. Jowett
ST. LUKE VI. 12, 13 167
lofty outlying ranges visible from the Concord hills formed some of the most pleasing episodes in his life. " A mountain chain," he says, " determines many things for the statesman and philosopher. The improvements of civilization rather creep along its sides than cross its summit. How often is it a barrier to prejudice and fanaticism ! In passing over these heights of land, through their thin atmosphere, the follies of the plain are refined and purified; and as many species of plants do not scale their summits, so many species of folly no doubt do not cross the Alleghanies." ^
Take the text in three divisions —
I. Our Lord's Habit of Prayer. II. The Occasion of the Night-long Prayer. III. The Answer to the Prayer.
L
Our Lord's Habit of Prayer.
1. The impression which the records of Christ's prayers make on us is that these prayers are the indexes to His whole life as a life of prayerfulness. They suggest to us the fact that He made so much of prayer as to avail Himself of every possible outward aid to devotion. He who was careful to instruct men that they were to enter into their closet and shut the door and pray to God in secret — He sought the stillness of night-seasons and mountain-tops, the calming influences of perfect solitude far from the madding crowd. These notices disclose to us the fact that Christ's devotional life here and there came out in trans- cendent intensity and volume, taking for its needed expression whole nights upon mountain-tops.
(1) Why should Jesus pray ? In the first place, it was natural for Him to pray, because He vms the Son of God. Prayer at its best is, if one may be allowed the expression, conversation with God, the confidential talk of a child who tells everything to his father. There is a remarkable example of this in the Confessions of St. Augustine. This great book is in the form of a prayer from beginning to end; yet it narrates its author's history and expounds the most important of his opinions. Evidently the good man had got into the habit of doing all his deepest thinking ^ H. S. Salt, ffenry David Thoreau, 65.
i68 PRAYER AND CHOICE
in the form of conversation with God. If this be what prayer is, it is not difficult to understand how the Eternal Son should have prayed to the Eternal Father. Indeed it is easy to see that, in this sense, He must have prayed without ceasing.
(2) Jesus also needed to pray because He loas the Son of Man. Prayer was the sign and proof of His having been made in all things like unto His brethren — a veritable son of man. It was the surest evidence He ever gave, on the spiritual side of His being, of His perfect and complete manhood. Hunger and thirst and weariness and pain told the story of His humanity, as far as the frail tabernacle of the flesh was concerned. But prayer — the cry of want, the language of dependence and trust, the words of submission and obedience to the will of God the Father — be spoke the reality of His spiritual humanity, and showed, more clearly than aught else could show, that in the inner life of thought and feeling, mind and spirit, the Lord Jesus was one with ourselves.
It is true that there are provinces in the realm of prayer which were foreign to Him. He never traversed them during the whole of His life. They lay entirely outside His experience as One who was " holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners." He had no need, as we have, to confess sin or to use in any sense the language of penitence, and to ask, as we must do, for Divine pardon. And this, in all His approaches to God, Jesus Christ is never shown to have done. And yet, because He was man, partaker of our nature and our name. He must needs pray.
He sought the mountain and the loneliest height,
For He would meet His Father all alone.
And there, with many a tear and many a groan.
He strove in prayer throughout the long, long night.
Why need He pray, who held by filial right,
O'er all the world alike of thought and sense,
The fulness of His Sire's omnipotence ?
Why crave in prayer what was His own by might ?
Vain is the question, — Christ was man in deed,
And being man His duty was to pray.
The Son of God confess'd the human need.
And doubtless ask'd a blessing every day.
Nor ceases yet for sinful man to plead,
Nor will, till heaven and earth shall pass away.^
' Hartley Coleridge.
ST. LUKE VI. 12, 13 169
2. Jesus loved the solitudes. " He went out into the mountain to pray." In Palestine, as in many parts of Scotland, there is mountain everywhere. A mile or two from any town you are out on it. You have only to quit the houses, cross a few acres of cultivated ground, and your feet are on the turfy pastures, where you can be absolutely alone. Jesus had, if we may so speak, made the discovery that He could obtain this solitude anywhere ; and, when He arrived in a town, His first thought was, which was the shortest road to the mountain, — just as ordinary travellers inquire where are the most noted sights and which is the best hotel.