will at least hear, who will listen; consider whether what we ask is fit
to be granted or not; and grant or refuse accordingly.

You say--What is the need of asking such a question? Of course we
believe that. Of course we pray, else why are we in church to-day?

Well, my friends, God grant that you may all believe it in spirit and in
truth. But you must remember that if so, you are in the minority; that
the majority of civilized men, like the majority of mere savages, do not
pray, whatever the women may do; and that prayer among thinking and
civilized white men has been becoming, for the last 100 years at least,
more and more unfashionable; and is likely, to judge from the signs of
the times, to become more unfashionable still: after which reign of
degrading ungodliness, I presume--from the experience of all history--that
our children or grandchildren will see a revulsion to some degrading
superstition, and the latter end be worse than the beginning. But it is
notorious that men are doubting more and more of the efficacy of prayer;
that philosophers so-called, for true philosophers they are not--even
though they may be true, able, and worthy students of merely physical
science--are getting a hearing more and more readily, when they tell men
they need not pray.

They say; and here they say rightly--The world is ruled by laws. But
some say further; and there they say wrongly;--For that reason prayer is
of no use; the laws will not be altered to please you. You yourself are
but tiny parts of a great machine, which will grind on in spite of you,
though it grind you to powder; and there is no use in asking the machine
to stop. So, they say, prayer is an impertinence. I would that they
stopped there. For then we who deny that the world is a machine, or
anything like a machine, might argue fairly with them on the common