Excerpt from The Prayer-Meeting and Its Improvement It is impossible to over-estimate the value of the prayer meeting, as it stands related to the life and usefulness of the Church of Christ. In fact, no other service can be compared with this in importance - not even the Sabbath preaching, nor the instruction in the Sunday-school - for without a live prayer-meet ing the church will be spiritually cold, the Sabbath services will be formal, and the Children will be fed with husks instead of pro visions from the Master's table. The weekly prayer-meeting is the pulse of the church, -one of the most encouraging signs Of the times, in the religious world, is the increased interest manifested by pastors and churches in this topic, and the new life and power which now are found in many of these hallowed circles of united prayer and pra1se. Some Of us can remember the prayer-meetings of our childhood, when the num ber present ranged from ten to twenty or thirty, and most of these were the female members - when the leader occupied most of the hour in cold, doctrinal remarks, and then remarked: Brethren, the meeting is Open, after which came the solemn pauses, only broken by this and that good deacon taking pity on the meeting, and making a few forced and uninteresting remarks. Oh! How cold those meetings were cold enough to freeze up any longings to be a Christian, in the breast of a sinner who might have chanced to happen in. How we children used to dread being com pelled to attend, preferring even to go to bed earlier than usual, rather than to sit for an hour in that spiritual refrigerator. Such prayer-meetings are, we trust, seldom found now, for with the increased interest in the Sabbath-school, the weekly meeting has been steadily growing in importance, in the estimation Of Chris tians of all denominations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.