A Poet on Prayer

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 48, 19 November 1932, Page 16

A Poet on Prayer

“I suppose that most people in distress have made wild demands in prayer, and have been frustrated in consequence. Plainly, much for which we ask is not given us. But much that we ask is asked against the course of nature, from "which suffering is in-

separable. "Christ had no intention of promising to deflect the course of nature. He promised no immunity from grief. His ‘Ask and it shall be given unto you’ presupposed a fitness of mood in the asking, and of such fitness would come a clear understanding of the nature of the thing asked. “Man’s communion with God, as Christ expounded it, predicted a mood in which man, shaping his desires, had faith that to God must be left the decision as to how they could best be satisfied, and further faith to accept the possibility of the divine way seeming at the time to be at odds with the way of man’s conception. “It is not an act 'of resignation that is demanded, but an act of faith. Christ made no pretence that in any circumstances it was an easy world for man.”—Mr. John Drinkwater, in the "Sunday Dispatch.”