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.

We call the Psalms the Psalms of David. It is not that we know how many he wrote of them. It is that they are the cries and prayers of a king; of one who is learning to obey and to rule, to suffer and to subdue; who is fighting a battle; who is fighting it for others as well as himself; who has the sense and the certainty of being crushed unless he can find a help which is not in himself, and which no mortal allies can give him. It is not a collection of fine sentences or lofty aspirations. The writer cares not the least that we should know what he is saying and thinking for the sake of any credit he can get for his sayings or his thoughts. He utters in the ears of God what would be most likely to destroy his reputation and respectability among men. His prayers have become a heritage for generations because his conflicts were the conflicts of a human being with the foes of human beings. We count them ours, because we are sure that the prayers were drawn forth out of a man by One who was educating him to know what kinghood and manhood is, and who would teach us the same lesson. We cannot let the Psalms pass into the world of books and letters; they must always be associated with personal effort and anguish.

I do not know whether David wrote the 119th Psalm or any part of it. But I find this characteristic in every verse of it. Though there is less to connect it than almost any of the Psalms with passing events, though it speaks of no Ishmaelites or Moabites, though it might have been written in a lonely chamber or a prison, there is the same personality in it, the same struggle; therefore the same power of adapting itself to all times and places, which you find in the rest. The sentence I have taken out of it contains, I think, the very spirit of the Psalms, the very spirit of all prayer.

I. My soul cleaveth unto the dust. There is nothing to guide us in determining what were the circumstances of the man who said this; not the least need to inquire what they may have been. The words fit all circumstances. They carry us out of the region of circumstances. He may have been wonderfully prosperous. He may have suffered the loss of all things. Friends may have been flattering him for his wisdom or zeal or elevation of mind. He may not have had a friend left in the wide world. He may have frequented the Temple every day. He may have been surrounded with the worshippers of Baal. He may have committed great sins. His course may have been quiet and innocent throughout. In any of these conditions a man may cry, “My soul cleaveth unto the dust. Whatever good or ill luck may have befallen me—or may be attending me—that is my state. There is a heavy weight upon me. You tell me I have great reason to be thankful for the good things that have been bestowed upon me. Perhaps so, but I find no thankfulness in me. I can repeat words which express the feeling; I can, if I try, invent them. But they correspond to nothing within: they are not mine. You say that I ought to hope for better days, if there is much against me at present. No doubt: but hope is just what I am utterly incapable of; with that I might do anything, but where is that to come from? You tell me that I should exert myself to shake off the sloth, the despondency which is preying upon me. I know that as well as you. But sloth and despondency are not raindrops that hang about my clothes; they are not even the clothes themselves; they have got hold of myself; they appear to be parts of my nature. All your advice, therefore, is sadly thrown away. You may censure, you may scorn as much as you will; you may exalt those fortunate people upon whom some energy, some strong purpose, has been bestowed. By speaking of them you awaken my envy; but you increase, not diminish my despair. Their treasures have not been conferred upon me.”

I am describing, you will say, a kind of character which is common enough, but one which certainly does not belong to a king; rather to a serf; one, therefore, which answers very ill to the person whom we identify with the book of Psalms. True; if the king has nothing in common with the serf; if there are no tendencies in the first which may sink him to the level of the other; or if he is to spend all his years without discovering those tendencies. But a king who is after God’s own heart—a king trained in His school—will not be left in ignorance of a fact which it is all-important for him to be acquainted with; he is certain to be a bad ruler—a vigorous or a feeble tyrant—if he supposes that he belongs to one race, and the great majority of his subjects to another. No! he must learn by some discipline or another that he has a soul, which,—by very slight causes indeed, by some sickness of body, something less than that, a trivial disappointment, or the mere satiety of success,—may be brought down to the dust, may cleave to it, may be utterly unable to lift itself up. Just there, just in that portion of him which appeared most royal,—will the degradation be felt. He cannot throw the blame of the baseness, cowardice, impotency of which he is conscious, upon any thing or upon any person else. He must sternly confess, “It is my soul which has sunk into this torpor, over which this palsy has crept.” As we are told in more than one of the Psalms, the attempt to rally from it by recalling better and happier states of mind which were once his, proves quite ineffectual. What he can do now, what he is now, is the question. All recollections of the past or dreams of the future which evade that question, are mere mockeries.

