Once answered, the prayer brings the additional responsibility of walking in its light. We find ourselves straggling within the toils of some disaster. We ask the Lord, “How is this?” He gradually unfolds the meaning as indicating some transition in His plan for our life. Having carried us safely through, and having set us surely in the line of the new departure, He expects us to take up the full measure of its obligation. When, with Saul of Tarsus, we are dazed by the new experience and cry out, Lord, what wilt thou have us to do? we are, with him, to accept the labor and sacrifice implied thereby. David puts it thus: “I will pay Thee my vows which my lips have uttered and my mouth hath spoken when I was in trouble.” Hannah, with her prayer answered in the gift of a son, must fulfil her vow in devoting him to the service of the Lord. For a long time God’s people were praying Him to open the way among the nations for the entrance of the Gospel of his Son. He answered by setting open the door to every land and to every island of the sea. It is our duty to enter and occupy. If we do not, we are grossly disobedient to the heavenly vision; we are found guilty of deserting in the battle of the great day of the Lord Almighty. The Christian world now rests under this obligation. We wrestled with God in prayer for the deliverance of our brethren in bonds. We cried, Oh Lord, how long! how long! The answer came by terrible things in righteousness. We had scarcely expected to see it in our day. Our thought had stopped with the great burden of emancipation. Our vision scarcely took in the mountain of obligation looming in the horizon of our answered prayer. We thought that if we could only see our country delivered from its crime and shame of oppression, the millennium would be near at hand. We had not yet taken upon our hearts the burden of lifting up the emancipated race. We had not yet received our divine commission to lead this people through their forty years of training into the citizenship of the republic and of the kingdom of God. But this was all implied in the answering of our prayer. We asked for this child of liberty, and now it is but the instinct of nature and the demand of reason that we meet the obligation of its nurture. We prayed that the slaves might be set free, and this implies that we make good the conditions of freedom. In the words of the martyr-President, they are “the wards of the nation.” So also are they the children of the Church, given in answer to prayer, to be nourished into Christian character for service in this their native land and in the country of their ancestral home. J. E. ROY. * * * * * AFRICA IN AMERICA AND AMERICA IN AFRICA. We are glad to print the following letter, from an intelligent friend in New England, to a member of our Executive Committee: MY DEAR SIR: