^ Alas ! we live in the kingdom of the devil db extra ; there- fore we cannot hear or see any good ab extra. But we live in the blessed kingdom of Christ ah intra. There we see, though as in a glass darkly, the exceeding, unutterable riches of the grace and glory of God. Therefore, in the name of the Lord let us break through, press forward, and fight our way through praise and blame, through evil report and good report, through hatred and love, until we come into the blessed kingdom of our dear Father, which Christ the Lord has prepared for us before the beginning of the world. There only shall we find joy. Amen.^
^ It is a strange thing that so fine a spirit as Satan is let loose to do so much mischief, but he is only " the prince of the power of the air," not of the power of the spirit. I believe there may be more devils than men. They are legion, and go in companies, so far as we can gather from the hints of Scripture. I think each temptation that assails a man may be from a separate devil. And they are not far off; probably our atmosphere was the place of their original banishment. And there they Hve — air-princes. But mark, they have no power over the innermost spirit ; nay, they can have no knowledge of the secrets of the heart of man. No single heart-secret is known to any single devil. These are known only to the Searcher of the hearts, who is also their Maker. Some good Christians disquiet themselves by forgetting this. I would say that our adversary can look and hear, see and listen, and make inferences. He has only a phenomenal knowledge, and that not perfect. He is but a creature, and cannot know the secrets of the universe. It ought to comfort all men that only our Maker knows our constitution.^
* Luther, Letters, v. 684.
' John Duncan, CoUoquia Peripatetica, 181.
f
4bo SIFTED AS WHEAT
n.
Defence.
"But I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not."
1. Our Lord anticipates the devil. His intercession precedes the tempter's attack. He presents Himself as the Antagonist, the confident and victorious Antagonist, of whatsoever mysterious, malignant might may lie beyond the confines of sense, and He says, "My prayer puts the hook in leviathan's nose, and the malevolent desire to sift, in order that not the chaff but the wheat may disappear, comes all to nothing by the side of My prayer."
^ " Intercession," it has been said, is " the divinest gift of friend- ship." Somebody may be thinking of a child far away upon the frontiers of the Empire. Ah ! severance is the penalty of Empire, and what a pain it is — what a deep wound — in a parent's heart ! You have not seen that absent child for many a year. You almost dread meeting him again, lest you should not recognize him or he you. He writes to you not quite so frequently or intimately as he used to write ; absence and distances soon or late chill the warmest hearts, and you and he are moving slowly apart, like ships bound for different ports on the infinite deep. What can you do for him? One thing only, — you can pray. Prayer is the wireless spiritual telegraphy transcending time and space. You are near him, if ever, in your prayers.
Or your child may be drifting into sin. He has gone like the prodigal into the far country. He has not yet like the prodigal " come to himself." He has ceased to visit you, even to answer your letters. He is dead — all but dead to you — while he lives. Oh ! it is only prayer that, if God will, may help you to help him. Some day perhaps he will arise and come to his father ; and you will welcome him ; and the past will be no more. It will be the answer to your prayer. "I have made supplication for thee," said the Saviour, " that thy faith fail not." ^
2. The prayer of our Lord was personal. It was a particular supplication for Peter. The precise terms in which Jesus prayed for Peter we do not know ; for the prayer on behalf of the one disciple has not, like that for the whole eleven, been recorded.
» J. E. C. Welldon, The School of FaUh, 100.
ST. LUKE XXII. 31, 32 461
But the drift of these special intercessions is plain, from the account given of them by Jesus to Peter. The Master had prayed that His disciple's faith might not fail. He had not prayed that he might be exempt from Satan's sifting process, or even kept from falling ; for He knew that a fall was necessary, to show the self-confident disciple his own weakness. He had prayed that Peter's fall might not be ruinous ; that his grievous sin might be followed by godly sorrow, not by hardening of heart, or, as in the case of the traitor, by the sorrow of the world, which worketh death : the remorse of a guilty conscience, which, like the furies, drives the sinner headlong to damnation.
^ In the first parish where I laboured lived a man who was not only agnostic in his attitude towards things religious, but even derided them, and was wont to chaff his wife on her devotion to her church. The wife, however, went on her quiet but earnest way, living out her religion in the home. One morning very early the husband awoke and discovered his wife beside his bed absorbed in whispered prayer. Her pale, upturned face was fixed with intensity upon the Invisible, and her warm hand was resting upon his own, she supposing him to be asleep. As the husband's eyes opened on the unexpected scene, the suggestion came like a flash to his soul, " My wife's God is more real to her than her husband is. If she is so earnest for my welfare as to rise at such an hour and pray alone for me, it is time I had some care for my own soul " ; and he instantly arose from his bed, knelt beside her and added his own prayer to hers. He gave his heart to God on the spot, and that very morning came to the early meeting at the church and announced his change of heart; the next Sabbath he united with the church. The conviction of reality in the wife's intimacy with God was what roused and brought him ; the wife had something to impart, which of itself wrought to open the husband's soul.^