It has sometimes seemed to me that God does not intend the faith in prayer to rest upon an induction of instances. The answers, however explicit, are not of the kind to bear down an aggressive criticism. Your Christian lives a life which is an unbroken chain of prayers offered and prayers answered; from his inward view the demonstration is overwhelming. But do you ask for the evidences, and do you propose to begin to pray if the facts are convincing, and to refuse the practice if they are not? Then you may find the evidences evanescent as an evening cloud, and the facts all susceptible of a simple rationalistic explanation. "Prayer," says an old Jewish mystic, "is the moment when heaven and earth kiss each other." It is futile as well as indelicate to disturb that rapturous meeting; and nothing can be brought away from such an intrusion, nothing of any value except the resolve to make trial for oneself of the "mystic sweet communion." I confess, therefore, that I read examples of answers to prayer without any great interest, and refer to those I have experienced myself with the utmost diffidence. Nay, I say frankly beforehand, "If you are concerned to disprove my statement, and to show that what I take for the hand of God is merely the cold operation of natural law, I shall only smile. My own conviction will be unchanged. I do not make that great distinction between the hand of God and natural law, and I have no wish to induce you to pray by an accumulation of facts--to commend to you the mighty secret by showing that it would be profitable to you, a kind of Aladdin's lamp for fulfilling wayward desires. Natural law, the hand of God! Yes! I unquestioningly admit that the answers to prayer come generally along lines which we recognise as natural law, and would perhaps always be found along those lines if our knowledge of natural law were complete. Prayer is to me the quick and instant recognition that all law is God's will, and all nature is in God's hand, and that all our welfare lies in linking ourselves with His will and placing ourselves in His hand through all the operations of the world and life and time." Yet I will mention a few "answers to prayer," striking enough to me. One Sunday morning a message came to me before the service from an agonised mother: "Pray for my child: the doctor has been and gives no hope." We prayed, the church prayed, with the mother's agony, and with the faith in a present Christ, mighty to save. Next day, I learned that the doctor who had given the message of despair in the morning had returned, after the service, and said at once, "A remarkable change has taken place." The child recovered and still lives.