The chapter on Prayer in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy is revolutionary and reformative. Its simplicity, sublimity, and purity far transcend any former teaching regarding prayer since the Lord's Prayer was given to Christ Jesus' disciples. The effect of Jesus' prayers far outstripped anything the disciples had heretofore known. They saw the sick healed, the blind restored to sight, the tempest stilled, and the multitude fed. No wonder they implored him, "Lord, teach us to pray." Mrs. Eddy writes (Science and Health, p. 16), "Our Master said, 'After this manner therefore pray ye," and then he gave that prayer which covers all human needs." Do we fully realize that no matter what the problem, how great the appearance of danger, how desperate the human need, there is a complete answer to be found in the Lord's Prayer? The first statement. "Our Father which art in heaven," excludes all but God the Father-Mother of us all, and the last statement conveys the triumphantly adoring recognition of His power and glory. The all-inclusiveness of God, good, is the all-exclusiveness of evil's claim to presence and power.

The epitome of prayer is found expressed in the first sentence of Mrs. Eddy's chapter on Prayer. It reads (ibid., p. 1), "The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God.—a spiritual understanding of Him, an unselfed love."

Absolute faith, spiritual understanding, unselfed love! These three essentials revolutionize one's attitude toward prayer, lifting it from the realm of petition, supplication, or intercession for God's pardon into the sublimity, grandeur, and peace of kindling desire, aroused hope, and unvoiced acknowledgment of God, good. The recognition that God is infinite Love, and man the reflection of Love, is the basis of true prayer. Discovering that good is infinite, and that man is already the possessor of all that God has to give, brings results. Such prayer cannot be hindered by the tempting influence of vanity, self-righteousness, or self-glorification.

The writer knows an infidel who was restored to faith in divine power when he read (ibid., p. 1). "Desire is prayer." He thought. "I can pray like that." He did, and continued to pray, for he had found the approach to God, the divine Mind. A man who had been profane since boyhood, who had never read the Bible or attended a church service, was healed when he read the chapter on Prayer in the textbook, for he said, "I could not take the name of God in vain after I had read that book for two hours."

In this day, when human problems are admittedly beyond the ability of the human mind to solve, when the upheavals of the carnal mind present situations of danger, threatened disease, and loss, when our understanding of God, good, is taxed to the fullest extent, it is well to remember that the Lord's Prayer "covers all human needs." An earnest student of the chapter on Prayer in the textbook learns that simplicity, honesty, and unfaltering faith in good open the door to a right understanding of prayer, strengthen hope, quiet fear, and assure safe deliverance from human woes. A more intimate acquaintance with Jesus' methods will guide thought to the right realization of God's allness, for his prayers were declarations of man's unity with the Father, rather than mere petitions to God to do more for man. Sincerity and unselfed purpose are the secrets of Jesus' marvelous inspiration as he prayed.

In his prayer, uttered before the crucifixion and reaching the heights of aspiration, unselfed purpose and devotion, Jesus prayed not for the glory of this world, but for "the glory which I had with thee before the world was." He prayed for this, as something not to be attained in the future, but to be claimed now as the natural state in which man eternally abides, the glory which the world did not give and could not take away. He claimed this glory at a time when the cause of Christianity was at its lowest ebb. The teaching of the Christ had been repudiated by the secular thought of the time, and its exponent, Jesus, was about to suffer crucifixion which it was hoped would end his teaching. The insidious methods of organized evil threatened by this act to banish the Christ-teaching from the thought of men: yet Jesus prayed. Was not this the yielding of the human to the divine at every point, which Mrs. Eddy says must occur?

The spiritual facts of being had not been destroyed, nor were they even touched by error's boast to power. The darkest hour, to human sense, is the hour when "redemption draweth nigh." The midnight hour in our Leader's experience brought the glory of revelation, the birth of Christian Science. At this point her thought became aware of God and of what He has done for His children, rather than of evil's threatening claim.

In this prayer, Jesus was claiming his true spiritual being and yielding up the mortal sense. Hitherto, he had been the son of Mary. Now the human must give place to the divine, and the Christ must be recognized as his true selfhood. The last whisper of belief in another selfhood was to be lost in his conscious sonship with God. The glory of this realization was to supplant and overcome in his consciousness and his experience the gloom that seemed to confront him. The echo of this sublime summary of Life comes to every heavy heart today.

The summons of Christian Science to awake to the glory of true being as the son of God, comes as a ringing challenge to us all. Jesus' prayer touches us with deep significance today. In the recognition of divine Life, so perfectly expressed in every human incident of his career, Jesus demonstrated the supreme ability of prayer to lift human consciousness into the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God.

In Christianity our relationship to God is one of dependence. Its condition is trust in God. Christ comes into the human heart through such trust. Apart from this trust Christianity does not exist. It is a trusting relationship, a trusting religion.—Selected.