Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/263

 of one of these bodies, which had been even more than usually paraded by its members for its signally striking results.

This was the prayer-answering case of the Ultra-Evangelicals, a residuary body, left behind after the great mass of the original membership had subsided into the common national and scriptural church. This body had selected an ingenious and notable plan for forcing, as it were, an answer to prayer; and its members have themselves put on record their high satisfaction with its success. A church order was issued to the effect that all the Ultra-Evangelical Hospitals, on the one side of a certain line, should be diligently prayed for, while all on the other side should be as diligently omitted from prayer. The hospital was still a necessary feature in life's crowding conditions, and religious and proselytizing zeal were always still more wanting and wishing and creating the necessity. After a due interval, the results were collected and reduced.

There was no small consternation throughout the body at the first aspects of the result. There appeared, indeed, as expected, a difference between the two sides; but it was, after all, but an unimportant matter, and, what was much worse still, it was actually against the side prayed for. Hereupon, however, a member, who belonged to the Statistical Society, administered some comfort, for the moment, by the explanation that the hostile fraction, as it was called, would have entirely disappeared had the areas of cases been larger. But the Church leaders were soon aware of the utter unsatisfactoriness of this secular explanation of the said fraction. That indication as they