actually bestowed. He is not like the gas or the water furnished to your dwelling with just so much pressure to the inch, the amount received depending upon the angle to which you turn the thumb-screw of the burner or the faucet. It is not the even pressure of a constant quantity. That the Holy Spirit was historically given at a definite point in human history "when Pentecost was fully come," is a dispensational truth. Nor do we pray, in asking now for the Holy Spirit, that a certain period promised in the Old Testament may arrive. In that sense the Spirit has come. But in the sense of personal nearness we do rightly pray that he may come to men. "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give his Holy Spirit to them that ask Him." "God is a Spirit." A spirit is defined as "a supernatural intelligence conceived of as apart from any physical organization.” The Infinite Spirit is everywhere, working differently as now he creates and now he upholds the world; as here he frowns on sin and there he smiles on obedience; as he departs with his favor, though present with his notice, from the guilty, and as he fulfils to faithful souls the promise, "I will draw near unto you." The bearing of these views on the question of prayer as

related to physical law is obvious. To many persons, some of these views are wonderfully helpful and even inspiring.

And yet we must always be on our guard, and make a sharp distinction between the fact and our theory of it. The fact of answered prayer would not be less credible if we were utterly unable to construct even a proximate theory of God's method. We can have a working theory, even as do those who speak of "gravity" and "inertia," which are assumptions explaining so many facts that they are almost considered as proven. What is called "chemical law" is in the same list. And the so-called "laws of life" are largely names for our generalization. We talk of the plant and of the animal life. But we have as yet no undisputed definition of life, and know nothing of what it is save that it is. The fact does not depend on the definition or on the theory of it. And if we could have no theory at all of prayer but had only the fact, that fact would stand fast as irrefragable. And yet, to see here and there, as in other things, glimpses and drawings of divine method, is to many persons not a little helpful when they come to pray.

CHAPTER VII.

NEGATIVE ANSWERS TO PRAYER.

A FEW years since, the praying men and women of this American nation were on their knees before God. The President of the United States had been wounded by a shot fired by a miscreant hand. As the long, hot weeks went by, the intercession of Christians for his recovery became more and more earnest. If ever supplication could avail, it would seem to be when, from church and household, men of every party and every creed lifted up prayer that his life might be spared. Singularly enough, thousands of men, mistaking their eagerness for faith, made his recovery a kind of prayer test. Looking back now, those of us who passed through the trial of the weary days find that we had begun to think that there was in that case an opportunity for God to speak out, and the whole nation would own the fact that prayer was a power. We fondly hoped that for the strengthening of the godly and the confounding of the scoffer, he would do this thing. To us, the interests of religion seemed to

demand that God should restore the loved President. But Garfield died; and the disappointed men who had prayed so long, at first felt that the prayer had been all in vain. Time has given us perspective; let us look and see whether there was lack of answer.

I. God's "no" is as really an answer as God's "yes." I deny my child; telling him that he cannot have what he asks. Is not that as much a reply as when I give him what he wants? Is not a negative answer an actual answer? Must God always say "Yes"? If so, we are the gods dictating to him, and he has dethroned himself in our behalf. How a child in your home shrieked when you took from his hand the razor he had seized; and how unkind he thought you that you did not grant him his wish to retain it. But you denied him, for the best reasons. He doubted your fatherly heart at first. But, child though he was, he never thought that your denial of his wish was the same thing as taking no notice of his request. God must have room to say "no;" and he must answer in that way a good many petitions.

II. In saying "no to some prayers God answers them more wisely, not to say more fully. By denying the prayer of a nation for the suffering President, he taught us some truths this na

tion needed to consider. God's sovereignty, as we see it now, would have been put in peril in the minds of thousands, and the prayerfulness evoked would have never been so grand a moral exercise, but for those lingering, weary weeks.

III. We sometimes ask out of the line on which God is acting. It is now known that from the first the wound was fatal, and that an absolute miracle would have been needed to restore Garfield to health. It now transpires that the physicians, after the first ten days, knew that recovery was impossible. Medical science never has recorded an instance of a ball piercing that vertebra, in which the result was other than fatal. It turns out now that we were praying for a thing as unlikely had we known what now we knowas if we had asked for a second sun to rise in the east.

But why did not God perform the miracle required and raise up the wounded President? To do so would have taken the world back 1800 years, to the last great miraculous era, when God wrought miracles on men's bodies. It would have been to turn back human history as an onward development of God's plan: to set back the world's moral progress for eighteen centuries. Was it worth his while to do that thing? Would any man, seeing what that miracle involved, have