XII

SPIRITUAL FRONTAGE

Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God. - Daniel vi. 10.

As one travels through the countries

which the Old Testament describes

-through Syria or Arabia or Egypt - he is apt to see a very strange and impressive sight. He stands watching the sun drop behind the violet hills and the shadows lengthening across the tawny plain, and far away on the desert he sees a solitary Arab guiding his camel over the yellow waste. The sun sinks and this lonely traveller halts, dismounts, and spreads his little carpet on the sand. He is all unconscious that any human eye is on him; all he thinks of is that his hour of prayer has come. He turns himself toward the point where he believes that his holy city of Mecca lies, and while his tired beast drops into welcome rest he

bows and prostrates and uplifts himself in absorbing prayer, a dark and miniature silhouette cut against the evening sky.

The first impression of such a scene is its awful and tremendous solitude. Here is a single human being on this sea of sand, alone with his God. In a moment, however, you remember that such worship is never solitary. It is, on the contrary, the one thing that takes from the lonely camel-driver all sense of solitude. He knows that in every part of the Mohammedan world, throughout India and Persia and Turkey and northern Africa, millions of men are bending with him in the same fading light, all facing on converging lines to the same central holy spot, the city of the Prophet; and as he repeats with this great multitude his simple prayers, he is taken up out of his solitude into the companionship of a common faith.

The same instinct which makes these Arabian races turn to their sacred place was moving the prophet Daniel in this passage. What Mecca is to them, Jerusalem was to him. It was his holy city, and he a captive in far-away Babylon. He is homesick for his lost temple; he longs for his home-worship.

So he gets him a dwelling fronting toward the city of his God, and as he prays he looks out across the open view, as though his prayers could cross the desert and touch the walls of Zion. He faces westward, under the same impulse which made the builders of the great Christian cathedrals place their altars at the east end, so that worshippers in Europe should face toward that same holy land and holy city.

Now, there may well seem to us much that is outgrown and superstitious in thus caring which way a worshipper should face. Every land, we say, is holy. All windows open on sacred scenes. The Meccas and Jerusalems of our worship are not walled cities, they are invisible and inward sources of inspiration. And yet it remains true that this principle of the outlook of the soul, the habitual frontage of one's life and thought, is still the most preliminary question of religion. Just as your home or room is valuable as it looks south or north, as it faces sunny fields or sunless alleys, so the first principle of the mind or soul is that it shall face the right way; and the difference between spiritual health and spiritual disease

is often not so much a matter of opinion, or creed, as of spiritual frontage.

Here, for instance, are two men who belong to the same political party; they assent to the same platform; they vote for the same candidate; they cheer at the same meeting; and yet, the motives which govern their minds are absolutely opposed. To one the party means the principle of reform, the security of trade, the permanence of our institutions; to the other it means the keeping of his own place, the hiding of his own crime, the price for his own vote. They are like people who live on opposite sides of the same street. In a certain sense they are near neighbors, and yet their points of view are directly opposite. One faces north, the other south. One looks toward the sun, the other toward the shadow. Each of them finds in the party which he opposes many persons much more like him than some who vote by his side. They do not vote for the same ticket, but they vote for the same ideas. They are not such near neighbors, but they do look out on the same view.

Or take the sympathies which people sometimes feel in religion and which are often

quite perplexing. Now and then you fall in with a person whose religious convictions are apparently very far removed from your own, but with whom you feel the subtle sympathy of a congenial soul. If your only association had been that of doctrinal discussion, you would have found no common ground of conviction; but what surprises you is the discovery, in spite of radical differences of opinion, of a common outlook. Worship means the same thing to you both; the windows of your souls open the same way; and you find more genuine sympathy with this believer in another creed than with many who stand very near you in opinion, but who stand, as it were, back to back with you and look out on different views.

Thus it happens that the first questions, even if not the greatest, which any soul should ask of itself are not: Where do I stand? What do I believe? What have I attained? but rather the much more elementary questions: Which way do I face? What is the habitual outlook of my mind and heart? Is there, indeed, any such outlook, past all the details and drudgery of life, toward any holy Jerusalem to which I turn in prayer?