The family of Mr. James R. Jordan has resided in Lake View, Chicago,
since the spring of 1871. They are members of Lincoln Park
Congregational Church. The father, Mr. James R. Jordan, died in October,
1882, aged eighty-four years. Through a long series of financial trials,
sorrows, afflictions by death and pressing cares, this family learned to
depend on God for their daily prosperity; and the cures wrought in them,
according to God's Word, are only a small portion of the remarkable
answers to prayer with which their history is filled.

It is an instructive fact for Christian meditation, that when the
exercise of intelligent faith was necessary to their cures, the faith
was there _ready for exercise._ They had not to begin, as, alas! so many
do, at the very foundation, and find out first, what faith is, and next,
how to exercise it. They had learned long before what faith is and what
faith is not; that _faith is trustful obedience to the Word of God;_
that it _is not_ a determination to have one's own way, nor to expect
the immediate gratification of a desire, simply because the desire has
been made known to God. They knew that faith obediently accepts God's
commands and promises, expects to comply with the conditions of those
commands and promises, and, so complying, expects to receive the results
of such obedience at such times and in such ways as God appoints; all of
which truths they found, and all of which may be found in the Holy
Scriptures.

Thus living in the hopes of the Gospel, realizing as much that their
"home is in heaven" as that their "rest is not here," they have, through
the years, performed the daily duties of their pilgrimage.