III.
But we must penetrate beneath even such means of grace as those I have enumerated before we reach the centre of our subject. It is not to the public ordinances, not to your Professors, and not even to your companions, that you can look for the sources of your growth in religious power. As no one can give you intellectual training except at the cost of your own strenuous effort, so no one can communicate to you spiritual advancement apart from the activities of your own eager souls. True devoutness is a plant that grows best in seclusion and the darkness of the closet; and we cannot reach the springs of our devout life until we penetrate into the sanctuary where the soul meets habitually with its God. If association with God’s children powerfully quickens your spiritual life, how much more intimate communion with God Himself. Let us then make it our chief concern in our preparation for the ministry to institute between our hearts and God our Maker, Redeemer and Sanctifier such an intimacy of communion that we may realize in our lives the command of Paul to pray without ceasing and in everything to give thanks, and that we may see fulfilled in our own experience our Lord’s promise not only to enter into our hearts, but unbrokenly to abide in them and to unite them to Himself in an intimacy comparable to the union of the Father and the Son.
Lectio, meditatio, oratio, the old Doctors used to say, faciunt theologum. They were right. Take the terms in the highest senses they will bear, and we shall have an admirable prescription of what we must do would we cultivate to its height the Christian life that is in us.
Above all else that you strive after, cultivate the grace of private prayer. It is a grace that is capable of cultivation and that responds kindly to cultivation; as it can be, on the other hand, atrophied by neglect. Be not of those that neglect it, but in constant prayer be a follower of Paul, or rather of our Lord Himself; for, God as He was, our blessed Lord was a man of prayer, and found prayer His ceaseless joy and His constant need. Of course the spirit of prayer is the main thing here, and the habit of “praying without ceasing,” of living in a prayerful frame, is above all what is to be striven for. But let us not fall into the grave error of supposing this prayerful habit of mind enough, or that we can safely intermit the custom of setting apart seasons for formal prayer. Let me read you a few appropriate words here from one of Dr. H. C. G. Moule’s delightful devotional treatises:
