by A. T. Pierson

Every praying person needs some place and time for prayer, free from needless interruption and intrusion. Our Lord counsels us, when we pray, to get somehow, somewhere, a silent, secret, communing place with God as the very basis of prayer and of all the holy living which is built on prayer [Mathew 6:6]. There are secrets of soul and spirit which no other human being, however intimate, ought to know or, indeed, can know; but from God we can conceal nothing. God’s eye pierces to our secret rooms; he reads the thoughts and hears the words that are as yet unspoken.

Why is such stress laid on this closing in of the praying person with God? Isn’t it, first of all, in order to practise the presence of God? Nothing else has so marvellous an effect on character and conduct as this sense of God’s presence. Such a sense of God’s presence may be cultivated. God has appointed two means to this end:

• first, a meditative reading of Scripture and
• secondly, habitual communion with God in our secret, private place.

To concentrate all thought and desire on God, to forget all else in order not to forget him, and so to be lost in the absorbing sense of his presence this is the first secret of power in prayer and, in fact, the secret also of all power in holy living and serving.

The secret place is also the great school for the education of the spiritual sense. Imagination is the sense of the unseen; reason, the sense of truth and falsehood; conscience, the sense of right and wrong; sensibility, the sense of the attractive and repulsive; memory, the sense of the past. The understanding and heard have eyes with which to see God’s beckoning and glance; ears with which to hear his still, small voice, organs of touch with which to handle him and see that it is he himself.

Let us think of the secret room as a place of vision—of contemplation of God, which makes possible new impressions, new discoveries into his nature, new revelations of his goodness, new gifts of his power. So, before we call, he answers and while we are yet speaking, he hears. Communion proves to be mutual—an outgoing and an incoming, a voice that answers as well as a voice that cries.