blind and deaf and dumb. It is evident from the text that the mute of to-day's Gospel had at one time enjoyed the use of speech, but that, having through accident or sickness lost his hearing, he had become partially, if not wholly, dumb. He is a perfect figure of a Christian soul in sin, and his miraculous cure is but the outward form of those innumerable miracles of grace, those conversions which God effects in response to prayer. "They brought to Him one that was deaf and dumb, and they besought Him that He would lay His hand upon him." To my mind, the Gospel message to-day is the necessity and the proper method of prayer; prayer for others and prayer for ourselves, that frequently turning aside with Jesus from the multitudes, our eyes may be opened to see, and our ears to hear, and our tongues loosed, to proclaim the wonderful works of God.
Brethren, though fasting and prayer go hand in hand, still of the two, prayer is the more important, for while fasting ceases on festivals, prayer becomes more insistent. And of the two forms of prayer, oral and mental, the latter is the higher, for by reason of our inconstancy, oral prayer is always in danger of degenerating into lip service, whereby men vainly seek to honor God while their hearts are far from Him. The brief, but fierce and noisy, thunderstorm is more destructive than productive, but the silent, steady, gentle downpour renews the face of the earth. Nothing is more insisted on in Scripture than the necessity of prayer: "Let nothing hinder you from praying always" is the constant cry of the
