apply here. After his
admonition against public prayer, or prayer for show, or prayer of much
speaking, he said: "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet,
and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret;
and thy Father which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly." Now
there are millions of men, women, and children in the world who have no
closets. There are great numbers of others who have no access to them
sometimes for days, or weeks, or months at a time. It is evident,
therefore, that in the word that has been rendered closet he
meant--enter into the quiet recesses of your own soul that you may thus
hold communion with the Father.

Now the value of prayer is not that God will change or order any laws or
forces to suit the numerous and necessarily the diverse petitions of
any. All things are through law, and law is fixed and inexorable. The
value of prayer, of true prayer, is that through it one can so harmonise
his life with the Divine order that intuitive perceptions of truth and a
greater perception and knowledge of law becomes his possession. As has
been said by an able contemporary thinker and writer: "We cannot form a
passably thorough notion of man without saturating it through and
through with the idea of a cosmic inflow from outside his world
life--the inflow of God. Without a large consciousness of the universe
beyond our knowledge, few men, if any, have done great things.[C]

I shall always remember with great pleasure and profit a call a few days
ago from Dr. Edward Emerson of Concord, Emerson's eldest son. Happily I
asked him in regard to his father's methods of work--if he had any
regular methods. He replied in substance: "It was my father's custom to
go daily to the woods--_to listen_. He would remain there an hour or
more in order to get whatever there might be for him that day. He would
then come home and write into a little book--his 'day-book'--what he had
gotten. Later on when it came time to write a book, he would transcribe
from this, in their proper sequence and with their proper connections,
these entrances of the preceding weeks or months. The completed book
became virtually a ledger formed or posted from his day-books."

The prophet is he who so orders his life that he can adequately listen
to the voice, the revelations of the over soul, and who truthfully
transcribes what he hears or senses. He is not a follower of custom or
of tradition. He can never