Chapter Twenty-Three, Simply by Prayer
Chapter Twenty-Three, Simply by Prayer
Over forty years had now elapsed since Muller first sought to demonstrate, by founding and maintaining an orphanage according to certain defined principles, that there is ‘reality in the things of God’. During that period there had been many who were convinced by the demonstration and who had been brought from scepticism to faith. The response of others, who were already Christians, had often been to commit themselves more whole-heartedly to lives of prayer and service to God. Most remarkable of all, perhaps, was the effect that a knowledge of Muller’s life had on a young Irishman, James McQuilkin, and subsequently through him, on the 1859 revival.
In November 1856 McQuilkin—doubtful of the truth of the Christian faith and somewhat scornful of those who accepted it— came into contact with a Mrs Colville, who at that time was living near Ballymena, County Antrim, and spending her time visiting the cottages of the district speaking to people about Christ.
‘Are you a Calvinist, Mrs Colville?’ McQuilkin asked, as they sat down to tea together.
‘I would not wish,’ she answered, ‘to be more or less of a Calvinist than our Lord and His apostles. But I do not care to talk on mere points of doctrine. I would rather speak of the experience of salvation in the soul. If one were to tell me what he knows of the state of his heart with God I think I could tell him whether he knows the Lord Jesus savingly.’
This effectively silenced McQuilkin, but a lady present began to unburden herself and what she said to Mrs Colville seemed to McQuilkin exactly to describe the state of his heart. ‘I waited,’ he said later, ‘with breathless expectation to hear what Mrs Colville would answer. After a brief pause she said solemnly, “My dear, you have never known the Lord Jesus.” I knew that she spoke what was true of me. I felt as if the ground were about to open beneath me and let me sink into hell. As soon as I could, I left the company. For two weeks I had no peace day or night. At the end of that time I found it by trusting the Lord Jesus.’
Shortly afterwards, McQuilkin saw an advertisement for the first two volumes of Muller’s Narratives. He had a great desire to read it and managed to get hold of a copy in about January 1857; he was amazed and humbled by what he read.
‘See what Mr Muller obtains simply by prayer,’ he thought. ‘Thus I may obtain blessing by prayer.’
He began to pray that God would give him a Christian friend, a prayer which was answered in the shape of Jeremiah Meneely. These two began a prayer meeting in one of the Sunday Schools in the parish of Connor, and the following autumn McQuilkin told the small group of young men who by now were praying regularly with him how God had blessed him through reading Muller’s Narratives and how he had been led to realise the power of believing prayer; he suggested that they should pray regularly for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on their district. The revival which had begun in the States in 1857 was now known about in Ireland; and McQuilkin said to himself:
‘Why may we not have such a blessed work here, seeing that God did such great things for Mr Muller, simply in answer to prayer?’
In March 1859 these young men organised a series of meetings in Ahoghill, near Ballymena; on the 14th the crowds were so great that the meeting, in the First Presbyterian Church, was abandoned, and outside in chilling rain hundreds fell to their knees in the streets. This was to be typical of the revival which followed, as hundreds of thousands were to be convicted of sin by the Holy Spirit. In May the movement reached Belfast and began to affect churches of all denominations.
Before the end of 1859 the flame was spreading through Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland. In the centre of Dublin, Merrion Hall—designed like Spurgeon’s Tabernacle and holding two thousand—was built and became one of the largest centres of the Brethren. The movement spread on through the Continent of Europe.
One result of the revival was that thousands of men and women felt called to become full-time evangelists. In England, one such was an Exeter shoemaker named George Brealey. Brealey was a fearless man who had achieved no mean reputation locally when he had rescued a drowning woman from the River Taw in full flood and later by entering a burning house in Exeter to rescue two children from the flames. The revival had filled him with a passionate zeal for souls and he had begun to work in the streets and slums of Exeter. Early in the 1860s he was challenged by an appeal for men and women to go to the West Indies to preach the gospel; many advised him to go and his wife was prepared to make the sacrifice. There were several interviews—including one with George Muller. Muller was not convinced that it was God’s will for him to go to Demerara, although the Scriptural Knowledge Institution could well afford to provide sufficient funds for Brealey and his family to make the trip. But because of his uncertainty Muller had only given a part— though a large part—of the necessary fare: he believed that if God wanted the family to leave He would provide the extra money needed.
