The Fundamentals - 1910: Vol.9

70

The Fundamentals led to shut themselves in the secret place with God, and have labored^ fervently in prayer. And as the starting-point is thus found in supplication and intercession, so the final outcome must be that God’s people shall have learned to pray; other­ wise there will be rapid reaction and disastrous relapse from the better conditions secured. PRAYER PUTS MEN IN TOUCH WITH GOD There is a Divine philosophy behind this fact. The great­ est need is to keep in close touch with God; the greatest risk is the loss of the sense of the Divine. In a world where every appeal is to the physical senses and through them, real­ ity is in direct proportion to the power and freedom of con­ tact. What we see, hear, taste, touch or smell—what is ma­ terial and sensible—we can not doubt. The present and ma­ terial absorbs attention and appears real, solid, substantial; but the future, the immaterial, the invisible, the spiritual, seem vague, distant, illusive, imaginary. Practically the unseen has little or no reality and influence with the vast majority of mankind. Even the unseen God Himself is to most men less a verity than the commonest object of vision; to many He, the highest verity, is really vanity, while the world’s vanities are practically the highest verities. God’s great corrective for this most disastrous inversion and perversion of the true relation of things is prayer. “Enter into_ thy closet. There all is silence, secrecy, solitude, se­ clusion. Within that holy of holies the disciple is left alone_ all others shut out, that the suppliant may be shut in —with God. The silence is in order to the hearing of the still, small voice that is drowned in worldly clamor, and which even a human voice may cause to be unheard or indistinct. The secrecy is in order to a meeting with Him who seeth in secret and is best seen in secret. The solitude is for the purpose of being alone with One who can fully impress with His pres-

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