HERALDS OF GOD
Christ, that background of your hidden intercessions, of your pleading for them name by name, will lift your words and wing them with love and ardour and reality, God will not refuse the kindling flame when secret prayer has laid its sacrifice upon the altar. And you will prove in your own experience the truth to which that great soldier of the Cross, Samuel Rutherford, gave expression long ago: "I seldom made an errand to God for another, but I got something for myself."
Is it too much to say that revival in the Church depends upon the prayer-life of its ministers? Too often we take for granted that here at least all is well. But still to-day, as when the winds of Pentecost stirred the world, the first essential is the broken spirit and the contrite heart of those who preach the Word, the sense of dreadful inadequacy driving every apostle to his knees. To realize, face to face with the task, that it is hopeless trying to go on unless higher hands take hold of you; to know the feeling of utter incapacity which creates a trust that is vital just because it is desperate; to cry to God out of that depth of humiliation every day you live—this is to learn the secret of the apostles, whose very weakness was turned through the alchemy of prayer into their strongest asset, whose human inadequacy itself became the vehicle of the conquering might of Christ. "We have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the excellency of the power is of God, and not of us." It is when a man strikes rock-bottom in his sense of nothingness that he suddenly finds he has struck the Rock of ages. Then
204
