Such direct, unmistakable answers to prayer strengthen faith, give confidence to ask for prayers for loved ones, and make it a very earnest, solemn part of the prayer meeting service.  Thus working and praying, praying and working, the church marches forward.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE TEMPLE COLLEGE

The Night Temple College Was Born.  Its Simple Beginning and Rapid Growth.  Building the College.  How the Money was Raised.  The Branches it Teaches.  Instances of Its Helpfulness.  Planning for greater Things.

In a letter written to a member of his family, from which we quote the following, Dr. Conwell tells how the idea of Temple College was born in his mind one wintry night.

“A woman, ragged, with an old shawl over her head, met me in an alley in Philadelphia late one night.  She saw the basket on my arm, and looked in my face wistfully, as a dog looks up beside the dinner table.  She was hungry, and was coming in empty.  I shook my head, and with a peculiarly sad glance she turned down the dark passage.  I had found several families hungry, and yet I felt like a hypocrite, standing there with an empty basket, and a woman, perhaps a mother, so pale for lack of decent food.

“On the corner was a church, stately and architecturally beautiful by day, but after midnight it looked like a glowering ogre, and looked so like Newgate Prison, in London, that I felt its chilly shadow.  Half a million cost the cemented pile, and under its side arch lay two newsboys or boot-blacks asleep on the step.

“What is the use?  We cannot feed these people.  Give all you have, and an army of the poor will still have nothing; and those to whom you do give bread and clothes to-day will be starving and naked to-morrow.  If you care for the few, the many will curse you for your partiality.  While I stood meditating, the police patrol drove along the street, and I could see by the corner street lamp that there were two women, one little girl and a drunken old man in the conveyance, going to jail!  I could do nothing for them.

“At my door I found a man dressed in costly fashion, who had waited for me outside, as he had been told that I would come soon, and the family had retired.  He said his dying father had sent for me.  So I left the basket in a side yard and went with the messenger.  The house was a mansion on Spring Garden Street.  The house was inelegantly overloaded with luxurious furniture, money wasted by some inartistic purchasers.  The paintings were rare and rich.  The owners were shoddy.  The family of seven or eight gathered by the bedside when I prayed for the dying old man.  They were grief-stricken and begged me to stay until his soul departed.  It was daylight before I left the bedside, and as the dying still showed that the soul was delaying his journey, I went into the spacious, handsome library.  Seeing a rare book in costly binding among the volumes