Let us consider — I. The Giver. II. The Gift. III. The Kecipients.
The Giver.
1. The Giver is God, and we must begin by regarding Him as a personal Being. This may not seem so easy in these modern days as it was in the childhood of the race. Old Testament saints found no difficulty in clinging to God as to a friend ; God was very personal to them. Every common bush was afire with Him. They spoke and acted as if they saw Him. Elect souls who had trained themselves to believe in the moral attributes of God came to trust the personal God Himself. God's righteousness, •mercy, loving-kindness, truth, are not so much abstract attributes of His essential nature as the forms through which He brings Himself near to man's life. By the manifestation of these in history and in the career of individuals. He reveals Himself. He cannot be separated from these attributes. They have no reality apart from Him ; and this was the lesson which the prophets more particularly and the teachers of ancient Israel were continually insisting should be learned by their countrymen. A few of them learned it. They could not think of goodness and righteousness except as associated with one God, whose law, as it sought to rule men's lives, was the expression of His mind.
We marvel at times at the spacious prayers contained in some of the Psalms, and in some of the prophecies of the Old Testament. How easily, yet how grandly, these men of long ago moved among great thoughts of the Creator. The very names they gave Him — " Almighty," " Everlasting," " King," " Lord of Hosts "—reveal the magnitude of the ideas which dominated their minds. These
ST. LUKE XI. 13 239
names indicated something real and vast. They represented the supremacy of the Divine control, its absoluteness in great things as in small A man who uttered such prayers never felt himself lost in the unlimited largeness of the universe, but was sure that He who knew all and was everywhere could never forget the least of His creatures, or be uninterested in him. " 0 Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thoughts afar off. . . . There is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, 0 Lord, thou knowest it altogether. . . . Whither shall I go from thy spirit ? or whither shall I flee from thy presence ? . . . Search me, 0 God, and know my heart : try me, and know my thoughts ; and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." The majesty of God and the faith of man are brought together in thoughts and words that are made possible only to him who in endeavouring to understand himself strives to come near in reverent belief to his Creator.
TI Personality, like prayer, is a force of which we have daily experience in ordinary life. The south-eastern district of Lanca- shire became, as is well known, the seat of the great cotton industry because it was one of the few parts of England in which the atmospheric conditions made it possible to work up this natural product into the familiar fabrics of commerce. The rain- fall of that region, which is a source of continual complaint to those who live in it, has been the cause of its wealth, for cotton will break in the working if the air is not damp. But to-day, so far have we advanced in knowledge and invention that the manu- facturer can make himself independent of the variations of climate by raising the atmosphere of his mill to the point of humidity required for weaving. It is in this way that human personality is on every hand adapting, modifying, selecting the conditions under which it acts, and Nature is conquered by obeying it. So is it, 1 conceive, that those spiritual beings, whether good or evil, which rise above the race of men in the hierarchy of personal hfe, live and move and operate. And the great Father, whose robe Nature is, is surely no irresponsible Sultan but Himself as one under authority when He makes the winds His messengers, His ministers the flames of fire.^
2. Christ taught us to call God " Father." The name which Christ gives to God elevates the whole idea of prayer, and places
* J. G. Simpson, T?ie Spirit and the Bride, 169.
240 THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
within the reach of us all a truth about the Creator which oniy a few of the most serious minds before had reached. Christ's teaching that God is our Father supplies us with the belief about God that quickens and purifies all our entreaties and resolutions. We begin then to understand that prayer is one of our privileges as His children, and we regard it less as a means of obtaining the gratification of our personal wishes than as an occasion of con- fidential inter-communion by which all our cares and griefs pass from us into the Divine heart, and we are made of one will with the Father.
^ Tennyson thus describes the love of a true father for his offspring :
Beat upon mine, little heart! beat, beat! Beat upon mine I you are mine, my sweet I All mine from your pretty blue eyes to your feet, My sweet.