rs its lesson all the
more emphatically when it stands alone.

When you have been convinced that God cares for his creatures, and have
therefore begun, in the Mediator's name, to pray;--when you have not
only said a prayer in fulfilment of a commanded duty, but felt a want,
and like a little child requested your Father in heaven to supply it,
another lesson concerning prayer remains still to be learned--to
persevere. When you have asked once--asked many times, and failed to
obtain relief, you are tempted gradually to lose hope and abandon
prayer. Here the lesson of the parable comes in: it teaches you to
continue asking until you receive. Ask as a hungry child asks his mother
for bread. It is not a certain duty prescribed, so that when you have
performed it you are at liberty to go away. Nor is it, Ask so many
times--whether seven or seventy times seven: it is, Ask until you obtain
your desire. When the Lord desired specially to recommend importunity in
prayer, he selected a case which teaches importunity and nothing more.
He gives us an example in which unceasing pertinacity alone triumphed
over all obstacles, and counsels us to go and do likewise when we ask
good things from our Father in heaven.

In this parable, as in that of the unjust judge, a human motive that is
mean is employed to illustrate a divine motive that is high and holy. In
both cases the reason of the choice is the same; and in both the reason
of the choice becomes the explanation of the difficulty. An example of
persevering importunity in asking was needed in order to become the
vehicle of the spiritual lesson; but in human affairs such an example
cannot be found among the loving and generous: you must descend into
some of the lower and harder strata of human character ere you reach a
specimen of the pertinacious refusal which generates the pertinacious
demand. That feature of the Father's government which the Son here
undertakes to explain cannot otherwise be represented by analogies drawn
from human experience. If the villager had been more generously
benevolent, he would have complied at once with the request of his
neighbour; but in that case no suitable example for the Lord's present
purpose could have emerged from his act. In order to find an example of
persevering importunity, it was necessary to select a case in which
nothing but persevering importunity could prevail.

The terms are distinct and emphatic: "Though he will not rise and give