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THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
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precisely for the same reason, or reasons, does the devotee, who prays for divine assistance, experience a feeling characteristic of relief. If we analyse his feeling still further, we shall find it to consist in the cessation of mental agitation coupled with a sense of satisfaction and resignation, resulting from the belief that the best that could be done has been done under the circumstances.
The response to prayer, which the superstitious seldom fail to attribute to their deity, proceeds from one of the following sources, namely,
(1) the soul itself,
(2) some other living being, affected by our distress and moved by sympathy to help us out of our difficulties,
and
(3) co-incidence.
In the first case, the soul itself perceives the solution of its difficulties, or secures its objective ; in the second, it is assisted by some one from outside; but in the third, it is obliged to what might be termed chance, pure and simple.
All cases of response to prayer, as a matter of fact, really fall in the third category, for the very idea of response is a pure fiction of unreasoning faith.*
* The facts of the modern European War may convince those who are not readily accessible to reasoning of the utter groundlessness of the belief in the existence of a beneficent Ruler of the Universe, both competent and anxious to grant the prayers of men. Its borrors have lasted not a few short weeks or months, but for several years continuously, in the course of which towns have been depopulated, countries devastated, kingdoms overthrown and hearth and home destroyed on a wholesale scale, plunging the whole world into misery, and transforming Europe itself into a regular shambles, reeking with the blood of no less than twenty million human beings, to say nothing of innocent beasts and birds. Tt is a record, in modern times,
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