OUR PRAYER MEETINGS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 117, 12 July 1873, Page 7

OUR PRAYER MEETINGS.

The " Baptist," under this head, has an article, from which we extract the following:—Something might be done by those who conduct our prayer meetjogs to throw more life and variety into them. Monotony is, from the necessity of the case, the sin which most easily besets the services; the sin against which it behoves those who lead them most anxiously to guard. Some conductors of prayer meetings are little more than machines for giving out hymns and calling on persons to pray. Hymn and prayer, hymn and prayer, in unbroken alternation, often a long hymn sleepily sung, and followed by a longer prayer; this is the mechanical round into which these services are, by such leaders, permitted to fall. The president of a prayer meeting should be a living man, infusing his own life and individuality into the meeting which he leads. There need be, there ought to be, no rant, or bluster, or eccentricity. Naturally and unobtrusively, by the very tone in which he reads the hymns, by a word or two spoken sometimes about the hymn before it is sung, by the reading of a few verses in the Bible, with two or three sentences of homely warm-hearted comment, by calling on two occasionally to follow one another in prayer, without the intervening hymn ; by methods which his own thought and judgment will suggest, the conductor may save the meeting from dulness and routine. The conducting of a prayer meejing is not a service which can be rightly fulfilled by any man anyhow. It is a service of much spiritual delicacy, involving serious responsibility, claiming earnest thought and preparation of heart in him who undertakes it. For lack of remembering this, many a meeting is marred.