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CHAPTER IV.

DEVOUT EXERCISES OF WILL

We have seen already that there can be no true Piety which does not affect the Will, nay have its seat and throne in the Will, renewing it into harmony with the will of God. We cannot conceive a child of God having a will at variance with his Father's will, or even indifferent thereto. There can be no true delight in God's presence, nor dependence on his help, where there is not also devotion to his service. He that has received the spirit of adoption at all, must have received it, however feeble in degree yet complete in kind. He must possess therefore with whatever fluctuations, a general desire and purpose to honour God's name, to walk worthy of Him who has called him to his kingdom and glory, and to become perfect as his Father which is in heaven is perfect. In a word, to use the expression of our Lord concerning his Apostles, (Matt. xxvi. 41,) "his spirit must be willing"-his purposes must cordially harmonize with those of God and he must be ready to do his will. It was so with those Disciples even amidst their heedlessness their rashness their ignorance of

themselves and their dulness towards the warnings of their master. They had no treachery of heart towards him (as, alas! the absent Judas had), but meant all that they said when they exclaimed, "Though we should die with thee yet will we not deny thee." And so will it be with all who are "transformed by the renewing of their mind, that they may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God."

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But then with this "spirit which is willing," there is still about the Christian the flesh which is weak; "the prejudices preferences appetites and passions of his old and lower nature; and these are continually opposing his new and higher purpose, seeking to mislead it to enfeeble it or at least to clog its efforts. We see this in those same Disciples. The very men who were at one moment full of generous zeal for their Divine Master are soon found"sleeping, for their eyes were heavy!" The very Apostle who now is ready to go with his Lord to prison and to death is within the hour forsaking him and flying; nay shrinking from the mention of his name; nay protesting with an oath, "I do not know the man!" The best intentions are forgotten; the most dilated zeal collapses to a point; the most resolute determinations have slunk away; the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. And who does not confess that so it is with every Christian? Who is not compelled to cry continually

with bitter self-reproach, "The things that I would I do not, and the things that I would not those I do!"

Here therefore we perceive the strong necessity of Prayer, as a means of exercising and thereby strengthening the Will. It was to this, that Jesus directed his Disciples as their great preservative in the coming trial—“ Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation." He knew their willing spirit and he loved them. But he knew too their weaker flesh and he was fearful for them. He endeavours therefore to arouse them to a sense of their spiritual danger, and to the earnest seeking of that divine strength without which they must fall. And here

in does he teach us that in Prayer lies all moral power. By constant bringing of our will under the eye and influence of God must we reduce it into harmony with His.

And this, Prayer enables us to do by settling our judgment of what is the will of God in each particular case. However honest our desire to please our heavenly Father, we are continually in danger of mistake concerning what will please him. The general principles of God's will are it is true set forth by him in his Holy Word, and enforced by the responsive voice of his Spirit in the heart. But when we come to act out the details of duty, we are in danger either of forgetting those principles, through the prevalence of a crowd of selfish

worldly maxims of the Understanding which judges not according to the grand ideas of Faith but according to the mean suggestions of Sense, not according to the Distant and Unseen but according to the Visible and Immediate; or of misapplying those principles, through the perplexity and ignorance of this same understanding which can only judge according to the evidence, obscure and meagre nay conflicting though it be, which may be brought before it; and which therefore leads us into many an evil path and involves us in a thousand errors, before we are aware. It is therefore one thing to have a will for God, and quite another to have this will sufficiently predominant above all other wills, and sufficiently enlightened when predominant to direct our steps aright.

Now here our remedy is Prayer. Prayer, which does not merely seek for strength to execute our judgment (for that judgment may be wrong); but lays it open before God, that in his presence and with reference to his promised guidance we may form and settle that judgment. We are in danger of being hurried along by the conclusions-the rash perhaps and passionate conclusions-of the Understanding. Prayer brings us to a pause, that we may recollect What saith the Lord? We are tossed perhaps upon a sea of troubles; our prospect overcast, our land-marks gone, our reckoning at fault. Prayer runs to the compass and the chart which God has given us, to find in what direction

we must steer. We are wavering between divergent trains of thought, each beckoning us in turn along its course. Prayer discloses some new object which at once decides their relative correctness. Prayer saves us from the judgment of our solitary self by reminding us of another than ourself, and of the judgment of that other, to modify our own. "Prayer," says Bishop Wilberforce,* "brings us near to Him; and of his infinite condescension brings Him near to us. In Prayer, in real hearty earnest prayer, all things around us are set in their proper places. The earth and its interests shrink into their real insignificance. Time, and all its train of pleasures pains shame poverty honour and riches, what are these to one whose eye is on the great white throne, before whom lies the awful book of judgment, who sees heaven opened and Jesus standing on the right hand of God?" Who has not experienced the advantage of considering, in cases of perplexity, What would such or such a revered Friend think of this matter? How would his mind, untroubled by the personal considerations which disturb my own, decide? And what then is the privilege of thus referring to the mind of God? of waiting, with a growing sense of his immediate .presence, for that calm serenity in which the slightest whisper of the conscience may be heard! In the very

*Ordination Sermon at Oxford, Dec. 1845.