[of a certain house], and 50 for present necessities. It is
impossible to describe my joy in God when I received this donation. I
was neither excited nor surprised; for I LOOK out for answers to my
prayers. I BELIEVE THAT GOD HEARS ME. Yet my heart was so full of joy
that I could only SIT before God, and admire him, like David in 2
Samuel vii. At last I cast myself flat down upon my face and burst
forth in thanksgiving to God and in surrendering my heart afresh to him
for his blessed service."[314]

[314] Ibid., p. 323

George Muller's is a case extreme in every respect, and in no respect
more so than in the extraordinary narrowness of the man's intellectual
horizon. His God was, as he often said, his business partner. He
seems to have been for Muller little more than a sort of supernatural
clergyman interested in the congregation of tradesmen and others in
Bristol who were his saints, and in the orphanages and other
enterprises, but unpossessed of any of those vaster and wilder and more
ideal attributes with which the human imagination elsewhere has
invested him. Muller, in short, was absolutely unphilosophical. His
intensely private and practical conception of his relations with the
Deity continued the traditions of the most primitive human
thought.[315] When we compare a mind like his with such a mind as, for
example, Emerson's or Phillips Brooks's, we see the range which the
religious consciousness covers.

[315] I cannot resist the temptation of quoting an expression of an
even more primitive style of religious thought, which I find in Arber's
English Garland, vol. vii. p. 440. Robert Lyde, an English sailor,
along with an English boy, being prisoners on a French ship in 1689,
set upon the crew, of seven Frenchmen, killed two, made the other five
prisoners, and brought home the ship. Lyde thus describes how in this
feat he found his God a very present help in time of trouble:--

"With the assistance of God I kept my feet when they three and one more
did strive to throw me down. Feeling the Frenchman which hung about my
middle hang very heavy, I said to the boy, 'Go round the binnacle, and
knock down that man that hangeth on my back.' So the boy did strike
him one blow on the head which made him fall.... Then I looked about
for a marlin spike or anything else to strike them withal. But seeing
nothing, I said, 'LORD! what shall I do?' Then casting up my eye upon
my left side, and seeing a mar