But if it were not too delicate a subject I could recite instances, to me the most remarkable answers to prayer in my experience, of changed character and enlarged Christian life, resulting from definite intercession. It is an experiment which any loving and humble soul can easily make. Take your friends, or better still the members of the church to which you belong, and set yourself systematically to pray for them. Leave alone those futile and often misguided petitions for temporal blessings, or even for success in their work, and plead with your God in the terms of that prayer with which Saint Paul bowed his knees for the Ephesians. Ask that this person, or these persons, known to you, may have the enlightenment and expansion of the Spirit, the quickened love and zeal, the vision of God, the profound sympathy with Christ, which form the true Christian life. Pray and watch, and as you watch, still pray. And you will see a miracle, marvellous as the springing of the flowers in April, or the far-off regular rise and setting of the planets,--a miracle proceeding before your eyes, a plain answer to your prayer, and yet without any intervention of your voice or hand. You will see the mysterious power of God at work upon these souls for which you pray. And by the subtle movements of the Spirit it is as likely as not that they will come to tell you of the divine blessings which have come to them in reply to your unknown prayers. But there are some whose eyes are not yet open to these invisible things of the Spirit, which are indeed the real things. The measure of faith is not yet given them, and they do not recognise that web,--the only web which will last when the loom of the world is broken,--the web of which the warp is the will of God, and the woof the prayers of men. For these, to speak of the whole as answered prayer is as good as to say that no prayer is answered at all. If they are to recognise an answer it must be some tiny pattern, a sprig of flower, or an ammonite figure on the fabric. Let me close, therefore, by recounting a very simple answer to prayer,--simple, and yet, I think I can show, significant.