The Renovation of the Will the Great Subject of Prayer

“My soul cleaveth unto the dust: quicken Thou me according to Thy word,”—Psalm cxix. 25.

The passage: My soul clings to the dust; give me life, according to your word.

We call the Psalms the Psalms of David, not because we know how many he wrote, but because they are the cries and prayers of a king. He is learning to obey and to rule, to suffer and to subdue. He is fighting a battle, for others as well as himself, and he is certain he will be crushed unless he finds a help that is not in himself and that no mortal ally can give. The Psalms are not a collection of fine sentences or lofty aspirations. The writer does not care whether we credit him for what he says and thinks. He tells God things most likely to destroy his reputation among men. His prayers have become a heritage for generations because his conflicts were those of a human being against the enemies of human beings. We count them ours because we are sure these prayers were drawn out of a man by One who was teaching him what kingship and manhood are, and who would teach us the same. We cannot let the Psalms pass into the world of books and letters. They must stay tied to personal effort and anguish.

I do not know whether David wrote the 119th Psalm or any part of it. But I find the same character in every verse. It has less connection with passing events than almost any other Psalm. It names no Ishmaelites or Moabites, and it might have been written in a lonely room or a prison. Yet it has the same personality and the same struggle, and so the same power to fit every time and place. The sentence I have chosen contains, I think, the very spirit of the Psalms and of all prayer.

I. My soul cleaveth unto the dust. Nothing tells us the circumstances of the man who said this, and there is no need to ask, because the words fit every circumstance and carry us beyond circumstance. He may have been wonderfully prosperous or have lost everything. Friends may have flattered his wisdom and zeal, or he may have had no friend left. He may have been in the Temple daily or surrounded by worshippers of Baal. He may have committed great sins or lived quietly and innocently. In any of these conditions a man may cry, “My soul cleaves to the dust. Whatever luck has come to me, this is my state. You tell me I have much to be thankful for. Perhaps so, but I find no thankfulness in me. I can repeat or invent words that express it, but they correspond to nothing within and are not mine. You tell me to hope for better days. But hope is just what I cannot manage, and with it I could do anything; where is it to come from? You tell me to shake off the sloth and despondency preying on me. I know that as well as you. But they are not raindrops on my clothes, or even the clothes; they have hold of me and seem part of my nature. So your advice is wasted. You may censure and scorn, and praise the fortunate people who have been given energy and strong purpose. Speaking of them only wakes my envy and deepens my despair. Their treasures have not been given to me.”

You will say I am describing a common character, but one that belongs to a serf, not a king, and so one that fits ill the man we identify with the Psalms. That is true only if the king has nothing in common with the serf, if nothing in him could sink him to the serf’s level, or if he can spend all his years without finding that out. But a king after God’s own heart, trained in God’s school, will not be left ignorant of what he most needs to know. He will be a bad ruler, a vigorous or feeble tyrant, if he thinks he belongs to one race and most of his subjects to another. He must learn that he has a soul which, through very slight causes (a bodily sickness, something less, a trivial disappointment, or the mere satiety of success), may be brought down to the dust, cling to it, and be unable to lift itself. The degradation will be felt just in the part of him that seemed most royal. He cannot blame anything or anyone else for the baseness, cowardice and impotence he is conscious of. He must say sternly, “It is my soul that has sunk into this torpor and been seized by this palsy.” As several Psalms tell us, trying to rally by recalling happier states of mind he once had proves useless. The question is what he can do and what he is now, and every memory of the past or dream of the future that dodges it is a mockery.

This is a baptism of fire for a man who has had a clear sense of his own power and knows he needs it for his work. He will practise many frauds on himself, trying to convince himself he can still carry gates and tear lions like kids, and that his strength has not really left him. The commonest fraud is the use of a keen wit to detect other men’s errors and falsehoods and to show how contemptible everyone around him is. “I can still do that; I still have this critical power. And if I can look down on mankind, must I not in some sense be better than they?” Poor self-deceiver! You know all the folly and feebleness of your fellow-creatures, and why they fail so badly. Then get up and act. Show them brave, heroic behaviour; shame their cowardice by showing what a conqueror of difficulties you are. What, you cannot? You cannot act? Then be honest. Suspend your lofty scorn of the crawling creatures around you, and learn to say frankly, “My soul cleaves to the dust.”

II. From this confession, when it is real and rises as a sigh out of the depths, comes the prayer “Quicken Thou me according to Thy word.” Then a man begins to believe in God, because he begins to believe he is not God himself. He may have acknowledged a Maker of the world before, and in a very complimentary fashion: “Some Intelligence called into existence this system of things, which serves my convenience and comfort. With so many adaptations to our wants, it is reasonable to suppose a good-natured contriver who would rather we were happy than miserable.” But the man who surveys the universe, understands the system and talks eloquently about its adaptations: is he not, for all practical purposes, more wonderful than the Being of whom he forms this vague, distant idea and to whom he gives this occasional homage? This judgment, reason and will I feel and know as my own; I can argue myself into believing something answers to them in God.

