to choose the places where men are thickest for ‘saying our prayers,’ and we shall do it with all the more spirit if we have spectators.  That accounts for a great deal of the ‘devotion’ in Mohammedan and Roman Catholic countries which travellers with no love for Protestant Christianity are so fond of praising.  But if we think of prayer as Christ did, as being the yearning of the soul to God, we shall feel that the inmost chamber and the closed door are its fitting accompaniments.  Of course, our Lord is not forbidding united prayer; for each of the assembled worshippers may be holding communion with God, which is none the less solitary though shared by others, and none the less united though in it each is alone with God.

III.  Our Lord passes for a time from the more immediate subject of ostentation to add other teaching about prayer, which still farther unfolds its true conception.  Another corruption arising from the error of thinking that prayer is an outward act, is ‘vain repetition,’ characteristic of all heathen religion, and resting upon a profound disbelief in the loving willingness of God to help.  Of course, earnest, reiterated prayer is not vain repetition.  Jesus is not here condemning His own agony in Gethsemane when He thrice ‘said the same words.’  The persistence in prayer, which is the child of faith, is no relation to the parrot-like repetition which is the child of disbelief, nor does the condemnation of the one touch the other.  The frenzied priests who yelled, ‘O Baal, hear us!’ all the long day; the Buddhists who repeat the sacred invocation till they are stupefied; the poor devotee who thinks merit is proportioned to the number of Paternosters and Aves, are all instances of this gross mechanical conception of prayer.  Are there no similar superstitions nearer home?  Are there no ministers or congregations that we ever heard of, who have a regulation length for their prayers, and would scarcely think they had prayed at all if their devotions were as short as most of the prayers in the Bible?  Are we in no danger of believing what Christ here tells us is pure heathenism—­that many words may move God?

The only real remedy against such degradation of the very idea of prayer lies in the deeper conceptions of God and of it which Christ here gives.  He knows our needs before we ask.  Then what is prayer for?  Not to inform Him, nor to move Him, unwilling, to have mercy, as if, like some proud prince, He required a certain amount of recognition of His greatness as the price of His favours, but to fit our own hearts by conscious need and true desire and dependence, to receive the gifts which He is ever willing to give, but we are not always fit to receive.  As St. Augustine has it, the empty vessel is by prayer carried to the full fountain.

SOLITARY PRAYER

     ’Enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to
     thy Father which is in secret,’—­MATT. vi. 6.