"Pray." But this advice is far from adequate. I shall qualify the
statement presently; but let me urge it here, with what you will
perhaps call daring emphasis, that to pray for these things is not
the way to get them. No one will get them without praying; but
that men do not get them by praying is a simple fact. We have all
prayed, and sincerely prayed, for such experiences as I have named;
prayed, believing that that was the way to get them. And yet have
we got them? The test is experience. I dare not limit prayer;
still less the grace of God. If you have got them in this way,
it is well. I am speaking to those, be they few or many, who have
not got them; to ordinary men in ordinary circumstances. But if we
have not got them, it by no means follows that prayer is useless.
The correct conclusion is only that it is useless, or inadequate
rather, for this particular purpose. To make prayer the sole
resort, the universal panacea for every spiritual ill, is as radical
a mistake as to prescribe only one medicine for every bodily trouble.
The physician who does the last is a quack; the spiritual advisor
who dies 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