p. 139 | Access to God by Gail Hamilton

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 3, 1865

Access to God.

By Gail Hamilton

HOWEVER early in the morning you seek the gate of access, you find it already open; and however deep the midnight moment when you find yourself in the sudden arms of death, the winged prayer can bring an instant Saviour near, and this wherever you are. It needs not that you ascend a special Pisgah or Moriah, it needs not that you should enter some awful shrine, or put off your shoes on some holy ground. Could a memento be reared on every spot from which an acceptable prayer has passed away, and on which a prompt answer has come down, we should find Jehovah-shammah, “The Lord hath been here,” inscribed on many a cottage hearth and many a dungeon floor. We should find it, not only in Jerusalem’s proud temple, David’s cedar galleries, but in the fisherman’s cottage, by the brink in Gennesaret, and in the upper chamber where Pentecost began. And whether it be the field where Isaac went to meditate, or the rocky knoll where Jacob lay down to sleep, or the brook where Israel wrestled, or the den where Daniel gazed on the hungry lions and the lions gazed on him, or the hillsides where the Man of Sorrows prayed all night, we should still discern the prints of the ladder’s feet let down from Heaven, the landing place of mercies, because the starting-point of prayer.—Gail Hamilton.