Article May 11, 1912 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from W. H. Fitchett, Frederick Lynch

[Rev. W. H. Fitchett, LL.D., in The Southern Cross, Melbourne, Aus.]

God stands not only at the end of prayer, to answer it, but at the beginning of prayer, to inspire it. This is why every true prayer has in it a prophetic element. It is a revelation of divine purpose. And it is the worst sort of atheism to imagine that God would inspire prayer only to mock it by leaving it unanswered. Moreover, the end of prayer is not to bring the pure eternal law of God down to the level of our ignorant human will; it is to lift up our will to His. The wedlock of our will with God's will, so that we love what He loves, hate what He hates, choose what He chooses, so that every pulse of our human will beats in a golden rhythm with His will—this is the end of all prayer. Its office, it might be said, is not to change God's will, but to change ours. But what casts a shadow on prayer for many good people is their uncertainty as to what is God's will. Now, as to one set of facts, we know absolutely what is the purpose of the divine Mind. God, by the very law of His character, is pledged, through the whole range of His resources, to help us in the attainment of all spiritual good. [New York Observer.]

The shortest and surest way of knowing the goodness of the Lord is personal experience. How do we know that God is intelligent? Because we are intelligent and can see and interpret the marks of intelligence in His world. In the same way we know that God has a sense of beauty because we have an esthetic sense which finds beauty in His world. We see things as we are. Turner showed a visitor his painting of a sunset, and the visitor, looking at it, said that he had never seen such a sunset. "Don't you wish you could?" replied the painter. He had the sunset in his soul, and so he could see it in the sky. So if we are good we can see the goodness of the Lord reflected from every aspect of the world. Nature will be saturated with it, our human world will glow with it, and we shall be sure it is concealed in the darkest facts and deepest mysteries. Where we cannot see it we can say with Jesus, "Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight." Let us get God's goodness in us, and then we shall see it or be sure of it in all the experiences of life. [Universalist Leader.]

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