140 Religious
you were crazy, Yet it is thought that God in answer to prayer frequently restores to health those who would naturally die. This he rarely, if ever, does suddenly and at once, as in the days of old, but gradually, through the ordinary processes of nature. In 1881, when Garfield was shot, a national day of prayer for his recovery was appointed,
No person is so sick but that God, if he chooses, can restore health; but when a person is dead no one now expects God to give life back again, or prays for it. Nor does any one expect if a person loses a limb that God will make it whole again. It is not believed that such miracles have ever been done since Bible times; not but that God could do them, but he never does, and to ask that kind of impossibility of him is useless. The less likely a thing is to come about in the usual workings of nature, the less it is expected that God will interfere and make it come about. Rain is frequently prayed for privately, and in churches on Sunday, and, in extreme cases, on week days in mass-meetings, of people that have left business and come together for the purpose. It is not rain that will come of itself that is expected,
