'And now I can come to the practical part. I have not been trying to entertain you, but I have been trying to interest you, and what I want to impress upon you is this: after those men have left the chapel you can do as much for their conversion as we can do in China. I want you to pray for the conversion of these men to whom we in Peking, and others in other parts of the world, are the means of communicating these truths of Christ. I believe it is not only the earnestness of the missionary that is going to produce results, but it is your earnestness here. We are your agents, and I believe, fervently, we shall have results there in direct proportion to the measure of your earnestness here. I believe I am speaking to the right people when I ask you to pray. Unprayed for, I feel very much as if a diver were sent down to the bottom of a river with no air to breathe, or as if a fireman were sent up to a blazing building and held an empty hose; I feel very much as a soldier who is firing blank cartridge at an enemy, and so I ask you earnestly to pray that the Gospel may take saving and working effect on the minds of those men to whose notice it has been introduced by us. Not long ago, at the close of a local anniversary, when we had been having a meeting, as we were going home, three of us got off a tram-car--two ministers of the locality and myself--and, as we were walking along, one said: "Ah, Gilmour, it is all the same over again; it is just the old thing; you missionaries come, and you have an anniversary, and the people's earnestness seems to be stirred up, and you ask their prayers, and it looks as if you would get them, but," he said, "you go away, and the thing passes by and is just left where it was before." I do not think that was quite correct. I think my brother was labouring under a temporary fit of the blues, and I was very glad to find his companion said it was not quite correct. What I want is this, to go back to my work feeling that there are those behind us who are praying earnestly that God's Spirit would work effectually in the hearts of those to whom we have the privilege of preaching. If you pray earnestly you can but work earnestly, and then you will also give earnestly; and I do not think we can be too earnest in the matter for which Christ was so much in earnest that He laid down His own life.'