law of the true and the false." No man makes anything right or wrong. It is so in itself. It was so before we came, and would be so if we were out of the system. It is the world where, by virtue of our moral equipment of faculties, we do our work, exactly as by our physical equipment of hand and foot and eye and ear we do our physical work. Physical material is, in our physical world, just what moral material is in our spiritual world. Physical facts are our environment in body, as spiritual facts are the furnishing for our spiritual life, They are not it. It demands them. Intellectual truth for the sentient mind, and moral truth for the conscious soul, are the requirements of faculty, just as is light for the eye and an objective world for the sense of touch.

As to the rank of these three realms, the physical world, the intellectual world, and the moral world-it is to be noticed that the latter has some deliverance to offer upon each of the other realms besides its own. The final ends of God are moral ends; and God and man both have it to use the physical and the mental so as to secure moral results. Prayer in its askings and answerings will have to do mainly with the moral realm; for the soul's duties and trials, its perplexities and weaknesses, its sins and its sorrows, its struggle

and its salvation, are the main things about which prayer is concerned. And yet the physical often bears so closely on the moral that we ask for material things as they are related to our spiritual life.

Dr. Bushnell, after urging that matter is not a two-faced something, one face of which is physical and the other spiritual, insists that "God has in fact erected another and higher system—that of spiritual government-for which nature exists." But as the two worlds are related, and prayer may have to do with them both, the answer may come in the related realm rather than that concerning which we specifically ask. But by far the larger number of requests will be within the spiritual sphere of things. Our prayer-tests will be mainly in the moral realm, where lie our largest needs, and to which come the promises that are of grandest scope. In this moral realm, it is soul meeting soul, the essential man meeting the One in whom his largest desires find their satisfaction. Both act under the law of sympathetic touch; and the prayer would seem to be not more natural than the answer. It is heart drawn to heart. It is a moral act in which two spiritual beings, in moral agreement, and acting on the same moral plane, speak to each other of their moral work. What more natural than that the one should ask, and

the other give, counsel; that the weaker in right should seek help of the stronger; that recognition should pass into communion of thought and feeling, in those who, however far apart in position, are seeking a common moral end? Is there anything improbable in such an exercise? Surely there should be an arrangement by which, at least occasionally, and in the great crises of a man's life, this thing might be done. We can certainly maintain it as a very strong probability that it is done. It is more than likely that somewhere and somehow, at least in the interspaces of event and law, if in no other way, God has left himself room for answer to the petitions of those so evidently made in his own image. What if, by-andby, further on in the argument, we shall find that God is shut up to no such narrow limits as some might think; that there is no reason to ask how, under and between physical laws, there can be crevice and loophole, so that God can find place to send answer to human petition; but that, alike by abundant arrangement, both in the physical and spiritual realms, and by his own ever-present personality, he is able, from the depths of his being, to sound the depths of our souls, when he has encouraged and inspired the prayer he proposes to answer?

Or yet again: this question of the probability

of answered petition can be approached from the physical side. We can begin at the other end of the line and come in toward the centre. It adds to the force of the argument to recall the conceded physical fact that even the words spoken by man, in oath as well as in prayer, make for themselves an imperishable record. Prayer is thus a part of the ever-written literature of the universe, remaining visible for the inspection of God and for the review of other moral beings with finer perceptions-perhaps for the continuous reading of man himself in superior states of development. Says another, "The air is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said, or woman ever whispered." "The earth and the sea give up their dead" in ways beyond those in which our interpretation may have understood the words. What we have written we have written. And the voice of prayer can be no exception, for even its words are not lost. Addressed, prayer goes to its destination. The petition of the devout heart has clothed itself in words; those words take their place among the facts that cannot be changed or lost. The universe is like one of those old-time palimpsests, or manuscripts covered over with successive layers of writing, which now, by our modern skill, are taken off separately and read out in the au

dience of the world, and whosoever cares may listen. There is an instrument into which you may speak, and, instantly, on a cylinder, not only your words, but your tones, your stress and accentuation, are all preserved, and the cylinder will give it all back again with absolute fidelity and startling distinctness; and that not once or twice, but an unknown number of times. The universe may be considered as one vast and indestructible graphophone, which records all that man has ever said, and returns all the utterances he has ever made, even the most secret prayer that has ever left his lips in the chamber of his devotion. To ask is to answer the poet's question:

"Do the elements subtle reflection give?

Do pictures of all ages live

On nature's infinite negative?"

In a universe with a recording system so per fect, a telegraphic system so carefully arranged and reaching so far with every word entrusted to its care, can a single sentence of human supplication get out of the range of God's eye or ear? Can he be the kind of a being who is not likely to listen kindly and answer fully the petition which is a perpetual fact? It rises from an earnest soul, it bursts the bounds of the lips and breaks into a vocal prayer, which thenceforth becomes an imperishable fact in the universe of God. It must