om the heart
yearns much, and the prayer offered is more tender and intense and more
frequent. Well, if _you_ do not pray for them who will? Who _can_ pray for
them with such believing persistent fervour as you! God has set us in the
relationship of personal affection and of kinship for just such a purpose.
He binds us together with the ties of love that we may be concerned for
each other. If there be but one in a home in touch with God, that one
becomes God's door into the whole family.

Contact means opportunity, and that in turn means responsibility. The
closer the contact the greater the opportunity and the greater too the
responsibility. Unselfishness does not mean to exclude one's self, and
one's own. It means right proportions in our perspective. Humility is not
whipping one's self. It is forgetting one's self in the thought of others.
Yet even that may be carried to a bad extreme. Not only is it not selfish
so to pray, it is a part of God's plan that we should so pray. I am most
responsible for the one to whom I am most closely related.

<u>A Free Agent Enslaved.</u>

One of the questions that is more often asked in this connection than any
other perhaps is this: may we pray with assurance for the conversion of
our loved ones? No question sets more hearts in an audience to beating
faster than does that. I remember speaking in the Boston noonday meeting,
in the old Broomfield Street M. E. Church on this subject one week.
Perhaps I was speaking rather positively. And at the close of the meeting
one day a keen, cultured Christian woman whom I knew came up for a word.
She said, "I do not think we can pray like that." And I said, "Why not?"
She paused a moment, and her well-controlled agitation revealed in eye and
lip told me how deeply her thoughts were stirred. Then she said quietly,
"I have a brother. He is not a Christian. The theatre, the wine, the club,
the cards--that is his life. And he laughs at me. I would rather than
anything else that my brother were a Christian. But," she said, and here
both her keenness and the training of her early teaching came in, "I do
not think I can pray positively for his conversion, for he is a free
agent, is he not? And God will not save a man against his will."

I want to say to you to-day what I said to her. Man _is_ a free agent, to
use the old phrase, so far as God is concerned; utterly, wholly free.
_And_, he is the most enslaved agent on the earth, so far as sin,