PRAYING THAT IS NOT PRAYING.
THERE is a good deal of this praying which is not praying at all. Men piously ask the Lord to undertake works by the score which they are too lazy or too penurious to do for themselves. Prayer becomes a cloak for laziness, and piety a mask for avarice. In this point of view, missionary meetings are the saddest places a thoughtful man can sit in for an hour's meditation. He finds himself often wondering in them, not that the heathen are not converted, but that there are any Christians left. Men meet and pray, and exhort, and turn the whole business over to the Lord's hands with an air of pious resignation, contributing a dollar or two, as they leave it, as their share toward the enterprise.