THOUGHTS ON INTERCESSORY PRAYER. BY A LADY. EDINBURGH: JOHNSTONE, HUNTER, & CO. LONDON: HAMILTON, ADAMS, & CO. Thoughts on Intercessory Prayer. INTRODUCTORY. "Life hath things of which the sharing Least hath he who soweth sparing, When the harvest's o'er." "Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another." THE sinner, after a struggle, longer or shorter, with convictions, or with doubt, or with the hardness of an unbelieving heart, finds himself at last, by God's grace, "in Christ." Once in Christ, lo, there opens upon him a world of love, beauty, hope, and joy, of which he had heard, indeed, but which he had never seen, and of which his conceptions had been only like the dim and confused shadows of a dream. To him now everything is changed. The Bible he knew well before; but what then? The most precious words fall cold upon the ear, when they come from the lips of one from whom we are estranged, with whom we are at enmity. Nature smiled upon him before as fair and bright as now, but only made him sad; for what availed it to him that he possessed a domain so princely, while he wandered lonely and orphaned there? Life, with its strange commingling of good and evil, its ceaseless changes and fearful uncertainty, was to him, as often as he allowed himself to think seriously of it, a dark and dreadful labyrinth. And we say not but that even yet much remains to him dark and inexplicable, in the dealings of God with man; but since first the eye of his faith met the loving eye of the Daysman, who has laid His hand upon both, he can bear to look up to the God of the Bible, of Nature, and of Providence,-once offended, but now eternally reconciled,—and, stretch ing out his hands towards Him, can cry, Abba, Father." In the cross of Christ, too, where "mercy and truth have met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other," he has seen displayed in all its glory and beauty the character of God; and on the strength of that character of God, as infinitely "holy, and just, and good," and, therefore, infinitely worthy of reverence, confidence, and love, he feels that he can take on trust all that to him is dark and mysterious in His dispensations, and can echo from his very heart the inspired challenge, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" But now there comes to him a new experience. Born into this new world, "translated" thus "out of darkness into the marvellous light," he looks back with a wistful yearning towards some dear ones, -dear, it may be, even as his own soul,to whom this joy of his is as yet a thing all unknown. Seen against the brightness of reconciliation to God our Father, the constant love and care of an all-sufficient |