itten by Miss
Martineau. How gently sweet and perfect are these prayers asking for a
clean heart and a right spirit! And yet at this time Harriet Martineau had
gotten well beyond the idea that God was a great, big man who could be
beseeched and moved to alter His plans because some creature on the planet
Earth asked it. Her religion was pure Theism, with no confounding dogmas
about who was to be saved and who damned. The state of infants who died
unbaptized and of the heathen who passed away without ever having heard of
Jesus did not trouble her at all. She already accepted the truth of
necessity, believing that every act of life was the result of a cause. We
do what we do, and are what we are, on account of impulses given us by
previous training, previous acts or conditions under which we live and
have lived.

If then, everything in this world happens because something else happened
a thousand years ago or yesterday, and the result could not possibly be
different from what it is, why besiege Heaven with prayers?

The answer is simple. Prayer is an emotional exercise; an endeavor to
bring the will into a state of harmony with the Divine Will; a rest and a
composure that gives strength by putting us in position to partake of the
strength of the Universal. The man who prays today is as a result stronger
tomorrow, and thus is prayer answered. By right thinking does the race
grow. An act is only a crystallized thought; and this young girl's little
book was designed as a help to right thinking. The things it taught are so
simple that no man need go to a theological seminary to learn them: the
Silence will tell him all if he will but listen and incline his heart.
Love had indeed made Harriet's spirit free. And to no woman can love mean
so much as to one who is aware that she is physically deficient. Homely
women are apt to make the better wives, and in all my earth-pilgrimage I
never saw a more devoted love--a diviner tenderness--than that which
exists between a man of my acquaintance, sound in every sense and splendid
in physique, and his wife, who has been blind from her birth. For weeks
after I first met this couple there rang in my ears that expression of
Victor Hugo's, "To be blind and to be loved--what happier fate!"

But Harriet's lover was poor in purse and his family was likewise poor,
and the thrifty Martineaus vigorously opposed the mating. In fact,
Harriet's mother hooted at it and spoke of it with scorn; and Har