The teachers in the Beginners’ departments realize the need of the cultivation of prayer and pray simply and often during the session, baby lips repeating the words.  Through cards and memory verses prayers go into homes where none are ever made.  In Primary departments the instruction is continued and children are led to express themselves in simple words of worship.  In the Junior departments there is the superintendent’s prayer—­the appeal it makes depending upon the leader’s sympathy, and knowledge of childhood.  Often both are lacking.  These Junior girls know the street, the moving picture show, the unsupervised playground, the temptations of school life; they are beginning to show the moral effect of poverty on the one hand and social ambitions and false standards on the other.  How many prayers for girls from ten to twelve does one hear?  How many can he find though he search ever so diligently.

When we come to the girl in her teens we find often in large numbers of classes that the only instruction in prayer is the indirect teaching from the prayer at the desk.  How many girls listen reverently to it?

They come from stores and shops, from high schools, offices, homes of plenty and homes of want.  They know temptation, they meet it in more dangerous forms than ever before.  How does the prayer affect life as they know it?  Very little I am bound to believe unless the great experience has come to them and they have said in simple girlish fashion, “O Christ, I choose thee King of my life—­I follow thee wherever the way shall lead,” unless that transferring of will from vague and indefinite desire to a definite purpose has come, the prayer which is a part of the average opening service will have little influence.  Even if the great decision has been made, the prayer of one far away at the desk, often out of touch with young life, does not bring the uplift.

What a teacher may do the following testimony of a young girl may help us to see: 

“I never had any special instruction in prayer at home.  I think I must have said my prayers when a very little child.  My parents are just fine but they do not go to church.  They almost always spend Sundays with grandmother on the farm.  I do not remember any instruction about prayer, though of course it was mentioned and I knew good people prayed, until I was seventeen when the finest teacher I ever had talked to us about it for four Sundays.  Then I saw how much the people who had helped the world had prayed and how much it did for them.  She made Christ seem so beautiful and sympathetic that though I can’t explain it I wanted to pray myself.  That afternoon out in the hammock I did.  I shall never forget how wonderful the world seemed....  In a few weeks three of us joined the church and we prayed for the other girls.  That year eight of us joined.”

The testimony speaks for itself.  She taught them what prayer had done for others; she made them want to pray.  I do not know that teacher but I feel sure she knew by experience what she taught.