have that done for him which he knows how to do for himself.
When his art fails, if his necessity still presses, he appeals to magic,
and he prays when he no longer can control the event, provided this
event is momentous to him. Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is a
desperate effort to work further and to be efficient beyond the range of
one's powers. It is not the lazy who are most inclined to prayer; those
pray most who care most, and who, having worked hard, find it
intolerable to be defeated.

[Sidenote: Theological puzzles.]

No chapter in theology is more unhappy than that in which a material
efficacy is assigned to prayer. In the first place the facts contradict
the notion that curses can bring evil or blessings can cure; and it is
not observed that the most orthodox and hard-praying army wins the most
battles. The facts, however, are often against theology, which has to
rely on dialectical refinements to explain them away; but unfortunately
in this instance dialectic is no less hostile than experience. God must
know our necessities before we ask and, if he is good, must already have
decided what he would do for us. Prayer, like every other act, becomes
in a providential world altogether perfunctory and histrionic; we are
compelled to go through it, it is set down for us in the play, but it
lacks altogether that moral value which we assign to it. When our
prayers fail, it must be better than if they had succeeded, so that
prayer, with all free preference whatsoever, becomes an absurdity. The
trouble is much deeper than that which so many people find in
determinism. A physical predetermination, in making all things
necessary, leaves all values entire, and my preferences, though they
cannot be efficacious unless they express preformed natural forces, are
not invalidated ideally. It is still true that the world would have been
better to all eternity if my will also could have been fulfilled. A
providential optimism, on the contrary, not merely predetermines events
but discounts values; and it reduces every mortal aspiration, every
pang of conscience; every wish that things should be better than they
are, to a blind impertinence, nay, to a sacrilege. Thus, you may not
pray that God's kingdom may come, but only--what is not a prayer but a
dogma--that it has come already. The mythology that pretends to justify
prayer by giving it a material efficacy misunderstands prayer completely
and makes it ridiculous, for