ONE Sunday evening at the usual services the invitation was given, as is customary, for such persons who especially desired to be mentioned in the daily prayers of the people to rise for a moment before the singing of the last hymn. The sermon had not mentioned the need of prayer and contained no special evangelistic appeal. The invitation was the customary proceeding throughout the year. The three thousand seats were all filled. The audience was composed, as usual, largely of men, and they were men of middle age. There were young people, representing both sexes, scattered through the audience, and lines of them along the back rows of seats in the distant gallery. No attempt was made to emphasize the ordinary invitation in any special manner. But when the solemn moment came for the prayer-seekers to rise the response was so general that the preacher asked those who had risen to remain standing until the pastors could see them and count them. There were over five hundred, and for a few weeks that was about the usual number of those who arose.
But the preacher was especially startled by the fact which he had not especially noted on previous occasions, that the majority of those who asked for prayer were young people. The scene, when those youthful faces appeared on every side and in so large a congregation, filled the soul of the beholder with almost painful awe. It led the preacher to meditate a moment to ask Christ and himself why so many young people took such a solemn, sincere interest in prayer at that time. The thought led him, before the benediction, to request all who had stood forth for prayer to write to him a personal and confidential letter explaining why they desired to be mentioned in the prayers of the Christian people. The letters came the next week by the hundred. It was an astonishing revelation. The letters from unmarried people were culled out of the collection and reread at leisure. Some of them were in need of higher wages; some were seeking for a personal religious awakening; some asked prayers for friends, for business, for safe journey, for health, or for other protection and relief. But out of two hundred and eighty-seven letters from those young people over two hundred mentioned, directly or indirectly, their strong desire for a husband, a wife, or a home. The details of lovers' quarrels were opened up, the anguish of broken engagements expressed on tear-stained sheets of note paper, and many doubtful lovers wished the Lord would reveal to them whether their choice had been a wise one or whether their love was deep enough for such an extremely important matter as marriage. The letters revealed such a general longing for a home that one seldom realizes is really existent. There were a few letters from young college women and university men. But the greater portion were from working girls. They were the most touchingly sacred records of the everyday thoughts of young women, all sincerely and modestly expressed. When those young women saw some handsomely gowned wife pass her desk, her counter, her bench, or loom, leading a bright-faced little son, the working girl's soul uttered an unvoiced shriek for a home, for a noble husband's protection, and for children of her own. Women waiters who daily fed the wives of wealthy merchants or of prosperous manufacturers wrote how terrible was the thought that they were going to be homeless and penniless in their old age—one great prayer going up to high heaven for holy domestic love and a place they could call"home."
After that evening's call upon the seekers after God to rise the request for letter
