Wesley had sufficient money and to spare during all his career. Bounds did not care for money. He did not depreciate it; he considered it the lowest order of power.
Wesley died with “an eye beaming and lips breaking into praise.” “The best of all is God with us,” Bounds wrote the writer of these lines. “When He is ready I am ready; I long to taste the joys of the heavenlies.”
Wesley said, “The World is my parish.” Bounds prayed as if the universe was his zone.
Wesley was the incarnation of unworldliness, the embodiment of magnanimity. Bounds was the incarnation of unearthliness, humility and self-denial. Wesley will live in the hearts of saints for everlasting ages. Bounds eternally.
Wesley sleeps in City Road Chapel grounds, among his “bonny dead,” under marble, with fitting tribute chiseled in prose, awaiting the Resurrection. Bounds sleeps in Washington, Georgia, cemetery, without marble covering, awaiting the Bridegroom’s coming.
These two men held ideals high and clear beyond the reach of other men. Has this race of men entirely gone out of the world now that they are dead? Let us pray.
Brooklyn, N. Y.
II PRAYING SAINTS OF THE OLD TESTAMENTS (_continued_) 21
XIV PAUL AND HIS PRAYING (_continued_) 131
XVI PAUL AND HIS REQUESTS FOR PRAYER (_continued_) 150
_The Holy Spirit will give to the praying saint the brightness of an immortal hope, the music of a deathless song, in His baptism and communion with the heart. He will give sweeter and more enlarged visions of heaven until the taste for other things will pall, and other visions will grow dim and distant. He will put notes of other worlds in human hearts until all earth’s music is discord and songless._--REV. E. M. BOUNDS.
Old Testament history is filled with accounts of praying saints. The leaders of Israel in those early days were noted for their praying habits. Prayer is the one thing which stands out prominently in their lives.
To begin with, note the incident in Joshua, 10th chapter, where the very heavenly bodies were made subject to prayer. A prolonged battle was on between the Israelites and their enemies, and when night was rapidly coming on, and it was discovered that a few more hours of daylight were needful to ensure victory for the Lord’s hosts, Joshua, that sturdy man of God, stepped into the breach, with prayer. The sun was too rapidly declining in the west for God’s people to reap the full fruits of a noted victory, and Joshua, seeing how much depended upon the occasion, cried out in the sight and in the hearing of Israel, “Sun, stand thou still upon Gideon, and thou moon in the Valley of Ajalon.” And the sun actually stood still and the moon stopped on her course at the command of this praying man of God, till the Lord’s people had avenged themselves upon the Lord’s enemies.
Jacob was not a strict pattern of righteousness, prior to his all-night praying. Yet he was a man of prayer and believed in the God of prayer. So we find him swift to call upon God in prayer when he was in trouble. He was fleeing from home fearing Esau, on his way to the home of Laban, a kinsman. As night came on, he lighted on a certain place to refresh himself with sleep, and as he slept he had a wonderful dream in which he saw the angels of God ascending and descending on a ladder which stretched from earth to heaven. It was no wonder when he awoke he was constrained to exclaim, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not.”
Then it was he entered into a very definite covenant with Almighty God, and in prayer vowed a vow unto the Lord, saying, “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace; and shall the Lord be my God, and this stone which I have set for a pillar shall be God’s house; and of all that thou shalt give me, I will surely give one-tenth unto thee.”