Brealey wrote to the captain of a ship asking whether he was prepared to take his family at a reduced rate. While waiting for a reply he accepted an invitation to pay a farewell visit to friends in Wellington, and from there travelled four miles south to preach at Clayhidon in the Blackdown Hills on the Devon and Somerset border. Explaining that he was on the way to Demerara to preach to black people an old woman told him:
‘You’ve made a mistake, maister; we be the blacks, we’ve got black hearts.’
On his return to Exeter he found that the captain had refused to cut his fare and the boat had already sailed. Thus it was that George Brealey devoted his life to preaching and working among the black hearts on the Blackdowns; and, as his grandson Douglas has written, ‘borne along by the Spirit of God, he swept through the hills like a flame of fire’. He built village chapels or re-opened older ones, carried on a consistent pastoral work and established day-schools.
The schools which George Brealey and his son Walter established on the Blackdowns were—like so many other schools in Britain and throughout the world—financed by Muller and Wright’s Scriptural Knowledge Institution. The Clayhidon school had been established by Walter Brealey in January 1870, and his sister Georgina Brealey was one of the teachers. In the same year, Forster’s Education Act had recognised education as a public service, increased grants to existing Church schools and empowered locally elected Boards to establish schools. In 1875 Clayhidon had formed its first School Board of five members, most of whom were in sympathy with the aims of the school particularly when they realised that the necessary money for the education of the neighbourhood would be supplied by George Muller and James Wright.
A notice in the Blackdowns local paper announced that in accordance with the Elementary Education Acts, School Audits for the year ended Michaelmas, 1879, would be inspected at noon on January 26th 1880, at the Board Room of Wellington Union Workhouse. On the appointed day, therefore, Walter Brealey arrived and spread out his impressive sheet of paper on the table of the Board Room. On the left hand side there was entered a ‘Donation’ from Messrs Muller and Wright which neatly cancelled out the debits on the other side.
This had gone on for years, and the inspectors had grown used to seeing the names of Muller and Wright of the Scriptural Knowledge Institution, Bristol.
‘You mean to say they’re not wealthy men?’ one of the audit men asked Walter Brealey.
‘No, and yet they manage to provide many schools with funds— as well as missionaries and so on.’
‘It’s very useful for you, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I don’t really see how we could run the schools without it.’
The last of these schools—at Bishopswood—was not closed until 1947 when State education services finally made it redundant. Muller and Wright also financed the Blackdown Sunday Schools at Clayhidon, Bishopswood and Browndown. When the hall was painted at Bishopswood they bore the cost of a new stove. The Bibles and testaments in use at this Sunday School, the summer treat, and the prizes were all paid for by the SKI. In addition, over the years, Muller supplied the Brealeys with thousands of tracts and Bibles.
In the 1870s and early 80s, the Scriptural Knowledge Institution entirely financed nearly eighty day schools for children and half a dozen adult schools; from five to ten schools were assisted. In the year 1879-80, the Institution was responsible for the education of over seven thousand children in seventy-six schools throughout the world as well as seven adult schools. Of these schools, there were fourteen in Spain, four in India, one in Italy, and six in British Guiana; the rest were in England and Wales including Bristol, Barnstaple, Howie Hill, Bow, Cardiff, Chittlehamholt, Hopton, Kilburn, North End (Fulham), Plympton, Underwood, Purton, Stroud and Yeovil as well as those on the Blackdowns. In the same year nearly forty Sunday Schools were entirely financed and fourteen assisted by the Institution.
Muller received letters from masters and mistresses teaching in city and country districts all over England telling of spiritual blessing amongst the children in these day schools which his Institution financed. The master of the Clayhidon school, presumably Walter Brealey, reported at the end of 1878 that ‘over forty, who have been in the schools are now converted, and have joined various sections of the church of God’; while from the heart of London, the mistress of the North End School at Fulham wrote of her pupils that ‘there are anxious ones of whom I have good hopes, and I feel quite sure the Lord is working in the hearts of several. I am very happy to add, those who professed Christ as their Saviour, last year, have shown, by their walk, that they do really belong to Him; three of them are still in the School, and they are bright examples to their schoolfellows’.
Another convert of the 1859 revival, later to become famous, was a young man from Manchester named Henry Moorhouse, who, in 1861, as a wild gambler and drinker rushed into a revival meeting at the Alhambra Circus in Manchester, looking for a fight, only to be arrested by hearing the name—Jesus; he ‘who had entered to fight remained to praise and pray’.
