EVERY Sunday in the churches of Christendom millions of prayers are offered to God, covering every phase of want and woe that mortals experience. This goes on year after year, it has gone on for centuries, and yet the grim hosts of evil work their will among the sons of men, desolating earth with suffering and wrong. Has God disappointed His children in ignoring their petitions? or is it the divine will that the curse of sin and sorrow shall remain upon mankind? In the light of Scriptural precept and example, which is the more reasonable conclusion, that these petitions were in opposition to God's will, or that they were offered "amiss"? Is it wise for mortals to assume, because they continue in their misery after having prayed for deliverance, that their evil conditions have the approval of God? Such an assumption is an outrage to that divine Love whose will our Master did in healing the sick and the sinning.
What, then, is the value attached to these prayers by the petitioners, and what are they expected to accomplish? Does the average Christian regard his prayers as capable of bringing him the blessings asked for? Does he expect to be a better man, a happier, healthier, purer man, because he has asked God to make him one? If he does not, what advantage does he hope to realize from his petitions, since they themselves do not express his confidence and faith? In what way is the Christian's God superior to Baal, if He also is unresponsive to the calls of His children? The test of Elijah as to whether Jehovah or Baal should be recognized as the true God was the answer to prayer: and he there demonstrated the living presence and power of the God of his fathers. Do not mortals require similar evidence to-day upon which to rest their choice between the God of Jesus Christ and the pagan gods of materialism? Is not God the same to-day as well as yesterday and forever? or is the present but a barren, dreary waste between the God-crowned past of prophet, Messiah, and apostle, and a hidden millennium of the future?
Is prayer to God a wholesome and profitable practice? Is it adaptable to daily need? Does it hold the key to the understanding of the real facts of being, and may men by means of it enter into the kingdom of heaven on earth? Is it scientific, or is it superstitious to pray? These are profound, reverent, far-reaching questions, involving the rationale of the Christian religion, and the wisdom of human hope in God. Is it well to dismiss them without just consideration because past prejudices have separated Science from all things religious, or rather have united religion to mystery and superstition That which interests human welfare so closely should not be left to speculation and uncertainty, nor to the decisions of worldly knowledge; for whatever relates to God concerns the very life of man, not only hereafter but here and now and every moment. The nature of the relationship existing between God and man must not be left outside the pale of ascertainable truth, if the problem of being is ever to be worked out scientifically. Man cannot work well in the dark. He must emerge from the night of superstition, of ignorance, of blind belief, before he can rightly know God in whom is no darkness at all.
