My heart sank within me as Mr. Cribbace spoke the words of evasion. There was nothing to be depended upon in prayer. The doctrine was a juggle of preachers. They might not mean it or think it straight out, but this is what it came to. Christ a second time repeated the words: "If ye shall ask anything in My name, I will do it." However it might be true in apostolic days, it was not true in ours, and the preachers knew it, and did not say so. Christ might as well be dead if the promise had passed away. Christianity had no material advantage to offer to the believer, whatever else it may have had. Mr. Cribbace spoke the truth now; I could see that. Never did that morning pass from my mind. That answer did not make me disbelieve, but I was never again the same Christian I had been before. The foundation on which every forlorn, helpless, uninformed, trusting believer rests had slipped--slipped away from under my feet. Whatever Christianity might be, it was no dependence in human need. The hard, material world was not touched by prayer. How else it could be moved I then knew not. For myself, I did not think about the terms of the Bible, but believed them. If there was an exception, it related to the saying of Christ that every "idle word" men should speak should be recorded against them. If "idle words" were to go down, then angry or wicked words would also be recorded. At night, as I made my last prayer, I tried to think over what I had said or done which might have been added to that serious catalogue, and thus I suffered more than my fair share of alarm. I did not know then that the rich have a much smaller account against them above than the poor, and that they fare better than the indigent in heaven, as they do on earth. A gentleman has his house and grounds, no one he dislikes can enter his home. His neighbour cannot much annoy him; he is at a distance from him. If he has a feud with his annoyer, he does not meet him above once a year, perhaps at a county ball, and there he can "cut" him; while a poor man lives in a house where he has several fellow-lodgers, who have done him a shabby turn, and whom he meets four or five times a day on the stairs. Evil thoughts come into his heart, evil words escape his lips, and he himself employs a recording angel all his time in taking down his offences, while the rich man has, peradventure, only a single note made against his name once a week.