He now spent his time, from morning to evening, distributing tracts, speaking personally to individuals and with his converted actor friend John Hambleton preaching in the open air at local and national gatherings, including theatre services. (It was under Hamble-ton’s preaching that Dr Barnardo had been converted.)
The story of how Henry Moorhouse became ‘the man who moved the man who moved the world’ is well told by that man himself, D. L. Moody. Moody wrote:
In 1867, when I was preaching in Dublin, at the close of the service a young man, who did not look over seventeen, though he was older, came up to me and said he would like to go to America with me, and preach the gospel. I thought he could not preach it, and I said I was undecided when I could go back. He asked me if I would write to him, as I did not know whether I wanted him or not. After I arrived in Chicago I got a letter saying he had just arrived in New York, and he would come and preach. I wrote him a cold letter, asking him to call on me if he came West. A few days after I got a letter stating he would be in Chicago next Thursday. I didn’t know what to do with him. I said to the officers of the Church, ‘There is a man coming from England, and he wants to preach. I am going to be absent Thursday and Friday. If you will let him preach on those days, I will be back on Saturday and take him off your hands.’ They did not care about his preaching, being a stranger; but at my request they let him preach. On my return on Saturday I was anxious to hear how the people liked him, and I asked my wife how that young Englishman got along. How did they like him? She said they liked him very much.
‘He preaches a little different from what you do. He tells the people God loves them. I think you will like him.’
I said he was wrong. I thought I could not like a man who preached contrary to what I was preaching. I went down on Saturday night to hear him, but I made up my mind not to like him, because he preached different from me.
Moody described how for six nights Moorhouse preached from John 3 :16 and concluded:
In closing up that seventh sermon, he said, ‘For seven nights I have been trying to tell you how much God loves you, but this poor stammering tongue of mine will not let me. If I could ascend Jacob’s ladder and ask Gabriel, who stands in the presence of the Almighty, to tell me how much love God the Father has for this poor lost world, all that Gabriel could say would be, that “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’”
Moody said, ‘I have never forgotten those nights. I have preached a different Gospel since, and I have had more power with God and man since then.’ Moorhouse became a close friend of Moody and Sankey; it was said that Moorhouse taught Moody that God hates sin, but loves the sinner.
During the last years of his life, Moorhouse sold Bibles and tracts from a Bible carriage and conducted evangelistic campaigns with Richard Weaver in the industrial districts of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Leicestershire. In two years Moorhouse sold over 150,000 Bibles and testaments, and gave away millions of books and tracts. All his literature was supplied by the Scriptural Knowledge Institution in Bristol.
On August 28th 1878 Moorhouse wrote to Muller from Blackpool:
Beloved Mr Muller, We are having a glorious time here, selling about 1,000 copies of the New Testament a week, and preaching to thousands in the open air. Enclosed P.O.O. for £12 10s. Please send us £3,000 2d Testaments. Many thanks for your kindness in giving them at half price to us. God bless you, dear Mr Muller.
In acknowledging receipt of the testaments sent, Moorhouse wrote again from Blackpool:
Beloved Mr Muller, The New Testaments have arrived safe from London. I thank you very much for giving them to me at id each. The expenses of the Gospel Carriage, for horses, lights and rent of ground, will average £3 a week; and I trust the sales of Bibles, etc. will cover this. I wish you could see the thousands of people listening to the preaching of the Gospel in the open air, and sometimes hundreds of men weeping. You would say this is the Lord’s Work. I wish there were a dozen more carriages out in the villages—I met a great many, in the States, who were much blessed by your ministry, out there; and many ministers told me how much they loved you. Again thanking you for your kindness, etc.
A letter the following October described how:
We were in Leicester last week, and in the fair sold 500 New Testaments, in six hours. A publican, opposite whose place we stood, sent for the police to remove us. He could scarcely get a customer into his place. Of course the police could not interfere, as we were breaking no law. The chief magistrate, in every town we have visited, in almost every case, has stood our friend, and given orders for us to have the best place in the market for our carriage ... A Lady in Leicester has taken off her jewellery, and is going to sell it and buy with it a Bible carriage for the county ...
