Article August 2, 1913 Issue

BASIS OF PRAYER

REV. WILLIAM E. ENNIS.

After long years of prayer,—prayer sometimes little short of agony, but which resulted in almost or quite nothing,—the writer has grown to recognize the fact that the failure of his prayer to win the result of answer lay in his failure to understand man's relation to God. His thought or belief about man did not agree with what man is. He prayed upon the spontaneous assumption that man is a mind or being apart by himself, and his prayer was an effort to get this off or apart being filled by divine power and wisdom and peace. Could he have succeeded, after beginning with such an assumption of man, he would of course have made God not the Supreme Being and the one and only Mind, but there would have been many minds, even as idolatrous mortal thought believes.

After many weary, disappointing years of prayer, the truth has sufficiently dawned upon his thought, through the teachings of Christian Science, to show him the error of this supposition. To ask God to come to a man, to enter and fill a consciousness separate from Him and unlike Him, is a pathetic act, and one divinely impossible of fulfilment. It is as if the familiar echo, being personified, should get lonely, and should ask the little boy to come and play with it. It is so weary and comfortless all by itself; in pain and sorrow it implores some one to come to it. But who can go to the echo, who can comfort and uplift it with his blessing and presence? No one can, of course, for there is no person, mind, or being called "echo;" and no more can God go to that mortal sense man who seems to be off and apart from God, for there is no such man. God can go only to what lives, and moves, and has its being in Him, because there is no real being, existence, or man outside of Himself,—outside of Deity.

And when this false mortal sense man ceases the belief that it is a man or a being, and when God is recognized as the only being, infinitely reflecting Himself through man, then we do indeed cease to pray the impossible prayer. Lighted by a beam of truth, we rise from this false self of belief; rise, and see and realize the one infinite being, and ourselves as forever perfectly and indestructibly living in God,—yea, verily living by Him—the "express image of his person." Mrs. Eddy describes the spiritual man as "that which has not a single quality underived from Deity; that which possesses no life, intelligence, nor creative power of his own, but reflects spiritually all that belongs to his Maker" (Science and Health, p. 475).

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