Jewish mode of thought was the way in which it related all things to God's immediate activity. The Old Testament is the book of God's immanence. The present attitude of mind leads men to rest in all causes short of God, and even to forget the need of a Cause of causes. An earnest student of nature remarked upon leaving her microscope: "I have found a universe worthy of God." She at least felt that a revelation of secondary causes was, at the same time, a new revelation of the God of causes.

If it could be proved that all answers to prayer came according to the working of natural law, it would not eliminate God from the process, or have any sort of bearing upon the efficacy of prayer. All we know of God's method of work demonstrates His love of law; and it would be no surprise, but rather what we should expect, to find that all the unseen stretches of life are equally within the domain of His law and order.[8]

§ 2. But when occasion requires, the reply to speech Godward comes in the shape of a voice. In one sense God is always speaking; He is never still. Just as in prayer it is not we who momentarily catch His attention but He ours, so when we fail to hear His voice it is not because He is not speaking so much as that we are not listening. We may hear sounds, as a language with which we are not conversant, but be unable to interpret. Or perhaps we are in the position of one who sits in the summer evening when nature is instinct with music,—the chirping of insect life, the whispering wind, the good-night call of the birds,—deaf to the many voices, whereas a companion has ears for nothing else but what those voices say. The cause of the former's deafness is that his attention is wholly absorbed by other interests. We must recognize that all things are in God and that God is in all things, and we must learn to be very attentive, in order to hear God speaking in His ordinary tone without any special accent. Power to do this comes slowly and as the result of not separating prayer from the rest of life. A man must not stop listening any more than praying when he rises from his knees. No one questions the need of times of formal address to God, but few admit in any practical way the need of quiet waiting upon God, gazing into His face, feeling for His hand, listening for His voice. "I will hearken what the Lord God will say concerning me." God has special confidences for each soul. Indeed, it would seem as though the deepest truths came only in moments of profound devotional silence and contemplation.

The written Word of God has special messages for the individual as well as a large general message for the entire Christian body. The devotional use of Holy Scripture is the means by which the soul reaches some of the most precious manifestations of God's will. By devotional use is meant such a study as has for its ultimate purpose an act of worship, or of conscious fellowship with Him. The Bible reveals not merely what God was, but what He is. Finding from its pages how He loved, we know how He loves; learning how He dealt with or spoke to men, we perceive how He deals with and speaks to us. But our instruction in things divine must come to us from a Person rather than a book, though through a book perhaps. If we approach the Bible as we would approach Bacon or Milton, merely as a collection of the wise thoughts and actions of the dead, it will never sway the life to any large extent. Holy Scripture is separated from all other literature by the fact that it contains absolute spiritual truth and because its Author, as a living Person, always stands behind it. Those who listen will hear the Holy Spirit saying to them, in direct application, the same things that lie on the open pages as the record of what was once said to men of old. Meditation or the devotional use of Scripture renders conscience, that organ of the soul by which God's voice is received by man, increasingly sensitive. The Old Testament days were full of men who could say "Thus saith the Lord," with the same assurance that they could report the speech of a comrade. Doubtless God had many ways of speaking to the prophets, but whatever these ways were and however special and singular, they were based originally on those by means of which He addresses all men in common. As a result of the Incarnation "all the Lord's people are prophets" and the Lord has "put His Spirit upon them;" and they, too, ought to be able to say "Thus saith the Lord."

§ 3. A third way in which God makes His will known to man is by His silences, silences which are always eloquent. As experience has taught us, silence can convey a message just as readily as speech sometimes, or even more readily. The silence of the Easter tomb was the first voice that told of the Resurrection. The loved disciple read the message of the orderly silence of the place where the Lord had lain; "he saw and believed." Silence has expression and accent telling of sympathy, rebuke, anger, grief, as occasion may require. The silence of Jesus before the importunate appeal of the woman of Canaan, was full of sympathy and encouraged her faith to rise to sublime heights. Whereas His silence before the accusations of His enemies during His trial was so eloquent as to establish His innocence even in the eyes of a Pontius Pilate. And if God is silent now at times when we long for some sign from Him, it is because by means of silence He can best make known to us His mind. His silence may mean that our request is so foreign to His will, that it may not be heeded without hurt to the petitioner. Or, on the other hand, He may be luring on our faith and inciting it to a more ambitious flight. Or, again, it may be that His silence is His way of telling us that the answer to our query or petition lies in ourselves. God never tells man what man can find out for himself, as He never does what man can do for himself. The result of giving a person what he should earn is pauperism. As God will do, nay, can do, only what will enrich human nature, it would be a contradiction of Himself to answer what we can find out for ourselves, or give what we can gain by our own efforts. Love lies within God's silences as their explanation.[9] The mother refuses to answer her child's questions because the child by a little observation and thought can itself get at the truth, and truth won by struggle is the only truth that we really possess. If God is silent when we ask for new knowledge of His Person and His love, may it not be that it is because we are substituting books about the Bible for an earnest study of the Bible itself, which contains a full answer to our prayer? Or if, when day after day we have prayed for the conversion of a relative, no response comes, may it not be that we have never put ourselves at the disposal of God to be the instrument for working out what is at once our desire and His purpose? At any rate, whatever be the explanation of a silence in this or that special instance, God is never silent excepting when silence speaks more clearly than a voice.

So the sure response comes to speech Godward in an action, or a voice, or a speaking silence. The persevering, faithful, attentive soul will never fail to discern God's answer to prayer, nor be disappointed in the quality of that answer when it comes. God is more ready to hear than we to pray, and it is His wont to give more than