Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 September 1893 — The Art of Praying. [ARTICLE]

The Art of Praying.

If prayer is worth using at all, and great numbers of intelligent people are oonvinced that it is, it is worth using with the utmost intelligence and the highest attainable skill, writes Edward S. Martin, In the North American Review. Tho kind of prayer in which tho petitioner usks for everything ho can think qf, in tho hope that some of his supplications may reach the mark, is as much out of date u those doses affected by doctors of the last generation, in which a lot of drugs were mixed, not for their combined effect, but in the hope that the right ono might bo among them, and might find its way to tho right spot in the patient. Perhaps clumsy doctors do that way still. Not so the masters of medicine. Their diagnoses make plain to them what they want to do; then, if they use a drug at all, it is sent to accomplish that particular purpose. So, in this enlightened generation the prayers of the great prayor-masters should be rlfle-sho.ts sent by an understood foroe at an ascertained mark. Whethor they hit or miss should depend upon comprehensible conditions. If a savage fires at tho moon with a rifle ho may be surprised at not hitting it; but a man who understands rifles is not surprised. Ho knows what may bo oxpected of them. So it would seem it should be possible to understand prayer.