CORRESPONDENCE AND INFORMATION 



2 5 



A Nature Prayer Meeting. 



Methodist Church, Stamford, Ct. 

 To the Editor: — 



I am not surprised that you should 

 have been sufficiently interested in our 

 nature evening prayer-meeting, that 

 you should remind me of my promise 

 to write you the particulars. You see 

 it was just this way; the birds were 

 singing so sweetly their carols of 

 praise and the hills were clothed in 

 such majestic beauty that for the time 

 being this other volume of revelation 

 seemed to command our immediate 

 attention in its messages of God writ 

 large. So one Sunday it occurred to 

 me to announce for the subject of the 

 next prayer and conference meeting, 

 "In God's Out-of-Doors," suggested by 

 the title of Bishop Ouayle's book. By 

 the w r ay this man is a wonder in read- 

 ing the spiritual language of the nat- 

 ural world. Not knowing just what 

 response the proposal would command, 

 I went around and urged privately 

 some of the faithful to be ready, lest 

 by any means there should be a ten- 

 dency to slip up on this unusual sub- 

 ject. To my personal astonishment, 

 not one of those who came thus fore- 

 armed had an opportunity to get in a 

 word crosswise or edgewise. People 

 who had never lifted their voices in 

 meeting before were eager to tell of 

 the deep thoughts and high apprecia- 

 tions which God had given them 

 through the media of nature. There 

 was a freshness about it which reminded 

 us of the days when the greatest of all 

 preachers used to stand by the way- 

 side scattering the seeds of truth, and 

 calling attention to the flowers of the 

 field and the birds of the air, as sug- 

 gestive of the rich providences of God. 

 I cannot reproduce the language or the 

 telling references, but I will show you 

 how the matter gripped the people by 

 stating that we remained together long 

 after the usual hour of closing, and 

 almost as many were ready to speak 

 when the benediction was pronounced 

 as when the first reference to nature 

 was made by a dear old man who dis- 

 covered a tiny insect, and carried it to 

 the shop where he works, and there 

 feasted his eves upon its wonderful 



decorations with the aid of a magnify- 

 ing glass which he keeps with his 

 rougher tools for just such a purpose. 

 Doctor, more nature in prayer-meet- 

 ings, and more prayer in nature-meet- 

 ings would be a mighty fine adjust- 

 ment. 



Yours truly, 



Claude H. Priddy. 



Read and carefully reread this letter. 

 From the naturalist's point of view it 

 is remarkably good, better, perhaps, 

 than intended or realized. It tells us 

 that Christ, "the greatest of all preach- 

 ers," dwelt constantly with nature in its 

 truth and in its love — "the rich provi- 

 dences of God." It admits that His fol- 

 lowers seldom so live. Nature under 

 consideration is so strange to His fol- 

 lowers, they are so ignorant of all that 

 pertains to nature, that the pastor 

 feared the prayer meeting would prove 

 a failure. On the contrary, to his "per- 

 sonal astonishment," it was amazingly 

 successful, because "people who had 

 never before lifted their voices in meet- 

 ing were now eager to tell." 



You are right, Reverend Mr. Priddy. 

 Your own church and all others need 

 not only more "nature in prayer meet- 

 ings" but in all other meetings and all 

 the time. You and your people need to 

 follow more carefully the example of 

 Christ, the Naturalist, to study and to 

 appreciate more the Living God in His 

 Works of the Present — not in those 

 events that were, centuries ago, re- 

 corded as samples of His Work. 



Says Ralph Waldo Emerson, most 

 truly: 



"The foregoing generations beheld 

 God and nature face to face ; we, 

 through their eyes. Why should not 

 we also enjoy an original relation to the 

 universe? Why should not we have a 

 poetry and philosophy of insight and 

 not of tradition, and a religion by rev- 

 elation to us, and not a history ol 

 theirs?" 



I am glad, Pastor, that you wrote of 

 the prayer meeting exactly as you have 

 written. If a naturalist by profession 

 had so written, some one might have 

 thrown a big word at him — materialist ; 

 might have saM it was a slur on the 



