This is the second bit of the evening's closer wooing, this long quiet talk about the supper table and along the road. It is wooing them up to more intelligence in their believing and loving. It's wooing them to trust _Him_, hold hard to _Him_, during the coming storm, when they wouldn't understand. Even when they can't understand, but stand in hopeless helpless bewilderment, they still can trust _Him_. Taken into the Innermost Life. They're outside the city-gate now, going down the path towards the Kidron Brook. Now comes the third bit of that evening's closer wooing.[120] And this is the tenderest, the most personal, the least resistible bit, the closest wooing of all. He takes them into His innermost heart-life for a brief moment. It must have reminded John afterwards of that mountain-top experience when Jesus drew aside the drapery of His humanity and let a little of the inner glory shine out. Here He takes them with Him into the holy of holies of His own inner life with His Father. Let not any one think that Jesus was simply letting them hear Him pray, so they might learn. Not that; not that. He was taking them into the sacred privacy of His own innermost life. That was a bit of the wooing, under the desperate happenings just ahead. But now as He takes them in He quite forgets them, though He knows they are there. _He is absorbed with the Father_. He isn't thinking now of the effect of all this on them. That's past. He is alone in spirit with the Father, talking out freely even as though actually quite alone. We are in the innermost holy of holies here. The heart of the world's life is its literature. The heart of all literature is this sacred Book of God. The heart of this Book is the Gospels. The heart of these four Gospels is John's. The heart of John's is this exquisite bit, chapters thirteen to seventeen. And there's yet an inner heart here. It is this bit, the seventeenth chapter, where the inner side of Jesus' prayer-life lies open to us. And we shall find an innermost heart yet again here. The simplicity of speech here catches the ear. The holy intimacy of contact with God hushes the spirit. The certainty of the Father's presence awes the heart greatly. The unquestioning confidence in the outcome is to one's faith like a glass of kingdom wine fresh from the King's own hand. The tenseness and yet exquisite quietness holds one's being still with a great stillness. Both shoes and hat go off instinctively and we stand with head bowed low and heart hushed for this is holiest ground. Of course, no paraphrase of this prayer can possibly approach its own beauty and simplicity. But it may perhaps send one back to the prayer itself to see better what is there.