spiritual adviser who does the first is

GROSSLY IGNORANT OF HIS PROFESSION.

To do nothing but pray is a wrong done to prayer itself, and can only
end in disaster. It is as if one tried to live only with the lungs,
as if one assimilated only air and neglected solid food. The lungs are
a first essential; the air is a first essential; but the body has many
members, given for different purposes, secreting different things, and
each has a method of nutrition as special to itself as its own
activity. While prayer, then, is the characteristic sublimity of the
Christian life, it is by no means the only one. And those who make it
the sole alternative, and apply it to purposes for which it was never
meant, are really doing the greatest harm to prayer itself. To couple
the word "inadequate" with this mighty word is not to dethrone prayer,
but to exalt it.

WHAT DETHRONES PRAYER

is unanswered prayer. When men pray for things which do not come that
way--pray with sincere belief that prayer, unaided and alone, will
compass what they ask--then, not getting what they ask, they often
give up prayer.

This is the natural history of much atheism, not only an atheism of
atheists, but a more terrible atheism of Christians, an unconscious
atheism, whose roots have struck far into many souls whose last breath
would be spent in denying it. So, I repeat, it is a mistaken
Christianity which allow men to cherish a blind belief in the
omnipotence of prayer. Prayer, certainly, when the appropriate