68 The Fundamentals life, and souls may not be saved; but, as the late Dr. Skinner, of New York, used to say: “If the peculiar type of piety is that which is inspired by a sense of the powers of the world to come, sinners will be saved and saints edified.” Even the world that now is will feel the power of such piety. Praying feeds missions at home and abroad. I t promotes giving. Parsimony is stifled in the atmosphere of God’s pres ence. Gifts are multiplied and magnified when the giver is consecrated. When disciples begin to pray for souls they begin to yearn over them and to be willing to make sacrifices for their salvation. The key that can unlock the treasury of God’s promises has marvelous power also to unlock the treas ures of hoarded wealth, and makes even the abundance of deep poverty to abound into the riches of liberality till the widow’s mites drop into the Lord’s hands even more frequently than the millions of merchant princes. No man can breathe freely in the atmosphere of prayer while he stifles benevolent im pulses. The giving of money prepares for the giving of self, and thus prayer makes missionary workers, as well as mis sionary givers, and supporters. Few, even amongst the most devout, have ever fully felt how far workers in “the mine of heathendom” depend on those who “hold the ropes.” James Gilmour, whose rare and radiant spirit so impressed the rude Mongolians, said that, unprayed for, he would feel like a diver in the river bottom with no air to breathe, or like a fireman on a blazing building with no water in his empty hose. Prayer is not to be thought the less of because we are so often driven to the throne of grace as a last resort. It is part of the philosophy of prayer that it shall reveal its full efficacy only when and where all beside fails us. Here, as. in all else, it is only at the end of self with all its inventions, that we find the beginning of God with all His interpositions. A praying heart is the one thing that the detnl cannot
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