with the deeper and
deeper clarification of the thought as we press home into God's
presence till we get there. It was so that he prayed, we may be
sure. It is not idly that prayer has been called "the greatest task
of the Christian man"; it will not be an easy thing, but a
strenuous.

One part of the difficulty of prayer is recognized by Jesus over and
over again. Men do not really quite believe that they will be
answered--they are "of little faith." But he tells them with
emphasis, in one form of words and another, driving it home into
them, that "all things are possible with God" (Mark 10:27)--"have
faith in God" (Mark 11:22). One can imagine how he fixes them with
the familiar steady gaze, pauses, and then with the full weight of
his personality in his words, and meaning them to give to his words
the full value he intends, says: "Have faith in God." To see him and
to hear him must have given that faith of itself. If the friend in
the house to your knowledge has the loaves, you will knock till you
get them; and has not God the gifts for you that you need? Is he
short of the power to help, or is it the will to help that is
wanting in God?

Once more the vital thing is Jesus' conception of God. Here, as
elsewhere, we sacrifice far more than we dream by our lazy way of
using his words without making the effort to give them his
connotation. To turn again to passages already quoted, will a father
give his son a serpent instead of the fish for which he asks, a
stone for bread? It is unthinkable; God--will God do less? It all
goes back again to the relation of father and child, to the love of
God; only into the thought, Jesus puts a significance which we have
not character or love enough to grasp. "Your Father knoweth that ye
have need of these things," he says about the matters that weigh
heaviest with us (Luke 12:30). Even if we suppose Luke's reference
to the Father giving the Holy Spirit to those who ask (Luke 11:13),
to owe something to the editor's hand--it was an editor with some
Christian experience--it is clear that Jesus steadily implies that
the heavenly Father has better things than food and clothing for his
children. How much of a human father is available for his children?
Then will not the heavenly Father, Jesus suggests, give on a larger
scale, and give Himself; in short, be available for the least
significant of His own children in all His fullness and all His
Fatherhood? And even if they do not ask, b