That roughly enough is what one means by meditation. When we analyze it to see just what it is that took place, we find three chief elements which correspond to the three elements in our complex personality. The predominating element which gives the name mental prayer to the whole action, is the intellect. We are attempting first of all to understand. We want to know what a given truth means and what it means to us. We want to get life into relation to it. That means not thinking abstractly as in a philosophical meditation, but thinking concretely about my own life as the sphere in which the truth acts. The second form of our activity comes into view as the result of this application of truth to life. It reveals success or failure on our part, and consequently, kindles in us love or abhorrence. We love God and are grateful to Him for His action in our lives, or we realize our own failure to respond to Him, and are filled with contrition. This is the action of our affections in response to what the intellect has shown. If this response is any more than mere emotionalism, the result will be the activity of the third element in our personality; the will. The will becomes active and determines us to follow good and to flee evil.

It would appear from what has been said that the practice of mental prayer admits of sufficient variety in subject and method, to make it a suitable exercise for any Christian who is sufficiently interested in prayer to make this effort. It is perfectly true that there are many Christians who cannot use mental prayer. These are hard working people to whom lack of time is a perfectly valid excuse. There are others whose intellectual training has not fitted them for meditation. But one would do well to pause and think over one's circumstances pretty carefully, before one concludes that one is shut off from all but the least developed forms of prayer experience. To vast numbers of Christians, neither ability nor opportunity is wanting, but the knowledge of the nature of this form of prayer or the will to practice it. And the attempt, when it is made, ends in discouragement and failure. I want, therefore, to say a few words of practical counsel, in such cases.

One of the commonest complaints is that of inability to keep the mind fixed. That, of course, is not peculiar to meditation, but is a besetting trouble of all prayers. It is easy, I think, to over-estimate its importance. It is a fact that under our educational system very few of us are trained in attention. We have not learned deliberately to direct and hold attention at a certain point. The consequence is that attention follows interest, and if there is no compelling interest the mind which is turned in a certain direction may swing off. It is this swing off which is the wandering mind and which causes the trouble. There is nothing for it but to call it back. One soon overcomes it, to a certain extent, if one relaxes the attention deliberately for a few seconds from time to time and then calls it back with a new act of concentration. Furthermore, the mind will turn to the most vivid object of interest. It seems distressing that the mind which has been fixed on prayer, should be found to have run off after some matter of wholly trivial interest. One feels terribly ashamed on discovering it. But the mind does not follow what we are convinced is our most important interest, or what is actually our deepest interest, for which we are prepared to sacrifice much, but it follows a vivid surface interest, an interest somewhat trivial in itself, but which is insistently present. I fancy that very few overcome this tendency to wander; we need to deal patiently with ourselves and with our infirmities in this matter.

Another frequent cause of discouragement is the seeming fruitlessness of this form of prayer. "I have been trying to make meditations," some one says, "for so many months or perhaps so many years, and I do not seem to gain anything. My meditations are wandering and cold nearly always." Now I do not believe that the value of a meditation depends in any great degree upon the facility of it. The meditation which seems to make itself, which goes on without difficulty, so that we hardly realize the passage of time, is not, by any necessity, a better meditation than the halting, troubled, wandering one, which it seems utterly futile to think of as a spiritual act at all. This last is the one which costs labor; it was less pleasant, but

it may well have been more profitable. We may well have laid hold of some truth in a manner that will make it a permanent acquisition, in this last act of prayer. The first may have been a superficial experience which vanishes as easily as it comes. Never estimate prayer in terms of ease and pleasantness.

And neither should we look to acquire spiritual habits with rapidity and ease. Curiously, many look to acquire spiritual habits almost over night. They turn from a life of sin or indifference and spiritual inexperience, and do not understand why they do not at once enter into the habits and experience of the saints. But certainly the acquisition of a new center of interest, the withdrawal of the affections from their accustomed objects, the conversion of the will may be expected to take a very considerable time. Spiritual habits are slowly built. We may be satisfied if progress is being made steadily and unswervingly toward our end-the knowledge and love of God.