Two years later, having visited factories in Oldham with his Bible Carriage, Moorhouse wrote that: ‘In many mills, I am told, the girls are reading now the Scriptures during the dinner hour, and the masters say these girls do more work than those who are careless about better things.’
Four years earlier, in 1876, Moorhouse—who was never strong— had been told by his doctors that his heart was twice the size it ought to be; he had continued his service in the same cheerful and energetic spirit as before. In September 1880, Muller received his final letter from Moorhouse:
Beloved Mr Muller, we have had a glorious time at Darlington and Stockton-on-Tees. Tens of thousands at the latter place have heard the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus. We took the carriage to the races, and never had we such a week before at any place... Could you see the hundreds listening with upturned faces, and many with tearful eyes, to the simple story of Calvary, your heart would rejoice, and you would feel repaid for all the loss you sustain in giving us the Scriptures and the little Gospel books at so cheap a rate. May God bless you, beloved Mr Muller. I enclose an order for 5,000 New Testaments and 600 Bibles, with many thanks for all your kindness and love.
A few weeks later, Henry Moorhouse was dead. John Hambleton recalled their final meeting: ‘Calling to see him on Monday last, before he left us, I grasped his arms, as his face betokened that the enemy death was doing his last work, and said, “Harry, we shall soon meet up yonder.” He replied, while gasping for breath, “Sure, sure, sure!” How plainly visible is the work of God in putting into such a little frail vessel as our brother such a treasure, showing us all that the excellency of the power is of God.’
Miiller recorded that ‘this most valuable holy brother fell asleep, his labours for many years having been very great, and too great for his strength’. He added: ‘We have agreed to supply the Bible Carriages which were under his care (as during his life-time) with the Holy Scriptures at very reduced prices, considering this work to be of deep importance. We do the same also in the case of approved Godly colporteurs’.
In the year that Moorhouse died (1880), Muller’s Scriptural Knowledge Institution sold nearly a hundred thousand Bibles and New Testaments at reduced prices and gave away over four thousand. As well as English the Bibles were in Welsh, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Russ, Swedish, Ancient Greek, Greek and (The Old Testament and Psalms) Hebrew. In the same year (and the year was not untypical) the Institution circulated nearly three and a half million tracts and small books.
During Muller’s life, the Institution which he had founded laid out nearly half a million pounds on objects other than the orphan work. Of this nearly £115,000 was spent on the school work throughout the world, nearly £90,000 on the circulation of Bibles, testaments, tracts, and books and over £260,000 on world-wide missionary work. In the peak years of the missionary work in the early 1870s, Muller sent ten thousand pounds abroad annually to nearly two hundred missionaries. By the mid 1880s expenditure was running at about £5,000 a year and rather more than 130 missionaries were' supported. All this expenditure was quite apart from the sum of nearly a million pounds which passed through Muller’s hands during his life to be spent on the orphan work.
‘See what Mr Muller obtains simply by prayer,’ James McQuilkin had said, ‘Thus I may obtain blessing by prayer.’ And, as we saw, he did. There is indeed a simplicity in prayer—‘Ask, and, it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.’ This was the simple, yet profound, promise from Matthew 7:7 and 8, with which Muller began a sermon on prayer in 1880. ‘Had it been left to us to make promises regarding prayer,’ he said, ‘I do not know that you or I could have done more than say, “Ask, and ye shall receive”. Yet, while the promise is so full, so deep, so broad, so precious in every way, we have here,’ he emphasised, ‘as becomes us with other parts of the word of God, to compare Scripture with Scripture, because in other parts additions are made, or conditions given, which, if we neglect, will hinder our getting the full benefit of prayer.’
During the sermon Muller outlined a number of conditions upon which successful prayer depends. First, he said, our petitions must be according to God’s will—1 John 5:14. Second, we must not ask on account of our own goodness or merit, but ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ’—John 14:13 and 14. Muller was careful to remind his congregation, however, as he often did, of the verse in the sixty-sixth Psalm: ‘If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.’ ‘That is,’ he said, ‘if I live in sin, and go on in a course hateful to God, I may not expect my prayers to be answered.’
