understand something of what He is doing with me or teaching me, before
I can accept His will, or get my heart to consent not to complain. It
makes me very unhappy. I begin to fear that I have never known even the
beginning of confidence, and that faith has been with me but a thing of
the understanding and the lips."

He bowed his head on his hands. Dorothy went up to him and laid a hand
on his shoulder, looking unspeakably sad. A sudden impulse moved the
curate.

"Let us pray," he said, rising, and kneeled down.

It was a strange, unlikely thing to do; but he was an unlikely man, and
did it. The others made haste to kneel also.

"God of justice," he said, "Thou knowest how hard it is for us, and Thou
wilt be fair to us. We have seen no visions; we have never heard the
voice of Thy Son, of whom those tales, so dear to us, have come down the
ages; we have to fight on in much darkness of spirit and of mind, both
from the ignorance we can not help, and from the fault we could have
helped; we inherit blindness from the error of our fathers; and when
fear, or the dread of shame, or the pains of death, come upon us, we are
ready to despair, and cry out that there is no God, or, if there be, He
has forgotten His children. There are times when the darkness closes
about us like a wall, and Thou appearest nowhere, either in our hearts,
or in the outer universe; we can not tell whether the things we seemed
to do in Thy name, were not mere hypocrisies, and our very life is but a
gulf of darkness. We cry aloud, and our despair is as a fire in our
bones to make us cry; but to all our crying and listening, there seems
neither hearing nor answer in the boundless waste. Thou who knowest
Thyself God, who knowest Thyself that for which we groan, Thou whom
Jesus called Father, we appeal to Thee, not as we imagine Thee, but as
Thou seest Thyself, as Jesus knows Thee, to Thy very self we cry--help
us, O Cause of us! O Thou from whom alone we are this weakness, through
whom alone we can become strength, help us--be our Father. We ask for
nothing beyond what Thy Son has told us to ask. We beg for no signs or
wonders, but for Thy breath upon our souls, Thy spirit in our hearts. We
pray for no cloven tongues of fire--for no mighty rousing of brain or
imagination; but we do, with all our power of prayer, pray for Thy
spirit; we do not even pray to know that it is given to us; let us, if
so it pleases Thee, remain in doubt of the gift for years