“O Master, let me walk with Thee, In lowly paths of service free; Tell me Thy secret; help me bear The strain of toil, the fret of care.
In hope that sends a shining ray Far down the future’s broadening way; In peace that only Thou canst give, With Thee, O Master, let me live.”
When our feelings are deeply stirred by a crisis it is the most natural thing to turn to God in prayer. Such an acknowledgment of the divine resourcefulness in the face of human helplessness advertises the inherent dignity of man, who finds that he is best able to overcome difficulties by reliance upon God. Any person who is able to make such a contact with the Source of Power through prayer is well equipped for the tasks of life.
It is the filial spirit which inspires the tone and quality of prayer, whereby we receive spiritual insight and moral strength for duty. It has been well said that “prayer is the discipline of desire in the light of the best consciousness of God that we can attain unto.” We must recover this practice of prayer for right living. It will reinforce us with virtue and vitality to keep true to our best selves and fit us to meet every demand. It is in actual experience and not by mere theorizing that we find out the real efficacy of prayer.
Bishop Edwin H. Hughes, in _The Pastor Looks at His Work_,[28] reports some of his experiences to show that
“A little while ago I was in a service where a minister of no little eminence was suddenly called on to pray. His response was simply the repeating of the entire hymn, whose first stanza reads:
‘My faith looks up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary, Saviour Divine! Now hear me while I pray, Take all my guilt away, Oh, let me from this day Be wholly Thine!’
If one man’s experience was typical, that individual hymn with its ‘I’ and ‘My’ brought scores of people into a spiritual aggregate and made a ‘common supplication.’
“Much of the same thing happened in the bishops’ meeting not so long ago. We were having a prayer service, only that, and it must have continued for two and a half hours. One bishop’s prayer that night was simply a repeating of Whittier’s hymn:
‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind, Forgive our feverish ways; Reclothe us in our rightful mind, In purer lives Thy service find, In deeper reverence, praise.’