The Secret Place of E. M. Bounds

Edward McKendree Bounds was born in 1835 in Shelby County in Missouri. He grew up in a frontier world where faith was often formal and where prayer was too easily assumed rather than practiced. As a young man he studied law and was admitted to the bar, yet the Word of God pressed on his conscience until the courtroom yielded to the call to preach. He entered the Methodist Episcopal Church South and began the long obedience that would make his name a watchword for prayer. During the American Civil War he served as a chaplain to Confederate troops, learned the sorrow of bivouacs and field hospitals, and tasted imprisonment when federal forces swept through his region. These trials did not sour him. They sent him deeper into communion with God. When the conflict ended he returned to the pulpit determined that the church must recover the secret place or lose her power in the world.

He pastored in towns across the South and Midwest and for a season edited the St Louis Christian Advocate, but his true editorial room was the dawn hour when he met God over an open Bible. Friends and family remembered that he rose at four in the morning, that he walked and prayed aloud for long stretches before daylight, and that he often carried the burden of a text for days until prayer had turned it to flame. He preached with moral clarity and tenderness, calling congregations to holiness of heart and life, but he measured his sermons by what happened in the prayer room not by what happened in applause. In later years he settled in Georgia to write and to mentor younger ministers. There he gave himself to the manuscripts that would become the classic volumes on prayer, pages born not in study alone but in the furnace of intercession.

The man behind the books lived simply and kept short accounts with God. He refused bitterness over the wounds of war and refused cynicism over the compromises of the church. He chose the narrow road of humility, confession, and continuous asking. He loved to turn promises into petitions, to speak to God about men before he spoke to men about God, and to take the cross as the pattern for every day. When age bent his frame he prayed with the same urgency as in youth, certain that access through the blood of Christ remains the greatest privilege of a believer in any era. He died in 1913 in Washington in Georgia after a life in which the secret place governed the public work.