Private Prayer by Dudley Marvin Canright

California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists · Oakland, Cal. · Jan 28, 1875

Private Prayer.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

THE largest part of the Christian's prayers will always be private. His prayer will be a dialogue with his Heavenly Father. If his religion is not so, he may distrust its sincerity. If it be not more secret than public, more hidden than open—if his prayers in his closet, in his studies, in his walks, are not far more constant and important than his prayers in company and in church—he ought to doubt whether he does not pray to be seen of men rather than to be seen and heard of God. Secret prayer is the foundation of all other prayer. Where there is no habit of private communion with God there will be no earnestness in public prayer. It will be formal, dry, and consisting in endless repetitions of the customary phrases. The life of religion in the soul consists in habitual communion with God, in gratitude, supplication, in "the flight of one alone to the Only One." This hidden, inner life must be maintained in its fullness by constant prayer, and thus it will flow out easily into all the acts of public devotion and active goodness. But when this inner life stagnates, then the outward acts of devotion become formal and rigid, and the man is like a tree, hollow at heart, which still may maintain an outward, languid show of life; or like an olive tree dead at the root, which still may bear "two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outmost fruitful branches thereof." Secret prayer is the sign and the food of this inner life; its sign—for this life is love, and where love exists it will express itself. If the heart loves God it will commune with him; it will habitually turn to him, as the heliotrope to the king of the day; it will lean on him in dependence, trust and confidence. Its food—for such communion, opens the soul to receive new life flowing into it from God; and prayer is the door through which the bread and wine of the soul are brought in.

—J. F. Clarke.