Prayer and praying men — Reading Notes

Daniel as the Archetype of the Praying Man

Bounds devotes the bulk of the excerpted material to Daniel, treating him not merely as a biblical figure but as a template for the praying life. The author highlights Daniel's refusal to "eat of the king's meat nor drink the king's wine" as a prelude to his prayer discipline—a decision made "without debating the question one moment." This characterization emphasizes resolve and immediacy over deliberation. Bounds then recounts the dream episode, where Daniel calls his three companions into "a concert of prayer" to seek divine revelation. The result—"the secret was revealed unto Daniel in a night vision"—is presented as a direct answer to united prayer. Throughout, Bounds's voice is exhortatory: he repeatedly draws a moral from the narrative, as when he declares, "Blessed is that nation which has praying men who can come to the help of civil rulers." The structure is consistently narrative-then-application, with little abstract theorizing.

Angels, Dreams, and the Mechanics of Answered Prayer

A striking feature of the excerpts is Bounds's matter-of-fact treatment of supernatural intermediaries. When Daniel prays for understanding of the ram-and-he-goat vision, the angel Gabriel is dispatched to "make this man to understand the vision." Bounds comments: "Angels have much to do with prayer. Praying men and the angels of heaven are in close touch with each other." This claim is presented as a straightforward observation, not a contested doctrine. Similarly, the king's dream is described as "a strange dream, the particular items of which passed from his memory," and the impossibility of human recall is contrasted with divine revelation through prayer. Bounds does not speculate on the psychology of prayer or the nature of angelic activity; he simply reports the biblical sequence and draws the lesson that "puzzling questions may often find an answer in the closet." The tone is confident, almost instructional.

Bounds's Rhetorical Method: Narrative, Exclamation, and Direct Address

The excerpts reveal a distinctive rhetorical blend. Bounds moves between compressed narrative summary—"Daniel appeared upon the stage of action"—and exclamatory asides: "And it all came about because there was a praying man there just at a critical time." He frequently addresses the reader with imperatives or implied applications, though the excerpts do not contain direct second-person commands. The prose is plain and repetitive in its structure: a biblical event is recounted, then its prayer lesson is stated. The introduction by Homer W. Hodge, included in the excerpts, offers a parallel portrait of Bounds himself as a man who "was praying and writing about Him all the time, except during the hours of sleeping." Hodge's comparison of Bounds to Wesley—"Wesley was preaching and riding all day. Bounds was praying and writing day and night"—suggests that the book's method of exemplar-based teaching reflects the author's own practice.

Readers approaching Prayer and Praying Men should expect a work that moves episode by episode through Scripture, drawing explicit prayer principles from each narrative. The excerpts suggest that Bounds assumes a reader familiar with the biblical stories but in need of focused application. The book's value lies less in originality of doctrine than in the sustained, concrete attention it gives to the prayer lives of specific figures—especially Daniel. Those seeking a systematic theology of prayer may find the approach repetitive; those looking for a devotional model rooted in biblical example will find ample material.

There’s a quiet comfort in watching Daniel’s steadfastness through Edward Bounds’s eyes—prayer as a slow, hidden labor. It reminds me of an old sermon I once stumbled across, Prospects of the Church of England A sermon preached in the Parish Church of Doncaster, on Sunday evening, August 30, 1868, on the occasion of the first offertory in — Background and Themes, about offertory and duty. Both seem to speak of faithfulness not for show, but simply because it’s owed.