^ The old customary, seemly attitude in prayer was standing. So Jesus said when He described the penitent publican, "He stood afar off and prayed "; so when He commanded His disciples and said : " When ye stand praying, forgive ! " So in the godly fear of our fathers I still remember the awe that seized me as a boy when the whole great congregation rose to its feet in prayer,
1 J. W. Ewing, Tlie Undying Christ, 71.
EPHESIANS III. 14, 15 97
when the feeble old man and the frail man lifted their worn faces uncovered in speechless reverence to the eternal light which descended and suffused them with a glory which makes the burnished nimbus with which the painter ever loved to decorate his saint seem tame and tawdry. So when the subject enters the presence of his sovereign he stands, and in the very act and attitude of his homage shows that he is a free-born citizen con- scious of his dignity.
But prayer is too large and masterful a thing to be capable of being expressed in any single attitude. There are moments when collective worship is beautiful and seemly, and there are moments when a man is overpowered with a transcendent need and is forced to his knees. The man who is dazzled with excess of light finds that he lives and looks through a medium of vision too perfect for his dim eyes. So the man who for a moment is possessed by a great vision, or is conscious of a great need, may as it were be swept from his feet into the attitude of a suppliant before God. The year when I first entered the University was a year when the most learned of all Scottish thinkers died and passed away. As I saw him he was a frail and shrinking shadow, scarcely equal to the humblest act of articulation, yet round the benches the whisper passed that in strong manhood, when first he came to his Chair and wrestled with the problems of meta- physics, and seemed now and then to wrestle in vain, there would come such a torrent of passion and of intellectual conflict in him, that he would leap from his desk and away from his papers and fall prone before God, that light might come and he might see}
^ Brother Lawrence told me that it was a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times : that we were as strictly obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of action as by prayer in its season. His view of prayer was nothing else but a sense of the Presence of God, his soul being at that time insensible to everything but Divine Love. When the appointed time of prayer was past, he found no difference, because he still continued with God, praising and blessing Him with all his might, so he passed his life in continual joy; yet hoped that God would give him somewhat to suffer, when he should have grown stronger.^
^ A. M. Fairbairn.
2 Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, 21.
EPH.-COL. — 7
98 THE FATHER AND THE FAMILIES
III.
The Fathee. " I bow my knees unto the Father."
1. St. Paul says that he offered his prayer to "the Father." He did not address a material image, a creation of his own fancy, a power, or even " the Divine totality of being." He prayed to a Person. With St. Paul prayer was mind addressing mind; heart pleading with heart.
^ Madame Blavatsky, the founder of modern Theosophy, was asked : " Do you pray ? " " No," she replied, " we do not pray ; the only Deity we know is an abstraction. We have no time to kneel to an abstraction." ^
2. The Authorized Version has an addition which we may well wish we could retain. " Unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." There is something peculiarly tender and winning about this title of God. God is brought very near to us as the Father of Jesus. And we can still cherish that beautiful title, for it is used in several other places.
All nations, all men, who have cultivated religion, have given names and titles to God, in which they have expressed and embodied as well as they could their most exalted ideas concern- ing God. So the Jew called upon the God of his fathers by the name of Yahveh (" Jehovah ") ; and in that name called to mind a whole world of plighted troth, of faithfulness and tenderness. So the Moslem, as he tells his beads, recites the names of God, and passes into a kind of ecstasy as he recalls one by one the lofty titles of the beneficence and power of Allah. St. Paul, like all other Christians since, had no personal name for the God whom he adored, no long string of loud-sounding titles. You will not find in the New Testament any mention made of the Supreme Being, of the First Great Cause, of the Architect of the Universe, or anything else in that line. For St. Paul, and for us, God is simply and for ever " the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." It is hardly too much to say, " that is all we know, and all we want to know, of Him."