I never could. Indeed, I sometimes, as I have said, hardly feel as if I had anything to ask; but oh, when I know what is going on in the heart of my people, and I am permitted to stand to lead them, to inspire their thought and feeling, and go into the presence of God, there is no time that Jesus is so crowned with glory as then! There is no time that I ever get so far into heaven. I can see my mother there; I see again my little children; I walk again, arm in arm, with those who have been my companions and co-workers. I forget the body, I live in the spirit; and it seems as if God permitted me to lay my hand on the very Tree of Life, and to shake down from it both leaves and fruit for the healing of my people! And it is better than a sermon, it is better than any exhortation. He that knows how to pray for his people, I had almost said, need not trouble himself to preach for them or to them; though that is an exaggeration, of course.

PERSONAL HABIT AND PUBLIC DUTY.

And now, my young friends, without dwelling longer upon this matter of ministerial prayer, for my hour has expired, I have only this to say, that I think it grows principally out of the habit of prayer in your own souls. Some people have asked me, "Do you ever write your prayers?" Why, I had rather undertake to make a diagram for every particle of my blood, what it should do all day, than to attempt to sketch out a prayer. Prayers are as flowers that scatter themselves all the hillsides over, and all the valleys through, according to the will of the shining sun that draws them up toward it. Prayer must be spontaneous, voluntary, effluent as the

atmosphere itself. It comes to those who pray much,I do not mean those that spend a great deal of time in the closet, because you can while away a great many pleasant hours over dull books with interjectional prayers; but those who have thoughts. that rise spontaneously up to God, for that is prayer. I have friends who are so dear to me that I hardly ever go a whole day unconscious of them. And sometimes, for hours together, I couple very much of my personal history with theirs. Have you never had friends that were so dear to you that, though they were a thousand miles away, you talked with them in the room, and, if you had a picture, there were two pairs of eyes looking at it, not one? Have you ever carried on this kind of double existence with friends? Well, it seems to me that is the attitude of the soul that loves God, that knows itself to be his, that expects to dwell with God, that does not think of him as a great judge, or as a despot, but as the sweetest, most genial, most affable, the nearest, the noblest, the most beautiful, the most to be desired, the altogether lovely; the one that made the sense of beauty in me, and is infinitely more fond of beauty than I am; the one that touched in me the fountain of poetic feeling, and is himself transcendently more poetic than all that ever sung on earth; the one who is the fountain out of which sprang everything that we love, or revere, or desire here! If such be our thought of God, and our life is hid with Christ in God every day, it is out of that fountain that comes pulpit prayer.

PRAYER THE SECRET OF STRENGTH.

And if you pray in the pulpit, and are dry, do not be discouraged. All streams run small at first, but grow better, grow deeper. Take more care of the inward. man. Be nobler. Oh, you have to be good men, you have to be noble men, more generous, more disinterested than anybody else about you! Sermons will not do; it is life God wants to bless, and it is your life, if you are settled in any parish, that God will make the means of grace to men. And you have to live lives of holiness, not after the Madame Guyon sort, or any particular sort, but after your sort, which is the purity of heart and the simplicity of faith and the freedom of will, ascending toward God. Live in that, grow in that, deepen in that, and people will begin to say, "Our minister's prayers, it seems to me, are more nourishing than they used to be." Then, when men vex you and trouble you, instead of getting angry, pray. Then, when troubles come, instead of feeling that you have too much trouble, pray and pray. When you find that talebearers in the community are after you, and you are annoyed and vexed in your parish, and there is scandal going around you here and there, pray, pray! It is the best way to head off little troubles. It is the best way to lighten great burdens. Pray always, be instant in prayer. Pray deep, deep as your soul goes, high as your thoughts can rise, and then you need not take much more trouble about your pulpit prayers, they will come. And when I hear a parish say, “Our minister may not preach as well as others, but oh, it is a balm and a refreshment to hear him pray!" I

VOL. II.

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congratulate them, they are not far from the gate of heaven.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.

Q. Would it not be well for the congregation to be made to feel that they are expected to join in the prayer?

MR. BEECHER. I suppose that when a man stands before his congregation he feels joined to them. I am conscious of that myself. I seem almost to pass into my congregation. I feel as if we were all one, as if my utterance were the utterance and the voice of all the sympathetic souls in the congregation. A great many say, "Let us pray," I suppose, because they have got to open the door somehow, and that is the way it has been customary to open it.

Q. May a person be eloquent in prayer without a vivid imagination?

MR. BEECHER. I think that all prayer has imagination in it. I think that faith is spiritualized imagi(nation. nation. Faith that works by love is ideality, or the imagination joined with affection and working in a spiritual direction; so that all sense of God, all sense of invisible things, means imagination. But the imagination, like every other thing, may exist in different degrees. It may be strong enough simply to be recipient, or it may be strong enough to be both recipient and in a small degree creative, or it may be positively creative, or efflorescent. The last form gives the highest development of it, carries one into the very borders. of what we call genius in that matter. I think there is a genius of prayer just as much as of poetry. I knew a woman so illiterate that she could not talk better

than a common negro. She came from the South, though she was a white woman, and lived in one of the southern counties of Ohio. When she began to pray, after a very little her spirit came to her; she seemed to drop the mortal part, and she fell into the language of the Old Testament. I heard Judge Fishback, now gone, say that he had heard all the able men in the West, but he never heard a human being who had such power, who affected him as that poor ignorant woman. did, when she got into those higher moods, and brought to her second or higher nature the use of all that sublime language of the Old Testament that seemed to be the channel to her spiritual feeling. I have heard old negroes in Indianapolis pray so as to make me wish I was in their place. There is a genius for prayer; but then it is just as it is with the element of beauty. The highest development of beauty makes you an artist; then you go along down until you come to that development in men which makes them decorators; and then lower down, to the great average mass of men who simply have a sense of what is tasteful or beautiful. A sense of beauty is distributed from the top to the bottom, though in different degrees; and the power of prayer follows the line of the gift. The gift is great in some; it belongs to all, but in varying degrees; and is susceptible, like all other gifts, of development by use.

Q. Some men do not have the power of expression, — of word expression. Now, what do you think of that yearning that there is in the Congregational Church I do not say whether it is right or wrong for something like a liturgy?

MR. BEECHER.

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I should say that that ought to be met by hymns. I shall come to that in my lecture on