Editorial December 28, 1940 Issue

Scientific Insistence

Alfred Pittman

Prayer as taught by Christ Jesus, and as understood in Christian Science, is by no means a weak or faltering procedure. It may begin in the midst of great difficulties, but it rises naturally to the assurance and evidence of unqualified love and power. In its true meaning, it is a scientifically Christian activity, an expression of exact knowledge of God and His will. It is recognition that the nature of God is expressed, and that everything contrary to His nature is illegitimate, not really expressed or existent, and in no way entitled to deceive men.

It is not strange, then, that Jesus should have taught the soundness and value of insistence, indeed of what might be called a peremptory quality, in prayer; and he did this with great emphasis in two parables. On the first occasion, one of the disciples had asked him to teach them to pray; and after giving them the Lord's Prayer, and manifestly by way of showing them how it was to be used, he told of a man who went at night to a friend's house to borrow bread for a guest who had just arrived. "Trouble me not," the friend first replied (Luke 11:7). "The door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee." But Jesus continued, "I say unto you, Though he will not rise and give him, because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth."

The Master went on immediately to say, "Ask, and it shall be given you"—indicating, what indeed is obvious in Science, that in prayer the asking determines the receiving, and that any difficulty about receiving disappears in proportion as the asking is properly done.

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