Prayer Characteristic of Piety.
JOHN KNOX was famous for his earnest prayers. He was heard at the great crisis to plead: "Give me Scotland or I die;" and Queen Mary said that she feared his prayers more than she did all the armies of Europe. And this seemed a curious presentiment; for one night, in the bloody times of persecution, as he and several friends were praying together, Knox spoke out and declared that deliverance had come, though he could not tell how. The next news was that "Bloody Mary" was dead. Zuinglius, the Swiss reformer, was also a man mighty in prayer, and he laid the heavy burden which he was trying to bear, upon the Head of the Church, in these words: "O Jesus, thou seest how the wicked and the blasphemous stun thy people's ears with their clamors. Thou knowest how, from my youth up, I have abhorred controversy, and yet, against my will, thou hast never ceased to impel me to the conflict. Therefore do I call upon thee with confidence to finish what thou hast begun! If in anything I have builded unwisely, let thy hand of power cast it down. If I have laid any other foundation beside thee, let thy mighty arm overturn it. O thou vine, full of sweetness, to whom the Father is the husbandman, and we are the branches, abandon not thy tendrils. Hast thou not promised to be with us unto the end of the world?" Melanchthon so prized prayer that he feared to lose anxieties, lest he should lose the blessed relief of prayer. He said: "If I had no anxieties, I should lose a powerful incentive to prayer; but when the cares of life impel to devotion, the best means of consolation, a religious mind cannot do without them. Thus trouble impels me to prayer, and prayer drives away trouble." In Gustavus Adolphus we have not only a sagacious king and successful general, but a man of prayer. When he was in camp before Werben, on one occasion, he had remained alone in his private apartment for some hours, and at such seasons his attendants were not allowed to disturb him. At length, however, a favorite, who had something important to communicate, presumed to look in at the door, softly, and found the king on his knees. Gustavus called him in, and said: "Thou wonderest to see me in this posture, who have so many thousands of subjects to pray for me; but I tell thee that no man has more need to pray for himself than he who, having to render an account of his actions to none but God, is, for that reason, more closely assaulted by the devil, than all other men besides." The venerated Rev. Philip Henry, the father of Matthew Henry, the commentator, was a specially godly man. In his life it is said: "He and his wife constantly prayed together, morning and evening." We are told, also, that he made a conscience of family worship, and abounded in it. He said to his children and friends: "Be sure you look to your secret duty; keep that up, whatever you do; the soul cannot prosper in the neglect of it. Apostasy generally begins at the closet door." As to family worship he would say: "If the worship of God be not in the home, write, 'Lord, have mercy on us' on the door, for there is a plague, a curse in it." Rev. Samuel Rutherford, the pious Scotch minister, in the days of persecution for the sake of the "Covenant," was said to be "always praying, always preaching, always visiting the sick, always catechising, always writing and studying." When settled at Answorth, he was constantly praying as well as laboring for his people; so that he says: "There I wrestled with the angel and prevailed. Woods, trees, meadows, and hills are my witnesses that I drew on a fair match betwixt Christ and Answorth." President Jonathan Edwards, at the beginning of his Christian life, adopted this resolution: "Resolved, Very much to exercise myself in this all my life long; viz., with the greatest openness of which I am capable, to declare my ways to God, and lay open my soul to him; all my sins, temptations, difficulties, sorrows, fears, hopes, desires, and everything and every circumstance." "He made a secret of his private devotions," observes Dr. Hopkins, one of his biographers, "and therefore they cannot be particularly known; though there is much evidence that he was punctual, constant, and frequent in secret prayer, and often kept days of fasting and prayer in secret, and set apart times for serious, devout meditations on spiritual and eternal things as part of his religious exercises in secret. It appears from his diary that his stated seasons of secret prayer were, from his youth, three times a day, in his journeys as well as at home. He was, as far as can be known, much on his knees in secret, and in devout reading of God's word and meditation upon it. And his constant, solemn converse with God in these exercises of secret religion, made his face to shine, as it were, before others."—Dr. Patton.