y people on every hand, all sorts of
things that he knew before. I reconsidered the words of Jesus, You are
not to give yourself to much speaking in your prayers, for your Father
knoweth what you have need of before you ask him. And then there was
another difficulty which troubled me more than any of the others, a
delightful, splendid difficulty it has seemed to me since those days.
It was connected with the thought of God's goodness and love. There are
heathen, they tell us, who have got a glimpse, from their point of
view, of this fact about God. It is said they do not bring any
offerings, except some flowers, to the deities they regard as good,
because, they say, they do not need to be persuaded. They bring all
their costly offerings to the bad gods, the ones they are afraid of;
and they attempt to buy their favor or buy off their anger.

When I waked up to the free and grand conception of the eternal love
and the boundless goodness of the Father, then it seemed to me that
many of my prayers in the past had been so far from reasonable that
they were absurd, and so far from piety that they were wrong. To
illustrate what I mean. When I was minister of an orthodox church in
the West, a lovely, faithful lady came to me to raise some question
touching this matter of prayer. It had been suggested, I suppose, by
something I had said; and I asked her this question: What would you
think of me if I should come to you, and with pathos in my voice, and
perhaps with tears in my eyes, plead with you to be kind to your own
children, beg you to give them something to eat, beseech you to furnish
them with clothes, entreat you to educate them, to do the best for them
that you knew how? What would you think of it? I asked. She said, I
should feel insulted. And I replied, Do you not think that God is
almost as good as you are?

If you are anxious and ready, do you think that God needs to be pleaded
with and entreated and besought in order to make him willing, in order
to make him kind, in order to bring some sort of pressure to bear upon
him so that he will do the things for his children of which they most
stand in need? No scientific difficulty, no question of theories of the
universe, has ever affected my practice in the matter of prayer so much
as this overwhelming, blessed thought of the loving-kindness and care
of the infinite Father. He does not need to be informed, he does not
need to be persuaded. Has not Jesus told us that you