MADE UP OF PHRASES;

how much of what we call Christian Experience is only a dialect of the Churches, a mere religious phraseology with almost nothing behind it in what we really feel and know.

To some of us, indeed, the Christian experiences seem further away than when we took the first steps in the Christian life.  That life has not opened out as we had hoped.  We do not regret our religion, but we are disappointed with it.  There are times, perhaps, when wandering notes from a diviner music stray into our spirits; but these experiences come at few and fitful moments.  We have no sense of possession in them.  When they visit us, it is a surprise.  When they leave us, it is without explanation.  When we wish their return, we do not know how to secure it.

All which means a religion without solid base, and a poor and flickering life.  It means a great bankruptcy in those experiences which give Christianity its personal solace and make it attractive to the world, and a great uncertainty as to any remedy.  It is as if we knew everything about health—­except the way to get it.

I am quite sure that the difficulty does not lie in the fact that men are not in earnest.  This is simply not the fact.  All around us Christians are wearing themselves out in trying to be better.  The amount of spiritual longing in the world—­in the hearts of unnumbered thousands of men and women in whom we should never suspect it; among the wise and thoughtful, among the young and gay, who seldom assuage and never betray their thirst—­this is one of the most wonderful and touching facts of life.  It is not more heat that is needed, but more light; not more force, but a wiser direction to be given to very real energies already there.

The usual advice when one asks for counsel on these questions is, “Pray.”  But this advice is far from adequate.  I shall qualify the statement presently; but let me urge it here, with what you will perhaps call daring emphasis, that to pray for these things is not the way to get them.  No one will get them without praying; but that men do not get them by praying is the simple fact.  We have all prayed, and sincerely prayed, for such experiences as I have named; prayed, believing that that was the way to get them.  And yet have we got them?  The test is experience.  I dare not limit prayer; still less the grace of God.  If you have got them in this way, it is well.  I am speaking to those, be they few or many, who have not got them; to ordinary men in ordinary circumstances.  But if we have not got them, it by no means follows that prayer is useless.  The correct conclusion is only that it is useless, or inadequate rather, for this particular purpose.  To make prayer the sole resort, the universal panacea for every spiritual ill, is as radical a mistake as to prescribe only one medicine for every bodily trouble.  The physician who does the last is a quack; the spiritual adviser who does the first is