It is not until a man has a clear and painful conviction that they are not his own, or that if they are, they will fade and perish utterly, that he begins heartily to confess a Reason, a Will, a Judgment higher than his own and absolutely good, by which his own may be renewed. As long as he believes new circumstances will set him right, he worships those circumstances. When he despairs of all circumstances because he finds the failure is in himself, he is inclined for a time to worship nothing and own nothing but shadow and emptiness. When that becomes intolerable, and he is sinking further into the mire with no ground, he cries, Quicken me, scarcely knowing to whom, only convinced he must pray to some Being who can hear. Then comes such a witness that this strange faith is not an illusion, and he makes his petition definite: Quicken Thou me. “You of whom I heard in childhood as renewing my life every morning, who are said to give all good things, and so surely these purposes, powers and will, the most precious of all: quicken in me what must live if I am to be a man, but is clinging to the dust and seems doomed to a more terrible death than the frailest insect or flower.”

The Psalmist did not stop there. He says, “according to Thy word.” “Sunk as I am, I do not count it merely possible or probable that you will help and raise me. I believe your word has gone out that you will, and that all your revelations to my race mean that you will. Your promise would come utterly to an end, and your faithfulness, the foundation of all faithfulness among men, would not be the rock it is, if I could not ask you with confidence for the strength without which I cannot be your servant or do any task you sent me here to do. You will not ask me to prove that my soul’s clinging to the dust is not my own fault, or that I have not destroyed my own powers. I confess that charge. I have sinned against you, who lent me those powers in trust, and I used them as my own and for my own ends. But you are the Forgiver of sin and the Deliverer from sin. Your word declares you so. Quicken me according to that word.”

I said this sentence seemed to me the essence and explanation of all prayer: the necessity of it lies in a man’s discovery of his weakness, and the hope of it lies in the nature of God and his relation to man. As long as the weakness can be traced to anything but the man’s own will, and the bondage felt to be in something else, he may ask for rain or fruitful seasons, relief from pain, children or friends. But he will not say, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. He will not understand that this is the greatest blessing the creature can ask or the Creator give, by which the Creator becomes a Father and the creature a child. That lesson comes when he finds that every treasure he can dream of, or any demon could bestow, is worthless or harmful without a free and loving will to receive it. It comes when he sees that his will can be free and loving only when the free and loving Will that formed it has subdued it to itself. Then prayer is no longer a desperate experiment to force what is better into agreement with what is worse. It is the cry of a spirit after that Spirit who alone can unfold all its capacities, rescue it from an independence that has ended in slavery, remove the curse of perpetual barrenness, and reveal the Eternal Good it longs for and cannot rest without.

III. I have taken this short Jewish prayer as a summary of all Jewish prayers and an introduction to all Christian ones. I chose it this afternoon because I know none that better explains the Collect in which we try to put into words what we have asked since last Advent and shall need in every year to come: “Stir up, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the wills of Thy faithful people, that they, plenteously bringing forth the Fruit of good works, may of Thee be plenteously rewarded, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” This prayer assumes that we in the nineteenth century are in essentials the same as the man whose soul clung to the dust. It assumes that no outward improvement or progress of civilization has made us less likely to become inwardly torpid and incapable of earnest, manly effort. It assumes that the deepest and most rational petition is for the renovation of the Will, and also the most universal, since the well-being of families, nations, churches and the universe is as involved in it as that of individuals. It assumes that only God can stir up the weak will of a man or quicken the corrupt will of a society. It assumes that such quickening is the one security for bringing forth the fruit of good works, since a vigorous moral state is the source of all vigorous moral acts. And it assumes that every act of a right and loving will receives a plentiful reward from God: deeper acquaintance with his Will, a share in accomplishing its purposes, and at last the sight of them accomplished.

These principles are implied in this prayer, as in the Psalmist’s and in all prayers. The earliest prayer, as much as the latest, demands in full strength two convictions that controversies always set against each other. It calls on the absolute Divine Will, whose acknowledgment is supposed to destroy man’s free agency, to give him the free agency which, left to himself, he lacks and is wretched without. And it calls on that Will in full assurance that all its workings, from Creation to this hour, were meant to break men’s bonds and raise them from captivity to a throne. But the writer of the Collect can face this great paradox of humanity as the Psalmist could not, for he says, “through Jesus Christ our Lord.” He prays through the One who has shown on earth the perfect Will of God as a Will to the Redemption and Reconciliation of the universe. In his own person Christ removed the hindrance to it, subjecting the human will to the Divine in life and death and establishing perfect harmony between them. He came to baptize with the Holy Ghost, that wills clinging to the dust might be quickened and Mankind be reconstituted in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the one God blessed for ever. Believing in that name, and that we live, move and have our being in it, we can regard prayer as the organ of man’s will or spirit, no less than Logic is the organ of his intellect. We can encourage the most baffled, desperate man to cry, “My soul cleaves to the dust: quicken Thou me according to Thy word!” And one adjective in the Collect may seem to make it unfit for us: we dare not call ourselves “thy faithful people” when our unfaithfulness seems the very reason our wills need stirring, as if it had checked all good fruit and withheld every great reward. Let us remember that the moment we begin to ask new life of God, confident we are asking according to his Mind, we return to our true condition as faithful, trusting creatures. Let us remember also that we do not pray alone. We belong to the Church of the firstborn, made up of just men made perfect as well as saints on earth, and complete in its Head and Mediator. That Church trusts God’s gracious and unchangeable Will. In the strength of the one prevailing Sacrifice, through the Eternal High-Priest who sits at the Father’s right hand, it asks that all enemies be made subject to him, and that all become willing in the day of his Power.