We thus commit the matter to God.  We do not ask God to raise up such missionary labourers as we think fit:  but such as He thinks fit.  We do not pray Him to alter His will concerning the heathen:  but to enable us to do what we know already to be His will.  And this course seems to me eminently rational; provided always, of course, that it is rational to believe that there is a God who answers prayer; and that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.

Now the older I grow, and the more I see of the chances and changes of this mortal life, and of the needs and longings of the human heart, the more important seems this question, and all words concerning it, whether in the Bible or out of the Bible—­

Is there anywhere in the universe any being who can hear our prayers?  Is prayer a superfluous folly, or the highest prudence?

I say—­Is there a being who can even hear our prayers?  I do not say, a being who will always answer them, and give us all we ask:  but one who will at least hear, who will listen; consider whether what we ask is fit to be granted or not; and grant or refuse accordingly.

You say—­What is the need of asking such a question?  Of course we believe that.  Of course we pray, else why are we in church to-day?

Well, my friends, God grant that you may all believe it in spirit and in truth.  But you must remember that if so, you are in the minority; that the majority of civilized men, like the majority of mere savages, do not pray, whatever the women may do; and that prayer among thinking and civilized white men has been becoming, for the last 100 years at least, more and more unfashionable; and is likely, to judge from the signs of the times, to become more unfashionable still:  after which reign of degrading ungodliness, I presume—­from the experience of all history—­that our children or grandchildren will see a revulsion to some degrading superstition, and the latter end be worse than the beginning.  But it is notorious that men are doubting more and more of the efficacy of prayer; that philosophers so-called, for true philosophers they are not—­even though they may be true, able, and worthy students of merely physical science—­are getting a hearing more and more readily, when they tell men they need not pray.

They say; and here they say rightly—­The world is ruled by laws.  But some say further; and there they say wrongly;—­For that reason prayer is of no use; the laws will not be altered to please you.  You yourself are but tiny parts of a great machine, which will grind on in spite of you, though it grind you to powder; and there is no use in asking the machine to stop.  So, they say, prayer is an impertinence.  I would that they stopped there.  For then we who deny that the world is a machine, or anything like a machine, might argue fairly with them on the common ground of a common belief in God.