perfect and immaculate, if we were to take these out of it, the customary
share in all common worship, and the private, separate communing with
God, it would be an altogether different life--different in its attitude
towards the common life of ordinary men, and different in its own quality
and influence.

We might still admire--nay, we could not but admire--all the beauty of
moral qualities, the purity, the sympathy, the love and self-devotion of
it; but it would have lost its spiritual atmosphere. It would no longer
be for us the life of the Divine Son, recognising and ready to share in
all our attempts at worshipping the Father, however poor they may be, and
living through the separate life in daily communion with Him.

Here then is His practice, written for our guidance, given that we may be
stirred by it to aim upwards, inviting us to set our own practice side by
side with it, and see how it looks in such a juxtaposition. Let us
glance for a moment at each of these texts separately.

As regards the one which I have taken from St. Mark--"He went out, and
departed into a solitary place, and there He prayed"--we have only to
turn over the pages of this Gospel and note, as we go, the similar
allusions, and we feel that we have here what is in fact an incidental
glimpse into the habitual practice of His secret and separate life.

In this passage we read that He departed into a solitary place, and there
He prayed; in another by-and-by that He departed into a mountain to pray;
and then again that He spent the whole night in prayer; and we see all
this not in some crisis of His life, but as a part of that which
corresponds to the common daily round in your life or mine.