When I waked up to the free and grand conception of the eternal love and the boundless goodness of the Father, then it seemed to me that many of my prayers in the past had been so far from reasonable that they were absurd, and so far from piety that they were wrong. To illustrate what I mean. When I was minister of an orthodox church in the West, a lovely, faithful lady came to me to raise some question touching this matter of prayer. It had been suggested, I suppose, by something I had said; and I asked her this question: What would you think of me if I should come to you, and with pathos in my voice, and perhaps with tears in my eyes, plead with you to be kind to your own children, beg you to give them something to eat, beseech you to furnish them with clothes, entreat you to educate them, to do the best for them that you knew how? What would you think of it? I asked. She said, I should feel insulted. And I replied, Do you not think that God is almost as good as you are? If you are anxious and ready, do you think that God needs to be pleaded with and entreated and besought in order to make him willing, in order to make him kind, in order to bring some sort of pressure to bear upon him so that he will do the things for his children of which they most stand in need? No scientific difficulty, no question of theories of the universe, has ever affected my practice in the matter of prayer so much as this overwhelming, blessed thought of the loving-kindness and care of the infinite Father. He does not need to be informed, he does not need to be persuaded. Has not Jesus told us that your heavenly Father is more ready to give the things which you need than you are to give good gifts to your children? And so I came to have a difficulty with the kind of prayer- meetings in which I was brought up as a boy, and which I used to lead as a young and earnest minister. I have heard kinds of prayers which have seemed to me reflections on the goodness and the kindness of our Father in heaven. I remember one man I used to hear him over and over again, week by week who would pray, It is time for thee, O God, to work! And, as I came to think of it, it hurt my sense of reverence. I shrank from it. And I could not believe that God was going to let thousands of souls in China or Africa perish merely because Christians in America did not pray hard enough and long enough for their salvation. Why should they meet with eternal doom on account of the lack of enthusiasm or devotion of people of whom they have never heard?