In olden time the Earl of Westmoreland said he had no need to pray,
because he had enough pious tenants on his estate to pray for him;
but all the prayers of the church universal amount to nothing unless,
like Daniel, we pray for ourselves. Oh, men and women, bounded on one
side by Shadrach's red-hot furnace, and the other side by devouring
lions, learn the secret of courage and deliverance by looking at that
Babylonish window open toward the south-west! "Oh," you say, "that is
the direction of the Arabian Desert!" Yes; but on the other side of
the desert is God, is Christ, is Jerusalem, is heaven.

The Brussels lace is superior to all other lace, so beautiful, so
multiform, so expensive--four hundred francs a pound. All the world
seeks it. Do you know how it is made? The spinning is done in a dark
room, the only light admitted through a small aperture, and that light
falling directly on the pattern. And the finest specimens of Christian
character I have ever seen or ever expect to see are those to be found
in lives all of whose windows have been darkened by bereavement and
misfortune save one, but under that one window of prayer the
interlacing of divine workmanship went on until it was fit to deck a
throne, a celestial embroidery which angels admired and God approved.

But it is another Jerusalem toward which we now need to open our
windows. The exiled evangelist of Ephesus saw it one day as the surf
of the Icarian sea foamed and splashed over the bowlders at his feet,
and his vision reminded me of a wedding-day when the bride by sister
and maid was having garlands twisted for her hair and jewels strung
for her neck just before she puts her betrothed hand into the hand of
her affianced: "I, John, saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem, coming
down from God out of heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her
husband." Toward that bridal Jerusalem are our windows opened?