In one way it yields results, often of an astonishing character. If the makers are sincere, the attitude of prayer harmonizes and strengthens their faculties, and enables them to bear with greater fortitude the vicissitudes of time; to bear, but not avert, impending fate. How many captives chained in dungeons have, in imitation of the apostle, prayed fervently with perfect faith that their chains might fall off, and the bars of their prison door be drawn aside, and met with no response. How many zealous martyrs have been led to the stake, praying to Jesus for deliverance which came not; and Jesus himself, in the hour of his mortal agony, prayed to the Father, to be answered by silence, and to find bitterness and mockery; a cross and a crown of thorns, where he had expected a throne and the glittering scepter of the nations. The once all-powerful belief in the ability of delegated men to control events and elements by supplication to the Deity, which made the “medicine men,” the priests and jugglers, the tyrants of mankind, has now, in civilized countries, dwindled into the intercessions for moral help, and an occasional prayer for physical changes, as for rain in times of drought, the staying of grasshoppers, or the approach of disease. It is difficult for the gospel minister to give up entirely the rôle of the “medicine man,” and cease to pray for the sick in the misty hope that God will answer. It is almost as troublesome for the preacher to let go his hold on the weather, and not follow the Indian’s rattling gourd, shaken at the sky, with prayer for the same object. This is the degradation of prayer, and the preacher clasps hands with the juggler. That this pretense is yet maintained, is made most remarkably apparent in a work on prayer recently published. An incident in the life of President Finney, of Oberlin College, copied from its pages, will amply suffice to illustrate this anachronism, a belief of savage man forced into the highest civilized thought. There was drought in Oberlin, and the thin, hard clay soil of that region suffered severely from a total failure for three months, of rain. Clouds promised the desired moisture, but hovered over the lake, and poured out their waters there. This they did day after day, raising the hopes of the anxious, and then drifting away. Finney, who was an enthusiast, was walking in the street one day, when a friend met him and said: “I should like to know what you mean by preaching that God is always wise and always good, when you see him pouring out that great rain on the lake, where it can do no good, and leaving us to suffer so terribly for want of the wasted water?”