I am told, also, that this being watches over us, takes care of us. And the other day I read a sermon (you will hardly believe it, but I did); I had nothing else to. I had read everything in that paper, including the advertisements; so I read the sermon. It was a sermon by Rev. Mr. Moody on prayer, in which he took the ground that our prayer should be "Thy will be done;" and he seemed to believe that if we prayed that prayer often enough we could induce God to have his own way. He gives an instance of a woman in Illinois who had a sick child, and she prayed that God would not take from her arms that babe. She did not pray "Thy will be done," but she prayed, according to Mr. Moody, almost a prayer of rebellion, and said: "I cannot give up my babe." God heard her prayer, and the child got well; and Mr. Moody says it was an idiot when it got well. For fifteen years that woman watched over and took care of that idiotic child; and Mr. Moody says how much better would it have been if she had allowed God to have had his own way. Think of a God who would punish a mother for speaking to Him from an agonizing heart and saying, "I cannot give up my babe," and making the child an idiot. What would the devil have done under the same circumstances? That is the God we are expected to worship. I range myself with the opposition. The next day I read another sermon preached by the Rev. De Witt Talmage, a man of not much fancy, but of great judgment. He preached a sermon on dreams, and went on to say that God often visited us in dreams, and that He often convinces men of His existence in that way. So far as I am concerned I had rather see something in the light. And, according to that sermon, there was a poor woman in England, a pauper who had the rheumatism, and there was another pauper who had not the rheumatism; and the pauper who had not the rheumatism used to take food to the pauper that had. After a while the pauper without rheumatism died, and then the pauper with the rheumatism began to think in her own mind, who will bring me food? That night God appeared to her in a dream. He did not cure her rheumatism though. He appeared to her in a dream, and he took her out of the house and pointed on the right hand to an immense mountain of bread, and on the left hand to an immense mountain of butter. And when I read that I said to myself, my Lord, what a place that would be to start a political party. And he said to her: "These belong to your father; do you think that he will allow one of his children to starve? What a place would Ireland be with that mountain of bread and butter! Until I read these two sermons I hardly believed that in this day and generation anybody believed that God would make a child an idiot simply because the mother had prayed for its sweet dear life, or that God's visits are only in dreams. But so it is.