GROSSLY IGNORANT OF HIS PROFESSION.

To do nothing but pray is a wrong done to prayer itself, and can only end in disaster.  It is as if one tried to live only with the lungs, as if one assimilated only air and neglected solid food.  The lungs are a first essential; the air is a first essential; but the body has many members, given for different purposes, secreting different things, and each has a method of nutrition as special to itself as its own activity.  While prayer, then, is the characteristic sublimity of the Christian life, it is by no means the only one.  And those who make it the sole alternative, and apply it to purposes for which it was never meant, are really doing the greatest harm to prayer itself.  To couple the word “inadequate” with this mighty word is not to dethrone prayer, but to exalt it.

          WHAT DETHRONES PRAYER

is unanswered prayer.  When men pray for things which do not come that way—­pray with sincere belief that prayer, unaided and alone, will compass what they ask—­then, not getting what they ask, they often give up prayer.

This is the natural history of much atheism, not only an atheism of atheists, but a more terrible atheism of Christians, an unconscious atheism, whose roots have struck far into many souls whose last breath would be spent in denying it.  So, I repeat, it is a mistaken Christianity which allow men to cherish a blind belief in the omnipotence of prayer.  Prayer, certainly, when the appropriate conditions are fulfilled, is omnipotent, but not blind prayer.  Blind prayer is a superstition.  Prayer, in its true sense, contains the sane recognition that while man prays in faith, God acts by law.  What that means in the immediate connection we shall see presently.

What, then, is the remedy?  It is impossible to doubt that there is a remedy, and it is equally impossible to believe that it is a secret.  The idea that some few men, by happy chance or happier temperament, have been given the secret—­as if there were some sort of knack or trick of it—­is wholly incredible and wrong.  Religion must be for all, and the way into its loftiest heights must be by a gateway through which the peoples of the world may pass.

I shall have to lead up to this gateway by a very familiar path.  But as this path is strangely unfrequented where it passes into the religious sphere, I must ask your forbearance for dwelling for a moment upon the commonest of commonplaces.

I. EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES.

Nothing that happens in the world happens by chance.  God is a God of order.  Everything is arranged upon definite principles, and never at random.  The world, even the religious world, is governed by law.  Character is governed by law.  Happiness is governed by law.  The Christian experiences are governed by law.  Men, forgetting this, expect Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith to drop into their souls from