But if we
have not got them, it by no means follows that prayer is useless.
The correct conclusion is only that it is useless, or inadequate
rather, for this particular purpose. To make prayer the sole
resort, the universal panacea for every spiritual ill, is as radical
a mistake as to prescribe only one medicine for every bodily trouble.
The physician who does the last is a quack; the spiritual advisor
who dies the first is
Grossly ignorant of his profession.
To do nothing but pray is a wrong done to prayer itself, and can
only end in disaster. It is as if one tried to live only with 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 might
word is not to dethrone prayer, but to exalt it.
What dethrones prayer
is unanswered prayer.
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