A Plea for Specialists in Religion

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BY THE REV. ANDREW CHAPMAN.

E hear on all sides, from religious people and from the thoughtful world, the truism that the changed and changing times call for a readjustment of the Church's method of dealing with people. That is what the cry for a "restatement of the faith" really means. For the faith itself we can only hold that it "was once for all delivered unto the saints" and any restatement of it can only be just that, a restatement, not a reconsideration or a retraction. The quaint old theological terms may be translated, even into modern slang if you like; the age-old principles may be brought to bear on modern problems and crises; but the faith itself must ever remain unchanged and unchanging unless it is to be given over altogether, and of it we can only say "securus judicat orbis terrarum." Do not think me flippant if I say that it is the Clergy who must be "restated." For it is certain that there

is a sense of failure in the view that men are today taking of the Church and of her Ministers, both from within and from without, a sense of failure, of inadequacy, of the pressing and dire need for some change of method which shall somehow save the ship which so many are already giving up for lost.

We must face this fact, with its implications, as bravely as we can. There is nothing to be gained by adopting the method of the ostrich. We must be honest and we must be humble, and if we are honest and humble we shall admit that it is not the Religion of Jesus Christ that has failed in this hour of world-crisis; it is not the Church (against whom by the infallible promise of her divine Founder, the gates of hell shall never prevail) but it is we who have failed. If men feel, as there is no question that many of them do feel, that Christianity is not the religion which can fulfil the needs of modern life and interpret it in terms of both spiritual and practical value, it is our fault because we have been content to teach an emasculated and partial faith, because we have neglected to correlate the facts of revelation with the vital problems of the everyday life of our people. If the world, the nation, comes to a crisis where the half gods must go, everything must go with them unless we have been rooted and grounded in principles and practices which can and will prove adequate under stress of our new and crucial needs.

These are times that try men's souls. And in that trial they are thrown back upon first principles. We must get down to bedrock too, else we part company with our people at the very moment of their utmost need. What are some of the questions that are being asked, on all sides, with an insistency that demands an answer, and which no uncertain answer will satisfy? We hear much of the great religious awakening which the war has been the means of bringing about in countless lives that were careless, or selfish, or worse, till the crash of Armageddon forced them to think down beneath the thresholds of common life. Men, we hear, want religion today as they never wanted it before, they are open to the message of religion as they have not been for centuries. The question emerges at once, What

is religion? Unless we can answer that question, and answer it satisfactorily, with authority and certitude, men and women will answer it for themselves, and the chances are that they will not, nine times out of ten, answer it correctly. We have seen, in our own day and generation, a whole nation building up a philosophy, which we need not hesitate to call a religion since they themselves claim that name for it, on false principles, reversing the Law and the Gospel, calling evil good, and good evil, saying that might not only makes right but is the only right, and following the formal and intellectual conclusions of their philosophical theorizing out into ruthless and unthinkable practice under the patronage of "unser Gott." And I venture to think that we are not altogether free from the danger of adopting their philosophy of religion ourselves. Free from the crudities of "the man in the street" the thought that is coming more and more to the fore when we consider religion is that personal sacrifice for a principle is a sufficient substitute for belief in revealed truth, that ethical practice is more than equivalent to religious piety, that religion is only what Huxley said it was, "Ethics tinged with emotion," that it doesn't matter what a man believes so long as he does what is right.

I cannot forebear quoting some passages from an excellent article, one of a series which recently ran in the Saturday Evening Post, because it states so admirably just what is the popular and serious thought of the average man on this important matter. The writer is supposed to be a middle-aged business man who is visiting his son, a Captain in the National Army, before the boy sails for France.

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'Suppose you and mother would like to know before I go,' said Jack, 'what I think about things-religious things, you know. Some of us get together here and talk them over now and then. We didn't before we came. But, you see, we can't help knowing, of course, that we mayn't come back; and— and-so you wonder if there would be anything else afterward if you didn't-Well, honestly Dad-I don't know. I haven't much faith, I guess, of the orthodox kind; but I can't help