TO learn how to pray aright is to learn the secret of all Christian success. The problems of evil—sin, disease, sorrow, misfortune, and want—confront mortals at every turn, and their right solution, which will enable men to erase these conditions from consciousness, involves the true understanding and practice of prayer, not as a blind hope nor as the homage of superstitious fear, but as the application of the Christ-truth in correcting human error.
It has ever been the desire of mankind to understand the origin or Principle of being, to discover and know God, around the thought of whom there have been grouped the various human concepts of heaven. This state of heavenly bliss has been pictured as existing in the presence of God, but always so far away that earth's suffering inhabitants have only dreamed of it as a distant possibility. The truest form of prayer is that which satisfies most the desire to know God, and that removes humanity's sense of separation from Him. It is certain that when mortals realize the presence of God they will have entered the kingdom of heaven, and will therefore be above the conditions which bring about hell,—the rule of discord. That this is the purpose of prayer, and that it may be realized on earth, is made evident by that petition of Jesus which must ever remain a model for all Christians.
The student needs to remember at the outset that the office of prayer is not to shape the thoughts of God, but of men. As we are told in our text-book, God does not await human appeals for help to be All in all to man, for He is to-day, as He has been in the past and will be forever, the omnipresence and omnipotence of infinite Love, abiding with His own in all ways and times and needs. God cannot be otherwise than Himself. A million years of human pleading, however pitiful, could not make Him more loving, kind, merciful, and good than He is and ever has been. Every need is already provided for in the truth of what God is. The necessity for prayer lies in mortal ignorance of that truth, and prayers are answered as this ignorance is removed. God has no need to give over again what He has already given, or to do over again what He has already done, any more than He has to make new suns to lighten the darkness of closed eyes.
