ion, as it were. If you ask them to come up and
look at a book, and they ask the price of it, you have an
opportunity of talking to them, and some of these men not only buy
the books, but they read them and come back for others.

'Now, how does the matter stand? These heathen have been in our
chapel, and we have taken the opportunity of putting some of the
truth into their hearts; but I know a good part, much, it may be,
of what the man has heard when he goes out--well, it is stolen
away, or it is trampled under foot; but some part of it remains.

'And now I can come to the practical part. I have not been trying
to entertain you, but I have been trying to interest you, and what
I want to impress upon you is this: after those men have left the
chapel you can do as much for their conversion as we can do in
China. I want you to pray for the conversion of these men to whom
we in Peking, and others in other parts of the world, are the means
of communicating these truths of Christ. I believe it is not only
the earnestness of the missionary that is going to produce results,
but it is your earnestness here. We are your agents, and I
believe, fervently, we shall have results there in direct
proportion to the measure of your earnestness here. I believe I am
speaking to the right people when I ask you to pray. Unprayed for,
I feel very much as if a diver were sent down to the bottom of a
river with no air to breathe, or as if a fireman were sent up to a
blazing building and held an empty hose; I feel very much as a
soldier who is firing blank cartridge at an enemy, and so I ask you
earnestly to pray that the Gospel may take saving and working
effect on the minds of those men to whose notice it has been
introduced by us. Not long ago, at the close of a local
anniversary, when we had been having a meeting, as we were going
home, three of us got off a tram-car--two ministers of the locality
and myself--and, as we were walking along, one said: "Ah, Gilmour,
it is all the same over again; it is just the old thing; you
missionaries come, and you have an anniversary, and the people's
earnestness seems to be stirred up, and you ask their prayers, and
it looks as if you would get them, but," he said, "you go away, and
the thing passes by and is just left where it was