The Hour of Prayer by Austin Phelps

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jun 12, 1879

The Hour of Prayer.

By Austin Phelps

IN the vestibule of St. Peter's, at Rome, is a doorway, which is walled up and marked with a cross. It is opened but four times in a century. On Christmas Eve, once in twenty-five years, the Pope approaches it in princely state, with the retinue of cardinals in attendance, and begins the demolition of the door, by striking it three times with a silver hammer. When the passage is opened, the multitude pass into the nave of the cathedral, and up to the altar, by an avenue which the majority of them never entered thus before, and never will enter thus again.

Imagine that the way to the throne of grace were like the Porta Santa, inaccessible, save once in a quarter of a century, on the twenty-fifth of December, and then only with august solemnities, conducted by great dignitaries in a holy city. Conceive that it were now ten years since you, or I, or any other sinner, had been permitted to pray; and that fifteen long years must drag themselves away, before we could venture again to approach God; and that, at the most, we could not hope to pray more than two or three times in a lifetime! With what solicitude we should wait for the coming of that holy day! We should lay our plans of life, select our homes, build our houses, choose our professions, form our friendships, with reference to a pilgrimage in that twenty-fifth year. We should reckon on time by the openings of that sacred door, as epochs. No other one thought would engross so much of our lives, or kindle our sensibilities so intensely, as the thought of prayer. It would be of more significance to us than the thought of death is now. It would multiply our trepidations at the thought of dying. Fear would grow to horror, at the idea of dying before that year of Jubilee. No other question would give us such tremors of anxiety as these would excite: ‘How many years now to the time of prayer? How many months? How many weeks? How many days? Shall we live to see it? Who can tell?’

Yet, on that great day, amidst an innumerable throng, in a courtly presence, within sight and hearing of stately rites, what would prayer be worth to us? Who would value it in the comparison with those still moments, that—

‘secret silence of the mind,’

in which we now can ‘find God,’ every day and every where? That day would be more like the day of Judgment to us, than like the sweet minutes of converse with ‘Our Father,’ which we may now have, every hour. We should appreciate this privilege of hourly prayer, if it were once taken from us. Should we not?

‘Still with thee, O my God, I would desire to be; By day, by night, at home, abroad, I would be still with thee! With thee amid the crowd That throngs the busy mart— To hear thy voice, ‘mid clamor loud, Speak softly to my heart!’

—Still Hour, by Austin Phelps.