aid not to pray. What can I do that I have not done, so
that I can see clearly?"

All my sympathies were excited by this letter, because I had been in
that quagmire myself. A student of Doctor Witherspoon once came to him
and said, "I believe everything is imaginary! I myself am only an
imaginary being." The Doctor said to him, "Go down and hit your head
against the college door, and if you are imaginary and the door
imaginary, it won't hurt you."

A celebrated theological professor at Princeton was asked this, by a
sceptic:--

"You say, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old
he will not depart from it. How do you account for the fact that your
son is such a dissipated fellow?"

The doctor replied, "The promise is, that when he is old, he will not
depart from it. My son is not old enough yet." He grew old, and his
faith returned. The Rev. Doctor Hall made the statement that he
discovered in the biographies of one hundred clergymen that they all had
sons who were clergymen, all piously inclined. There is no safe way to
discuss religion, save from the heart; it evaporates when you dare to
analyse its sacred element.

I received multitudes of letters written by anxious parents about sons
who had just come to the city--letters without end, asking aid for
worthy individuals and institutions, which I could not meet even if I
had an income of $500,000 per annum--letters from men who told me that
unless I sent them $25 by return mail they would jump into the East
River--letters from people a thousand miles away, saying if they
couldn't raise $1,500 to pay off a mortgage they would be sold out, and
wouldn't I send it to them--letters of good advice, telling me how to
preach, and the poorer the syntax and the etymology the more insistent
the command. Many encouraging letters were a great help to me. Some
letters of a spiritual beauty and power were magnificent tokens of a
preacher's work. Most of these letters were lacking in one
thing--Christian confidence. And yet, what noble examples there were of
this quality in the world.

What an example was exhibited to all, when, on October 8, 1885, the
organ at Westminster Abbey uttered its deep notes of mourning, at the
funeral of Lord Shaftesbury, in England. It is well to remember such
noblemen as he was. The chair at Exeter Hall, where he so often
presided, should be always associated with him. His last public act, at
84 years of age, was to go forth in