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Prayer.

"Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." -PHILIPPIANS iv. 6, 7.

THIS,

HIS, and one or two similar passages of Scripture, have given rise to a celebrated misrepresentation of our holy religion. "Be careful for nothing;" "take no thought for the morrow," &c., were alleged by Strauss, Buckle, and others, as proofs that the New Testament is opposed to industry and commerce. They further maintained that the world could do better without Christianity than it could without commerce; and so they advised us to shelve Christianity as a thing of the past, opposed to the better instincts and wiser reflections of the nineteenth century. But, though we are urged by Christianity to

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seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness," we are also urged to do whatsoever

our hand findeth to do with our might. When Christ tells us to "take no thought for the morrow," it is plain, from the word used in the Greek, that He is warning us not against prudent, but against anxious thought. If a man insures his life, though he is in one sense taking thought, not only for the morrow, but for an event that may not happen for thirty, forty, fifty years, yet he is not violating Christ's command; he is performing a thoroughly Christian duty. So in regard to our text, "Be careful for nothing," might be more strictly rendered, "be not anxious about anything." It is the same word that is translated elsewhere, "take no thought." But without consulting our Greek Testaments, we might surely have guessed that the active, earnest, energetic, hard-working Paul was not exhorting us to apathy, to indolence, to a care-for-nothingand - nobody state of mind. On the contrary, the freedom from anxiety to which he is exhorting us, is the essential condition of true work. When do you work best ? When you are worried? When your hearts and minds are in a feverish state of restlessness and foreboding? Nay, surely, is it not rather when your hearts are at peace?

The true cure for anxiety, the apostle tells us,

is prayer. "Be careful for nothing, but let your requests be made known unto God." In this sceptical age, however, when the very foundations of our faith are being shaken, it is somewhat difficult to believe in the usefulness of prayer. The opinion is becoming very general that answers to prayer must be impossible, inasmuch as they would imply violations of natural law. But this difficulty, I think, may be at once removed. What do we mean by a law of nature? as for example, when we speak of the law of gravitation? Why, simply, that all bodies or particles of matter in the universe attract one another in a certain definite way, and so tend to come together. But, mark you, though they tend to come together, this can be prevented. Suppose your child is leaning from a window at the top of the house, and that he leans a little too far, loses his balance and falls out. Gravitation will inevitably and remorselessly drag him to the ground unless some one interferes. But if you see his danger, and rush forward and catch him, he will be saved in spite of gravity. That law has not been violated, it is still acting, and tending to drag the child downwards, but you have counteracted Gravitation—a force that is perhaps as old

it.

And,

as eternity-gravitation would have killed him; but you, who were born yesterday and will die to-morrow-you, with your puny strength, have successfully interfered. Take another equally simple illustration. When you light a fire on a winter's day, you do not violate the laws of cold; you only introduce other forces, working according to other laws, which counteract those previously in operation. So that you see though the laws of nature can never be violated, they can be, and constantly are, counteracted. in point of fact, it is their inviolability which enables us to overcome them. If we could not depend upon the way in which any force was going to act, we should not know with what other forces it might be resisted. Take the case of lightning. We know it is a law that a tall chimney or lofty building tends to attract electricity from a thunder-cloud. We also know that some metals are good conductors. Hence we attach metallic rods to our more lofty and valuable structures, so that the electricity may be conducted thereby into the ground, instead of lingering about the edifice and destroying it. But if the laws of electricity were changeable, if, for instance, metals were sometimes conductors and sometimes non-conductors,

we should be altogether helpless. It is only when we foresee the precise mode of action of natural forces that we understand what to do if we wish to counteract them. As the Duke of Argyll says in his 'Reign of Law,' " It is the very inviolability of these laws which makes them subject to contrivance through endless cycles of design. How imperious they are, yet how submissive! How they reign, yet how they serve!"

This word law, then, is not such a bugbear as it looks. It does not prevent us from accomplishing our own purposes and plans; and if we can frustrate the tendency of natural forces by the introduction of other forces, why cannot God do the same? Just in proportion as God's knowledge and power are greater than ours, will He be able to achieve what it is impossible for us to effect. Well, then, supposing we are in any “trouble, need, sorrow, sickness, or any other adversity," from which we are unable to extricate ourselves, God could perhaps deliver us from it, without any violation or violent rupture of the laws of nature, merely in virtue of His superior knowledge of those laws, and His superior power of wielding, combining, and adapting them.

But what I want you specially to notice is this: The end and use of prayer is not to bring