religious teachers exhort us to believe.' Evidently, he
imagines that it would be sufficient for the hospital authorities to
advertise--not of course, in the 'Times,' but in the 'Record'--and
that, thereupon, whoever, having entered into his closet and shut the
door, had, on behalf of any of the patients experimented upon, prayed to
the Father who seeth in secret, would at once come forth and proclaim
openly how he had been engaged. Not by 'arguments' of no greater
'cogency' than that of any based upon results thus obtainable, need
either of the two experimentalists expect to persuade praying people
that prayer is, 'in the natural course of events,' doomed to become
'obsolete, just as the Waters of Jealousy and the Urim and Thummin of
the Mosaic Law did in the times of the later Jewish Kings.' Not quite so
easily will they cause it to be 'abandoned to the domain of recognised
superstition,' just as belief in witches and in the Sovereign's touch as
a cure for scrofula, and 'many other items of ancient faith have already
successively been.' Both of them have, it seems, yet to learn that the
only prayer which is believed by people of some little enlightenment to
be of any avail, is the 'fervent, effectual prayer of a righteous man,'
prayer that cometh from 'a pure heart fervently,' prayer that is made
'with the spirit and with the understanding also.' Prayer of this sort
is not to be discredited by any abundance of statistical testimony to
the futility of cold lip-worship, or by any number of fresh examples of
the generally recognised fact that the children of this world are wiser
in their generation than the children of light. The recovery from the
very jaws of death of King Hezekiah, of Louis XV. of France, while as
yet undetected and _bien-aime_, and of the present Prince of Wales, may,
none the less probably, have been in part due to the prayers offered up
for the first by himself, for the second, according to President Henault
and Mr. Carlyle, by all Paris, and, for the third, by the whole British
empire, because _lessons_ appointed to be regularly said or _sung_ in
churches for the prolongation of the Sovereign's life, and said and sung
by the congregations to whom they are set, with equal regularity,
whether the Sovereign be well or ill, detested or beloved, are to all
appearance disregarded. Modern believers in prayer are well aware that,
although they ask, they may not receive if they ask amiss, and would
accept th