This is a baptism of fire for a man to pass through who has had a clear sense of his own power, who is certain that he wants that power for work. Very many frauds he will practise upon himself; many attempts he will make to convince himself that he can still carry gates and tear lions like kids; that his strength is not really departed from him. The commonest fraud—oh, how common!—is the exercise of a keen wit in detecting the errors and falsehoods of other men, in showing how contemptible all the people about him are. “I can do that still; I have this critical judging power left. And if I can look down on mankind, must I not, in some sense, be better than they?” Poor self-deceiver, self-mocker! Thou knowest all the folly and feebleness of thy fellow-creatures. Thou perceivest why they fail so egregiously. Up, then, and be doing! Give them a specimen of brave, heroic behaviour. Shame their pusillanimity by letting them see what a conqueror of difficulties thou art! What! that is not possible? Thou canst not act? Oh! then, be honest. Suspend for a little while thy lofty scorn of the crawling creatures around thee. Learn to say frankly, “My soul cleaveth to the dust.”

II. For from this confession, when it is really one, when it rises as a sigh out of the deeps, there comes the prayer, “Quicken Thou me according to Thy word.” Then it is that man begins to believe in God; for then he begins to believe that he himself is not God. A Maker of the world he may have acknowledged before, acknowledged in a very complimentary fashion. “No doubt some Intelligence called into existence this system of things, which ministers so much to my convenience and comfort. Where there are so many nice adaptations of things to one’s wants or wishes, it is reasonable to suppose a good-natured contriver; one who had rather on the whole that we were happy than that we were miserable.” But he who surveys this universe, he who can understand this system, he who can descant eloquently on these adaptations, is not he for all practical purposes more wonderful than the Being of whom he forms this vague and distant conception, on whom he bestows this occasional homage? This judgment, this reason, this will—I may argue myself into the conviction that there is something answering to them in Him: I feel and know them as my own.

Oh, brethren, it is not till a man has a very clear and painful conviction that they are not his own, or that if they are his own, they will fade into nothing, they will perish utterly; it is not till then that he begins heartily to confess that there must be a Reason, a Will, a Judgment higher than his own, absolutely good, by which his own may be renovated. As long as a man believes that any new circumstances will set him right, he worships those circumstances. When he despairs of all circumstances because he finds that the failure is in himself, he is disposed for a time to worship nothing, to own nothing but shadow and vacancy. When that vision has become intolerable, when he is sinking further and further into the mire where no ground is, he cries, Quicken me; scarcely knowing to whom the prayer is offered, only convinced that he must pray to some Being who can hear. And then there comes such a witness to him that this faith, strange as it is, is not an illusion, he gives his petition definiteness, Quicken Thou me. “Thou, of Whom I have heard in my childhood as renewing my life every morning; Thou, Who I have been told art the Giver of all good things, therefore surely of these purposes, these powers, this will, which are the most precious of all things. Do Thou quicken that in me which must live in order that I may be a man, but which is cleaving to the dust; which appears to be doomed to a more terrible and utter death than the frailest insect and flower which I behold.”

The Psalmist did not stop here. “Quicken Thou me,” he says, “according to Thy word.” “Sunk as I am, I do not count it a possibility, even a high probability, that Thou wilt help me and raise me. I believe Thy word has gone forth that Thou wilt. I believe that all Thy revelations to my race and to mankind mean that Thou wilt. Thy promise would come utterly to an end for evermore; Thy faithfulness, which is the foundation of all faithfulness among men, would not be the rock that it is, if I might not ask Thee with confidence to endue me with the strength without which I cannot be Thy servant; cannot fulfil any of the tasks which Thou hast sent me here to fulfil. Thou wilt not ask me to prove that it is not through my own fault that my soul cleaveth to the dust; that I have not destroyed my own powers and energies. I confess that charge; I have sinned, and sinned against Thee, Who hast lent me those powers in trust which I have used as my own, and for my own ends. But Thou art the Forgiver of sin and the Deliverer from sin. Thy word declares Thee in that character, Quicken me according to that word.”

