ith 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 w