Children are not allowed at the electrical switchboard, nor any unskilled hand.  For misuse means possibility of great damage to property and life.  And the spirit switchboard does not yield to the unskilled touch.  Though sometimes there seems to be much tampering by those with crude fingers, and with selfish desire to turn this current to personal advantage merely.

It takes skill here.  Yet such is our winsome God’s wondrous plan that skill may come to any one who is willing; simply that—­who is willing; and it comes very simply too.

Strange too, as with the electrical counterpart, the thing is beyond full or satisfying explanation.

How does it come to pass that a man turns a few handles, and miles away great wheels begin to revolve, and enormous power is manifested?  Will some one kindly explain?  Yet we know it is so, and men govern their actions by that knowledge.

How does it come to pass that a woman in Iowa prays for the conversion of her skeptical husband, and he, down in the thick of the most absorbing congress Washington has known since the civil war, and in full ignorance of her purpose becomes conscious and repeatedly conscious of the presence and power of the God in whose existence he does not believe; and months afterwards with his keen, legally trained mind, finds the calendar to fit together the beginning of her praying with the beginning of his unwelcome consciousness?  Will some one kindly explain?  Ah! who can, adequately!  Yet the facts, easy ascertainable, are there, and evidenced in the complete change in the life and calling of the man.

How comes it to pass that a woman in Missouri praying for a friend of keen intellectual skeptically in Glasgow, who can skillfully measure and parry argument, yet finds afterwards that the time of her praying is the time of his, at first decidedly unwelcome, but finally radical change of convictions!  Yet groups of thoughtful men and women know these two instances to be even so though unable to explain how.

And as the mysterious electrical power is being used by obedience to its laws, even so is the power of prayer being used by many who understand simply enough of its laws to obey, and to bring the stupendous results.

The Broad Inner Horizon.

This suggests at once that the rightly rounded Christian life has two sides; the out-side, and the inner side.  To most of us the outer side seems the greater.  The living, the serving, the giving, the doing, the absorption in life’s work, the contact with men, with the great majority the sheer struggle for existence—­these take the greater thought and time of us all.  They seem to be the great business of life even to those of us who thoroughly believe in the inner life.