ur hearts, ought it not to be easy
and fitting for us to think, at least, if we do not say, Thank you,
Father? Not only thanksgiving, but adoration.

Any uplook to something beautiful and high and fine above you partakes
of the nature of worship. So that prayer which is worship, is it not
altogether fitting and sweet and true? Only as we look up do we ever
rise up, do we ever attain to anything finer and better.

And then there is communion. Is it true that God is Spirit, and that he
is Father of his children, also spirit? Are we made in his likeness? Is
there community of nature between him and us? I believe that he is
human in all essential qualities, and that we are divine in all
essential qualities. I believe the only difference between God and man
is a difference not of kind, but of degree, and that there is,
possibility of constant interchange of thought, of feeling, communion,
between God and his children. Profound, wonderful truth it seems to me
is expressed in those beautiful words of Tennyson's:

"Speak to him thou, for he hears, And spirit with spirit may meet.
Closer is he than breathing, And nearer than hands and feet."

Communion then possible, the very life of that which is divine within
us!

Then I do not believe for one moment that prayer is only a sort of
spiritual gymnastics, that it produces results in us merely by the
exercise of spiritual feelings and emotions. I believe that in the
moral and spiritual realms prayer does produce actual results that
would not be produced in any other way. This, however, mark you
carefully, not by producing any change in God, only changing our
relations towards God. Can I illustrate it? I have a flower, for
example, a plant in a flower-pot in my room. It seems to be perishing
for the lack of something. It may be that the elements in the air do
not properly feed it: it may be that it is hungry for light. At any
rate, I try it: I take it out into the sunshine, I let the air breathe
upon it, the dews fall upon it, the rains touch it and revive it and
the plant brightens up, grows, blossoms, becomes beautiful and
fragrant. Have I changed natural laws any? Not to one parunticle. I
have changed the relation of my plant and the air; and I have produced
a result of life and beauty where would have been ugliness and death.

So I believe in prayer in that sense, that it may and does change the
spiritual attitude of the soul towards God so that we come into
entirely new