NOTE E, Chap. XI. p. 133
There is a question, the deepest of all, on which I have not entered in this book. I have spoken of the lack of prayer in the individual Christian as a symptom of a disease. But what shall we say of it, that there is such a widespread prevalence of this failure to give a due proportion of time and strength to prayer? Do we not need to inquire, How comes it that the Church of Christ, endued with the Holy Ghost, cannot train its minister, and workers, and members to place first what is first? How comes it that the confession of too little prayer, and the call for more prayer, is so frequently heard, and yet the evil continues? The Spirit of God, the spirit of supplication and intercession is in the Church and every believer. There must surely be some other spirit of great power resisting and hindering this Spirit of God. It is indeed so. The spirit of the world, which under all its beautiful and even religious activities is the Spirit of the God of this world, is the great hindrance. Everything that is done on earth, whether within or without the Church, is done by either of these two spirits. What is in the individual the flesh, that is in mankind as a whole, the spirit of the world, and all the power the flesh has in the individual, is owing to the place given to the spirit of this world in the Church and in the Christian life. It is the spirit of the world in the great hindrance to the spirit of prayer. All our most earnest calls to men to pray more will be vain except this evil be acknowledged, and combated, and overcome. The believer and the church must be entirely freed from the spirit of the world.
And how is this to be done? There is but one way—the cross of Christ, "by which," as Paul says, "the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." It is only through death to the world, that we can be freed from it spirit. The separation must be vital and entire. It is only through the acceptance of our crucifixion with Christ, that we can live out this confession and as crucified to the world, maintain the position of irreconcilable hostility to whatever is of its spirit and not of the spirit of God. And it is only God Himself who, by His Divine power, can lead us into and keep us daily dead to sin, and alive unto God in Christ Jesus. The cross, with its shame, and its separation from the world, and its death to all that is of flesh and of self, is the only power that can conquer the spirit of the world.
I have felt so strongly that the truth needs to be anew asserted, that I hope, if it please God, to publish a volume: The Cross of Christ, with the enquiry into what God's word teaches us to our actual participation with Christ in His crucifixion. Christ prayed on the way to the cross. He prayed Himself to the cross. He prayed on the cross. He prays ever as the fruit of the cross, as the church lives on the cross, and the cross lives in the church. The spirit of prayer will be given. In Christ it was the crucifixion spirit and death that was the sort of the intercession spirit and power. With us it can be no otherwise.
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