Such an opportunity as the church offers for social worship is essential to the maintenance of religion.  Religious feeling the expression of which was confined to the relations between the individual and his God, would become self-centred, egoistic, and morbid.  If there were no praying but secret praying, if the social element were eliminated from prayer and praise, faith would take on ascetic forms, devotion would become rancid, sympathy would be smothered, and the character of the worshiper would be hardened and belittled.  There is a place and a time, as we have seen, for private devotion; probably many of us make far less use of it than would be good for us; but any attempt to shut our religion into the closet would be suicidal.  It would mould there.  To keep it fresh and wholesome it must be taken out into the light and air; the winds of heaven must blow through it; our desires must mingle with the desires of others; our voices must join with their voices; we must learn to think of the needs, the struggles, the sorrows, the hopes that are common to us all, to put ourselves in other people’s places when we pray, to feel that our religion is a bond that binds us to our kind.

There is a kind of prayer which we could only use in the closet,—­intimate, personal, dealing with matters of which no one else has any right to know.  But there is another kind of prayer for which there is no other place than the great congregation; a prayer in which many pleading hearts unite; in which the sympathies and hopes and aspirations of a thousand worshipers are blended.  Such a prayer, if some one can give it voice, is something far higher and diviner than ever ascended from any secret shrine.

It is true that the prayer of the great assembly does not always find a fitting voice.  It is sometimes arid and formal; it is sometimes palpably insincere and perfunctory, alas for our human disabilities and infirmities!  The power of the leader to forget himself, to gather up into his heart the common needs of those who are listening, and pour them out before God, is sometimes wanting.  Not seldom we may find ourselves wishing for those forms of prayer, sanctified by centuries of use, in which the Christian church, in all the lands of earth, has made known its requests to God.  These are always dignified and reverent; every truly devout heart may find utterance for some of its deepest needs in the petitions of the Book of Common Prayer.  But most of us have heard prayers in the sanctuary which lifted and kindled us as no written prayers could ever do.  If the leader of the devotions could be “in the Spirit on the Lord’s day;” if he could forget himself; if the simplicity which is in Christ could take possession of his thought, if he could look over the company round about him before he closed his eyes, and with a swift glance could glean out of that field of human experience some inkling of the trials, the perplexities, the griefs, the struggles, the tragedies of the lives there before him, and with a great, fervent, energizing[16] prayer could carry them all up to God, there would be something in that which would convince all who were listening that the highest form of prayer is not secret prayer, but social prayer.  Nor is it an uncommon thing to hear, even in humble pulpits, prayer which effectually meets this great demand.