bars and the
turning of our captivity such as shall fill all our mouths with laughter.

A few know that these words are not rhetorical. They know, with St. Paul,
the riches of the glory of Christ's inheritance in the saints. Such was
Mary Slessor, pioneer missionary in West Africa, the leaves of whose
biography I happened to turn over as I was writing these pages. She had
frequently to take journeys through forests with leopards swarming around
her. She wrote: "I did not use to believe the story of Daniel in the
lions' den until I had to take some of these awful marches, and then I
knew it was true and that it was written for my comfort. Many a time I
walked along praying 'O God of Daniel, shut their mouths,' and He
did."[5]

This is the prayer of faith. It is the prayer which asks "not to be hit."
It is more than resignation, it is the prayer of power. It believes that
there are hardly-tapped powers and possibilities in God for those who seek
first His kingdom and righteousness. We do not know much about such prayer
in our present spiritual sickness. But it is there, a weapon to be wielded
by dauntless, simple faith. There is an inheritance to be claimed by
little-loving sons, who yet are sons--"heirs of God and joint heirs with
Christ, if so be that we suffer with Him."

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Prayer after the mind of our Lord depends greatly on how we think of
Him. The following lines, written by a barrister, are, I think, a
wholesome corrective of that which is too soft in our conventional thought
about our Saviour. Despite a false or partial note here and there, they
are nearer to Him than the thought underlying the first verse of the
hymn--a great favourite among the men owing to its tune--"Jesu, Lover of
my Soul." At any rate they suggest the right association of ideas in which
our Lord should live in the mind of a young man:

Jesus, Whose lot with us was cast,
Who saw it out, from first to last:
Patient and fearless, tender, true,
Carpenter, vagabond, felon, Jew:
Whose humorous eye took in each phase
Of full rich life this world displays,
Yet evermore kept fast in view
The far-off goal it leads us to:

Who, as your hour neared, did not fail--
The world's fate trembling in the scale--
With your half-hearted band to dine,
And chat across the bread and wine:
Then went out firm to face the end,
Alone, without a single friend:
Who felt, as your last wo