Prayer in the Unconverted.
“When Thou saidst, Seek ye My face, my heart said unto Thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.” —Psalm xxvii. 8.
The faculty of prayer is not an acquisition of later years, but is created in us, inherent in the root of our being, inseparable from our nature.
And yet consistent with this fact is the fact that the great majority of men do not pray. It is possible to possess a faculty dormant in us for a whole lifetime. The Malay possesses the faculty for studying modern languages as well as we, but he never uses it. In sleep we retain our faculties of seeing and hearing, but then they are inactive. Altho possessed of great power, the big fellow did not lift a finger against the little scamp who tormented him. Hence a faculty may remain in us wholly undeveloped and dormant for a lifetime, or partly developed but suppressed. And the same is true of the faculty of prayer. Among the fourteen hundred millions of the earth’s population, there are scarcely two hundred million who do not appear to be acquainted with prayer, altho their form of prayer is very defective. Of the non-praying masses, who almost exclusively occupy Europe, one half remember the time when, in some way or other, they used to pray. Many of those who have lost even that, still breathe an occasional prayer. And the number of them who wish that they could pray is very large; and among the non-praying people they represent undoubtedly the noblest.
Hence we maintain our starting-point, that we owe the faculty of prayer to our creation. God created man as a being disposed to prayer. If this were not so, the faculty of prayer could not be among his endowments. We are created for prayer, otherwise we could never have tasted of its sweetness.
To the question, Why in our creation is this a peculiar work of
the Holy Spirit? we answer: Prayer is the drawing and pressing of the impressed imagetoward its *Original,*which is the Triune God. To be the bearers of that impressed image is the marvelous honor bestowed upon men. Altho marred by sin—God grant by regeneration restored in you—yet the original features of that image are still the original features of our human being. Without that image we would cease to be men.
And, owing its origin to the impress of that original Image, our inward being draws toward It, naturally, urgently, and persistently. It can not live without it, and the fact that, on the other hand, the original Image of the Eternal One draws the impressed image in man to Himself, is the ultimate and constraining power of all prayer. However, to be exalted to the dignity of prayer, this drawing to God must not be like the involuntary suction of water to the deep, or the turning of the opening rose-bud toward the light. For the water knows not whither it is going, and the rosebud is unconscious of the sunshine which governs it. That almost irresistible drawing can be called prayer only when we knowthat it is prayer, when we perceiveit, and, knowing to whom it draws us, make it our own conscious, cooperating act.
Hence prayer does not spring from the will. The Triune God is He who rouses the soul to prayer, who draws us, and not we ourselves. Wherefore the Psalmist says: “When Thou saidst, Seek ye My face, my heart said unto Thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.” (Psalm xxvii. 8) And how does this first impulse from God reach us? Not externally as the wind, but internally in the heart. And knowing that it does not proceed fromme, but comes to me, it must be from the Holy Spirit who works in me. Are not all the internal impulses that proceed from the Eternal One *the proper work of the Holy Spirit?*We can have no fellowship with the Son but through the Holy Spirit; none with the Father but through the Son to whom the Holy Spirit has introduced us.
However, we do not speak now of the state of regeneration. In our treatment of prayer thus far, we have reference to man in his original state, and independent of the restoration; and in that state we say, prayer is not the cry of an independent being for a God to him unknown, with whom he hopes thus to become acquainted; but, on the contrary, that all prayer presupposes, on man’s part, an inward sense of the Eternal Being of God, and of the fact that, being created after His image, he belongs to Him and consciouslydraws
to his original Image. Wherefore we may call it a spiritual magnetism, which operates unceasingly upon him, and originated in his creation. However, it is different from magnetism in a twofold aspect: (1) in that man is consciousof it; (2) in that it is a mutualattraction.
The second pointneeds special emphasis. In magnetic attraction the magnet is active and the iron passive; but in prayer it is not so. Prayer rests upon the foundation of mutualattraction. So long as it proceeds from God’s side alone, there is no prayer; but there is, when our being begins to draw to God, when we feel the impulse if possible to draw God to us: “Come, Lord, how long! Lord, delay not! come quickly!”