George Müller

George Müller was a Prussian con artist and thief converted at a Saxon prayer meeting, who settled in Bristol and opened an orphan house in 1836 with a deliberate rule: he would never ask a human being for a penny, so that the record itself would prove God answers prayer. By his death the Ashley Down houses had sheltered more than ten thousand orphans, and his published journals itemized the income — millions in today's terms — arriving unasked, sometimes at the hour of need; the famous breakfast story, where the children sat before empty plates and a baker and a broken-down milk cart arrived at the door, comes from his associates' accounts. In his seventies he began seventeen years of world preaching tours. He read the Bible through, by his own count, about two hundred times.