s not to be explained away.

By all means, then, we conclude, let us obey the instincts which urge us
to turn to God in {217} prayer; they lie deeper and are less
fallible--embodying as they do the experience of the race--than our
individual reasonings. We may tell our Father in all simplicity of
whatever desires we may cherish with an approving conscience, leaving the
fulfilment to His wise and steadfast love; it is not the ignorance of our
requests but the faithlessness of our spirits that we most stand in need
of guarding against. Let us here, as elsewhere, follow the example of
the Son of God, whose unique intimacy with the Father made Him only the
more earnest in communing with Him, least lonely when alone with God.
Above all, let us bear in mind that the best prayer is that which has
least of self-seeking in it, but is answered in the making, and so sends
us back to our tasks--perhaps to our trials--refreshed as by a draught
from some hidden and precious spring, renewed in manhood and nearer to
God. In the oft-quoted aphorism of George Meredith, "He who rises from
his prayer a better man, his prayer is answered." As a Greater than
Meredith said, "Your Heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all
these things; but seek ye first His Kingdom, and His righteousness, and
all these things shall be added unto you." The ideal prayer is that
which will ask little, aspire much, submit altogether; it is the soul's
complete surrender to and rest in God.

[1] The Rev. E. W. Lewis, M.A., B.D., in a paper on "The Divine
Immanence, its Meaning and its Implications." Compare also _The New
Theology_, p. 34. As Dr. William Adamson observes, "The illustration is
unfortunate. The supposed ocean is to be thought of as infinite, and the
bay is finite, but in their essence and existence they are essentially
one. There can be no bay where there is no boundary, and where in this
case could the boundary be found, for there can be nothing outside the
infinite?"

[2] Bousset, _Faith of a Modern Protestant_, p. 59.

[3] _The Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 466.

[4] _A Century's Progress_, p. 105-6.

[5] _Spinoza_, by J. Allanson Picton, p. 213.

[6] So far, of course, as such an attitude may be the outcome of an
antecedent disbelief in God, it is perfectly logical; only we have no
common ground with those who take that view. It is otherwise, however,
where an avowed acceptance of Theism is nevertheless accompan