The third condition was that we must exercise faith in the power and willingness of God to answer our prayers. ‘This is deeply important,’ Muller said. ‘In Mark 11:24, we read, “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” “What things soever ye desire”—of whatever kind—“believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” I have found invariably, in the fifty-four years and nine months during which I have been a believer, that if I only believed I was sure to get, in God’s time, the thing I asked for. I would especially lay this on your heart that you exercise faith in the power and willingness of God to answer your requests. We must believe that God is able and willing. To see that He is able, you have only to look at the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ; for having raised Him from the dead, He must have almighty power. As to the love of God, you have only to look to the cross of Christ, and see His love in not sparing His Son, in not withholding His only begotten Son from death. With these proofs of the power and love of God, assuredly, if we believe, we shall receive—we shall obtain.’
The fourth condition was that ‘we have to continue patiently waiting on God till the blessing we seek is granted. For observe, nothing is said in the text as to the time in which, or the circumstances under which, the prayer is to be answered. “Ask, and it shall be given you.” There is a positive promise, but nothing as to time... Someone may say, “Is it necessary I should bring a matter before God two, three, five or even twenty times; is it not enough I tell Him once?” We might as well say there is no need to tell Him once, for He knows beforehand what our need is. He wants us to prove that we have confidence in Him, that we take our place as creatures towards the Creator.
‘Moreover, we are never to lose sight of the fact that there may be particular reasons why prayer may not at once be answered. One reason may be the need for the exercise of our faith, for by exercise faith is strengthened. We all know that if our faith were not exercised it would remain as it was at first. By the trial it is strengthened. Another reason may be that we may glorify God by the manifestation of patience. This is a grace by which God is greatly magnified. Our manifestation of patience glorifies God. There may be another reason. Our heart may not yet be prepared for the answer to our prayer. I will give an illustration ...’ Muller gave a number of illustrations from the lives of those known to him and then drew on his own vast experience.
‘If I say that during the fifty-four years and nine months that I have been a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ I have had thirty thousand answers to prayer, either in the same hour or the same day that the requests were made, I should not go a particle too far. Often, before leaving my bedroom in the morning, have I had prayer answered that was offered that morning, and in the course of the day I have had five or six more answers to prayer; so that at least thirty thousand prayers have been answered the self-same hour or the selfsame day that they were offered. But one or the other might suppose all my prayers have been thus promptly answered. No; not all of them. Sometimes I have had to wait weeks, months, or years; sometimes many years. The man speaking at the present time, whom God has delighted to honour by giving thirty thousand answers to prayer in the same hour or day on which they were offered, this self-same man has had to wait many years for answers to many of his prayers. During the first six weeks of the year 18661 heard of the conversion of six persons for whom I had been praying for a long time. For one I had been praying between two and three years; for another between three and four years; for another above seven years; for the fourth above ten years; for the fifth about fifteen years; and for the sixth above twenty years. I asked once a thing of God, which I knew to be according to His mind, and though I brought it day by day and generally many times a day before Him, in such assurance as to be able to thank Him hundreds of times for the answer before it was received, yet I had to wait three years and ten months before the blessing was given to me. At another time I had to wait six years; and at another time eleven and a half years. In the last case I brought the matter about twenty thousand times before God, and invariably in the fullest assurance of faith, and yet eleven and a half years passed before the answer was given.
‘In one instance my faith has been tried even more than this. In November 1844, I began to pray for the conversion of five individuals. I prayed every day without one single intermission, whether sick or in health, on the land or on the sea, and whatever the pressure of my engagements might be. Eighteen months elapsed before the first of the five was converted. I thanked God, and prayed on for the others. Five years elapsed, and then the second was converted. I thanked God for the second, and prayed on for the other three. Day by day I continued to pray for them, and six years more passed before the third was converted. I thanked God for the three, and went on praying for the other two. These two remain unconverted. The man to whom God in the riches of His grace has given tens of thousands of answers to prayer, in the self-same hour or day on which they were offered, has been praying day by day for nearly thirty-six years for the conversion of these two individuals, and yet they remain unconverted; for next November it will be thirty-six years since I began to pray for their conversion. But I hope in God, I pray on, and look yet for the answer.
‘Therefore, beloved brethren and sisters, go on waiting upon God, go on praying; only be sure you ask for things which are according to the mind of God, The conversion of sinners is according to the mind of God, for He does not desire the death of the sinner. This is the revelation God has made of Himself— “Not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” Go on, therefore, praying; expect an answer, look for it, and in the end you will have to praise God for it.’
Of the two individuals still unconverted at the time of this sermon, one became a Christian before Muller’s death and the other a few years later.