160 The Sources
The members funded a larger building, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and
Spurgeon’s time was filled with continual preaching and with an endless
writing output. He also founded an orphanage and the Pastor’s College,
now Spurgeon’s College. Spurgeon prayed constantly, and he led his people
in public prayer on Sundays and in weekday meetings. No record exists of
his private prayers; he would have resisted the very idea, but his transcribed
pulpit prayers are full of passion, naturalness and devotion to Jesus Christ,
his ‘well beloved’.
Prayers of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55)
Kierkegaard was an eccentric and troubled man, affected by bereavement
and a failed engagement, but he was a profound and influential Danish
thinker. He is regarded as the first existentialist philosopher. He was an
object of scorn to some and he became antagonistic towards what he saw
happening in the Danish Church, and Christianity more generally. He
insisted that it is the individual alone before God, not the crowd, who must
answer and act in obedience. This concept animates his personal prayers,
recorded in his journal and interspersed in his other extensive writings.
Amid all the complexity of his life and emotion the prayers reveal a penitent
man, eager for God’s will and dependent on Christ.
Celtic Prayers from Carmina Gadelica
(1900)Current interest in Celtic prayer arises largely from a nineteenth-century
collection of Gaelic prayers and incantations collected over 40 years in
Scotland by Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912): the Carmina Gadelica.
Some of the prayers included may be very old, originating in the Celtic
Church in the fifth to twelfth centuries. But the material is probably
more recent and the collection represents several periods of recovery
of this manner of prayer and believing. The style of the prayers and the
theology expressed seem to resonate with what we may discern of the
old Celtic tradition, such as an emphasis on the Trinity, on creation,