nity 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