I. THE ORIGIN OF PRAYER. Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, O Lord. Ps. cxxx. I. T is strange how the words of those old IT Hebrew songs strike at the roots of things. The most recent of them were written at least twenty-four centuries ago, yet they are as fresh and vital as if they were penned yesterday. They are the utterances of men who were neither philosophers nor theologians nor saints; yet they lay bare the inmost springs of life, they supply facts and experiences that are built into the foundation-walls of Christian theology, they have been woven into the hymns and prayers of nineteen centuries of Christian history. The secret of their vitality and power lies in the fact that they are frank, genuine words, wrung from men who glanced keenly into the depths and heights of their life, and discerned the eternal facts that formed the background from which their life was thrust, and along which it moved. They utter the perennial voice of the soul of man, crying from the abysses of his life to the unseen Power from which his life outflows. This is the reason that those antique Hebrew canticles have become the temple-hymns of the Christian Church and the road-songs of the Christian pilgrim through the ages. The highest poetry is at once the deepest philosophy and the truest religion. The roots of all three interlace. They are buried in the bottommost facts of life. Childhood, with its young eyes, ofttimes discerns these facts more clearly than the eyes which are accustomed to look at things through the dust of the world's toil and the fog of the world's thought. The world in its childhood babbled words of the keenest vision; and, as long as men value poetry that goes beneath the crust of things, that deals with the elemental forces of our nature, that takes the soul of man, and fashions it into a flute or bugle so that the divine breath blows through it in immortal music; as long as men want tender or tragic |