3.  Secret scriptures also—­from that enlightening day Christiana’s Bible became full of them.  Peter says that no prophecy is of any private interpretation; and, whatever he means by that, what he says must be true.  But Christiana would have understood the apostle better if he had said the exact opposite of that,—­if not about the prophecies, at least about the psalms.  Leave the prophecies in this connection alone; but of the psalms it may safely be said that it is neither the literal nor the historical nor the mystical interpretation that gets at the heart of those supreme scriptures.  It is the private, personal, and, indeed, secret interpretation that gets best at the deepest heart of the psalms.  An old Bible came into my hands the other day—­a Bible that had seen service—­and it opened of its own accord at the Book of Psalms.  On turning over the yellow leaves I found a date and a deep indentation opposite these words:  “Commit thy way unto the Lord:  trust also in Him:  and He will bring it to pass.”  And as I looked at the figures on the margin, and at the underscored text, I felt as if I were on the brink of an old-world secret.  “Create in me a clean heart” had a significant initial also; as had this:  “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.”  The whole of the hundred-and-third psalm was bracketed off from all public interpretation; while the tenth, the cardinal verse of that secret psalm, had a special seal set upon it.  Judging from its stains and scars and other accidents, the whole of the hundred-and-nineteenth psalm had been a special favourite; while the hundred-and-forty-third also was all broidered round with shorthand symbols.  But the secret key of all those symbols and dates and enigmatical marks was no longer to be found; it had been carried away in the owner’s own heart.  But, my head being full of Christiana at the time, I felt as if I held her own old Bible in my hand as I turned over those ancient leaves.

4.  Our Lord so practised secrecy Himself in His fasting, in His praying, and in His almsgiving, and He makes so much of that same secrecy in all His teaching, as almost to make the essence of all true religion to stand in its secrecy.  “When thou prayest,” says our Lord, “shut thy door and pray in secret.”  As much as to say that we are scarcely praying at all when we are praying in public.  Praying in public is so difficult that new beginners, like His disciples, have to practise that so difficult art for a long time in secret.  Public prayer has so many besetting sins, it is open to so many temptations, distractions, and corruptions, that it is almost impossible to preserve the real essence of prayer in public prayer.  But in secret all those temptations and distractions are happily absent.  We have no temptation to be too long in secret prayer, or too loud, or too eloquent.  Stately old English goes for nothing in secret prayer.  We never need to go to our knees in secret trembling,