I said, brethren, that this sentence seemed to me to contain the very essence of prayer, to be the explanation of all prayer; the necessity for it lying in a man’s discovery of his weakness; the hope of it lying in the nature of God Himself, and in His relation to man. As long as that weakness can be referred to anything but the man’s own will; as long as he feels the bondage to be in something else than that, he may ask for rains or fruitful seasons, for the relief from some pain, for the gift of children or of 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 which the creature can ask or the Creator can give; that by this the Creator becomes a Father, and the creature a child. That lore comes when he has found that all treasures which he can dream of, or any demon could bestow, are worthless or are mischievous, if there is not a free and loving will to receive them. That lore comes when he perceives that his will can only be free and loving, when the free and loving Will that formed his has subdued it to itself. Then prayer becomes, not a desperate experiment to compel that which is better into consent with that which is worse, but the cry of a spirit after that Spirit which can unfold all its capacities,—can rescue it from an independence that has ended in slavery,—can remove from it the curse of perpetual barrenness,—can reveal to it the Eternal Good for which it longs, and without which it will never be at rest.

III. I have taken this short Jewish prayer as a summary of all Jewish prayers, as an induction to all Christian prayers. My special reason for choosing it as a subject this afternoon is, that I know of none which explains so well that Collect in which we try to embody what we have been asking for since last Advent, what we shall need in every year that is coming: “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 this nineteenth century, are in essentials the same with the man who complained that his soul clave to the dust. It assumes that no improvements in our outward condition, no progress of civilization, has made it less likely that we should become inwardly torpid, incapable of earnest, manly effort. It assumes that the deepest and most rational of all petitions, is a petition for the renovation of the Will. It assumes that this is also the most universal petition, that in which the well-being of individuals is not more involved than the well-being of Families, Nations, Churches, the Universe. It assumes that only God can stir up the weak will of a man, can quicken the corrupt will of a society. It assumes that such quickening is the one security for the bringing forth the fruit of good works, a vigorous moral state being the source of all vigorous moral acts. It assumes that all acts proceeding from a right and loving will, receive a plenteous reward from God; the reward of deeper acquaintance with His Will; the reward of helping to accomplish the purposes of that Will, and at last of seeing them accomplished.

These principles are implied in this prayer, as they are in that of the Psalmist, and in all prayers. For the earliest prayer, as much as the latest, demands both the convictions which in controversies are always set in hostility to each other,—demands them both in their full strength. It invokes that absolute Divine Will, the acknowledgment of which is supposed to involve the destruction of free agency in man, to give him the free agency which, left to himself, he wants—not having which he must be wretched. It invokes that absolute Divine Will, in the full assurance that all its operations, from the Creation to this hour, have been intended to break men’s bonds asunder, to raise them from captivity to a throne. But the writer of the Collect can face this great paradox of humanity as the writer of the Psalm could not. For he says, “through Jesus Christ our Lord.” He prays through Him Who has on this earth manifested the perfect Will of God as a Will to the Redemption and Reconciliation of the Universe; Who has in His own person removed the hindrance to that Redemption and Reconciliation; in life and death subjecting the human will to the Divine; establishing the perfect harmony between them. He prays through Jesus Christ, Who came to baptize with the Holy Ghost, that wills cleaving to the dust might be quickened, that Mankind might be reconstituted in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the one God blessed for ever. Believing in that name,—that we are living, moving, having our being in it,—we are able to regard prayer as not less, but more, the organ of the will or spirit of man than Logic is the organ of his Intellect. We can encourage the most baffled, desperate man to cry, “My soul cleaveth to the dust: quicken Thou me according to Thy word!” And if there is one adjective in the Collect which seems to make it unfit for our use—if we dare not call ourselves “thy faithful people,” when we feel as if our unfaithfulness were the very reason why our wills need to be stirred up,—as if through our unfaithfulness all good fruits had been checked and killed, all great rewards withheld—let us remember that the moment we begin to ask new life of God, confident that we are asking according to His Mind, that moment we return to our true condition, as faithful, trusting creatures. Let us remember also that we are not alone in our prayers. We belong to the Church of the firstborn. That Church, which is composed of just men made perfect, as well as of saints upon earth, stands complete in its Head and Mediator. That Church, faithfully trusting in God’s gracious and unchangeable Will, asks in the strength of the one prevailing Sacrifice, through the Eternal High-Priest who sits at the right hand of the Father, that all enemies may be made subject to Him,—that all may become willing in the day of His Power.