The daily morning journal and courier., 1899-10-16
SERMON BY REV.DR. PATTON
AT FIRST M. F. CHURCH IN PLACE
 OF DR. ELDRIDGE.
His Subject Taken from Psalm 65,2- Prayer-Without Prayer Man Is Not What He Ought to be, He Sins-In the Largest Sense of Prayer Man Was Made to Pray.

|
 Largest Sense of Prayer Man Was
 Made to Pray.
 In the absence of the pastor, Rev
 Gardner s. Eldridge, the pulpit at the
 First M. E. church yesterday morning
 was occupied by the Rev. Walter M.
 Patton, D. D., of Yale university. Dr..
 Patton took his sermon from Psalm 65,
 2, and spoke in part as follows:
 | The desire to get a clear and definite
 conception of religious truth and eXperi-
 ence is not wrong if it be followed hum
 bly,. And if with an earnest desire to
 know and do and be that which is right we should seek to know clearly all that l is possible about God, His work and His word.
 We can hardly think that God needs to be moved to will or act by any pray CT or intercession human or divine When we need anything He can have
 no need of our prayer before He gives it to us When another has need He
 can have no need of our intercession in
 order to fill that others want. Yet we
 cannot question that the Holy Scrip lures represent that certain blessings,
 at least, will not be granted unless men
 pray. Nor is 1t only that prayer has an
 influence upon the one who prays such
 as fits him to receive gifts from God.
 It is undeniably the tenor of Holy Writ
 that God is moved by prayer to will and
 act as He would not have done without
 the prayer. Now. how can we harmon
 iZe this apparent contradiction? In and
 for Himself alone God has no need Of
 prayer or intercession but we must
 think that communion of spirits, or the
 communication of spirits with each oth-
 CT, receives it's character from their mu
 tual relations and that communication
 which does not correspond with mutual
 relations or abstenton from communi-
 cation means a breach of that funda- mental law obedience to which means the perfection and blessedness of human life. The being of man and his relations to God and the world involve certain duties and certain privileges, failure to enter into which means sin-the neglect or imperfect performance of something which a man must have in order to be perfect in himself and in his relation to God and the world. Where we find Creator intelligent and moral and creature intelligent and moral; where we have the Creator a Bountiful Pro- wider and the creature continually needy; where we have an aggrieved Ruler and an offending subject; where we have kindred spirits-a greater and a less-the true relation must be one of prayer from the less and answer from the greater God and we are one, but He is infinite every way, while we are less than the dust of the balance, Still. be- ing one, our most true and beautiful at titude toward each other implies ad- vance in sweet confiding self disclosure and request on the part of the inferior, with gracious self-discosure and re- sponse on the part of the superior, Prayer being a fact universal in the race of men, must be explained from the way man was made and the relations he was meant to hold to God and His creatures. Now, we, perhaps, can see the deep reason why men must pray | Failure to pray is departure of man from the way he was meant to go in | relation to God And God requires prayer once He becomes related to men, because His true relation to them can not be realized without it. And now we can see why one who had assumed | an official subordination to God as our | Lord had resorts often to prayer. The very subordination, however reached, | implies prayer, not to speak of this as one of the many things which our Lord | took upon Him to show us better way of living.
 But there is an inference from what | We have said which becomes very sure when carry prayer down to the consti- tutional relation of man and God for it's reason If that be the reason of prayer, then it's answer cannot fail. If the hu- man part of prayer be true the divine part cannot be wanting. It is as sure IS that we are erring and fallible that ,ur particular petitions will in many ,ases not be answered. If they were all 70 be answered we would need to be al- ways and in everything right. The req 'on of prayer is the great general need If souls related to their home in the bosom of God, and when, instead of the bread or the health or the deliverance Or which we offered prayer. there ,omes to us only a throb of the heart of 1od, we are better answered than we ould have hoped to be- and the mother ar is well pleased to hear the mistaken ltterance of the heart that feels itself needy and succourless. But God will nswer the particular petitions that He an answer, and those that are wisely conceived as far as we are concerned. Ve need not be anxious about that. Is He has made His world and the men n it. there are some things God cannot To- and there are some things He is too vise and kind to do. No prayer, how yer, is ever unanswered in one sense 10 matter how wrong it may be in it's iea of human need-if the tides of God low back into the soul of every true etitioned He has an hundredfold now n this time and the foretaste of life 
 We must look at another aspect of rayer. Intercession is fact which is ound as uniformly throughout the race { s is prayer itself. It is fully explained y the interest which men have in one E mother, according to their degrees of eed or of relationship to each other, n the one hand; and, on the other by {