Here is surely enough knowledge to comfort many a bereft heart, and enough too to make us pray persistently and believingly for loved ones because of prayer’s uncalculated and incalculable power.  Be sure the prayer-fact is in the case of your friend, and in strong.

Yet let us be wary, very wary of letting this influence us one bit farther.  That man is nothing less than a fool who presumes upon such statements to resist God’s gracious pleadings for his life.  And on our side, we must not fail to warn men lovingly, tenderly yet with plainness of the tremendous danger of delay, in coming to God.  A man may be so stupefied at the close as to shut out of his range what has been suggested here.  And further even if a man’s soul be saved he is responsible to God for his life.  We want men to live for Jesus, and win others to Him.  And further, yet, reward, preferment, honour in God’s kingdom depends upon faithfulness to Him down here.  Who would be saved by the skin of his teeth!

The great fact to have burned in deep is that we may assure the coming to God of our loved ones with their lives, as well as for their souls if we will but press the battle.

Giving God a Clear Road for Action.

Out in one of the trans-Mississippi states I ran across an illustration of prayer in real life that caught me at once, and has greatly helped me in understanding prayer.

Fact is more fascinating than fiction.  If one could know what is going on around him, how surprised and startled he would be.  If we could get all the facts in any one incident, and get them colourlessly, and have the judgment to sift and analyze accurately, what fascinating instances of the power of prayer would be disclosed.

There is a double side to this story.  The side of the man who was changed, and the side of the woman who prayed.  He is a New Englander, by birth and breeding, now living in this western state:  almost a giant physically, keen mentally, a lawyer, and a natural leader.  He had the conviction as a boy that if he became a Christian he was to preach.  But he grew up a skeptic, read up and lectured on skeptical subjects.  He was the representative of a district of his western home state in congress; in his fourth term or so I think at this time.

The experience I am telling came during that congress when the Hayes-Tilden controversy was up, the intensest congress Washington has known since the Civil War.  It was not a time specially suited to meditation about God in the halls of congress.  And further he said to me that somehow he knew all the other skeptics who were in the lower house and they drifted together a good bit and strengthened each other by their talk.