Promise is like the unsown seed, the germ of life in it, but the soil and culture of prayer are necessary to germinate and culture the seed. Prayer is God’s life-giving breath. God’s purposes move along the pathway made by prayer to their glorious designs. God’s purposes are always moving to their high and benignant ends, but the movement is along the way marked by unceasing prayer. The breath of prayer in man is from God. God has everything to do with prayer, as well as everything to do with the one who prays. To him who prays, and as he prays, the hour is sacred because it is God’s hour. The occasion is sacred because it is the occasion of the soul’s approach to God, and of dealing with God. No hour is more hallowed because it is the occasion of the soul’s mightiest approach to God, and of the fullest revelation from God. Men are Godlike and men are blessed, just as the hour of prayer has the most of God in it. Prayer makes and measures the approach of God. He knows not God who knows not how to pray. He has never seen God whose eye has not been couched for God in the closet. God’s vision place is the closet. His dwelling place is in secret. “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” He has never studied God who has not had his intellect broadened, strengthened, clarified and uplifted by prayer. Almighty God commands prayer, God waits on prayer to order His ways, and God delights in prayer. To God, prayer is what the incense was to the Jewish Temple. It impregnates everything, perfumes everything and sweetens everything. The possibilities of prayer cover the whole purposes of God through Christ. God conditions all gifts in all dispensations to His Son on prayer: “Ask of me,” saith God the Father to the Son, as that Son was moving earthward on the stupendous enterprise for a world’s salvation, “and I will give thee the heathen for thy inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” Hinging on prayer were all the means and results and successes of that wonderful and Divine movement for man’s salvation. Broad and profound, mysterious and wonderful was the scheme. The answer to prayer is assured not only by the promises of God, but by God’s relation to us as a Father. “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou has shut thy door, pray to thy Father, which is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.” Again, we have these words: “If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father, which is in heaven, give good things to them that ask him?”