TO learn how to pray aright is to learn the secret of all Christian success. The problems of evil ‹ sin, disease, sorrow, misfortune, and want ‹ confront mortals at every turn, and their right solution, which will enable men to erase these condition from consciousness, involves the true understanding and practice of prayer, not as a blind hope nor as the homage of superstitious fear, but as the application of the Christ-truth in correcting human error.

It has ever been the desire of mankind to understand the origin or Principle of being, to discover and know God, around the thought of whom there have been grouped the various human concepts of heaven. This state of heavenly bliss has been pictured as existing in the presence of God, but always so far away that earth's suffering inhabitants have only dreamed of it as a distant possibility. The truest form of prayer is that which satisfies most the desire to know God, and that removes humanity's sense of separation from Him. It is certain that when mortals realize the presence of God they will have entered the kingdom of heaven, and will therefore be above the conditions which bring about hell, ‹ the rule of discord. That this is the purpose of prayer, and that it may be realized on earth, is made evident by that petition of Jesus which must ever remain a model for all Christians.

The student needs to remember at the outset that the office of prayer is not to shape the thoughts of God, but of men. As we are told in our text-book, God does not await human appeals for help to be All in all to man, for He is to-day, as He has been in the past and will be forever, the omnipresence and omnipotence of infinite Love, abiding with His own in all ways and times and needs. God cannot be otherwise than Himself. A million years of human pleading, however pitiful, could not make Him more loving, kind, merciful, and good than He is and ever has been. Every need is already provided for in the truth of what God is. The necessity for prayer lies in mortal ignorance of that truth, and prayers are answered as this ignorance is removed. God has no need to give over again what He has already given, or to do over again what He has already done, any more than He has to make new suns to lighten the darkness of closed eyes.

The true value of prayer, then, is in its effect upon the petitioner himself, keeping him in remembrance of God, and turning his face towards God until his own thought and character become divinely illumined. Prayer is the cultivation of that state of thought which reverently and gratefully appropriates the good that God has provided; it is not the begging for that which God would otherwise withhold. The child of God is not a beggar but an heir, entitled to "all that the Father hath;" and the Scriptures also tell us that we are now "the sons of God." We should therefore approach God "now" as "sons" and not as outcasts or orphans, and we should also endeavor to bring into our experience the conditions which pertain to such a relationship. Prayer is the mental striving with and overcoming of whatever in our thought prevents us from realizing the possession of man's birthright; the mental recognition that all which represents man as sick or sinful, desolate or dying, is a false, erroneous sense, to be corrected and destroyed through our knowledge and application of the truth.

We have not yet begun to pray truly if we expect that our petitions will bring the divine presence down into our ignorance and evil, there to bless us. How could an infinite and omnipresent God go where He is not already? And least of all how could He go into a place that does not exist, except in mortal belief; that is, the place where evil is believed to be? How can we honestly ask God to bless us while we are worshiping another god? How can we expect Him to heal our diseases while we are bowing down in trembling fear to a false concept of God whom we believe to have caused our suffering, or while rendering our heart's homage to a god of material medicine? How can we expect God to be all to us while we are attributing life, power, intelligence, substance, presence, almost everything to evil, to matter, chance, disease, want, sorrow, death? These are pertinent questions, to which our answers should indicate where we stand, and show us something of the work which God requires of us.

The man who should immure himself in a dungeon and pray the sun to shine upon him there would command our pity, yet have we not frequently assumed a kindred attitude in our prayers? Do men not ask God to bless them in their sinfulness, to bless their ignorance, their belief in disease and in medicine, to bless their belief in material living and material dying, to bless their belief in the blending of good and evil which divine Truth condemned at the very beginning? Do we not in fact ask God to bless our indolence by giving us what we are not willing to labor for ourselves? Yet who of us would not tell the man in the dungeon to come up if he wants to find the sunshine?

We are thus led to see what should be our own line of action respecting our needs. We are not to stop praying, but we are to pray differently, if it be true that we have heretofore been asking God to do our work for us. We also must go into the sunshine if we would enjoy its blessing. We must come out of materiality, and the wrong conditions which lead to sickness and unhappiness, if we would enjoy the sunshine of divine Love and express spiritual and physical harmony. Asking God to "come down and bless us" in our sinfulness, is asking the impossible. Good cannot enter into an evil state nor bless it, but we can come out of our evil thoughts and find God. We can come out of anger and selfishness and hatred and find that Love is everywhere. The capability of doing this is natural; this is the work which God demands, and prayer is the road over which humanity travels towards its accomplishment. Prayer is the mental action which turns thought from evil to good, from error of every kind to Truth, and which follows up this right beginning all through the Christian's warfare with the flesh and the world until he reaches the consciousness of the nothingness of evil and the allness of God, good. This is the kind of prayer that need never cease; it returns thanks always for God's goodness.

The student in Christian Science learns that prayer stands ever for action on his part; never for idleness or helplessness. He learns that the barrenness or the fruitfulness of his prayers rests with himself; that the desire for good embraces its fulfilment if the individual is faithful to that desire. The theatre of human consciousness, wherein is enacted its drama of so-called mortal existence, is a mental state and is always subject to the control of thought. Prayer is used in Christian Science to guide that thought aright, to keep it in the line of truth, to lift it above the belief in evil and thus to produce harmony in place of discord. This means work for the student. It means the overcoming of evil beliefs, the purification of thought, the following of Christ.

Prayer in Christian Science is not offered to propitiate an angry Deity, to implore His mercy, nor to ask that ignorance and sin be overlooked, but it is the mental effort to perceive and understand the unchanging Truth of being and to rely upon it. It is a protest against evil, a strenuous objection to the charge that God ever makes His children sick or sinful, the realization that outside of the falsities of human error, God reigns supreme, filling all space and including all reality. It is a mental process and very simple; the only thing that seems to render it difficult is one's belief in matter and evil, and as this is overcome the student sees more clearly that man does indeed live and move in God and nowhere else. The Christian Scientist goes to God in prayer as one goes to a spread table where he may partake of all he needs. It is man's place to gather the fruit of the tree of Life which God has provided for him. The practice of pleading with God to give of this fruit is as unreasonable as for a hungry man to sit at a bountifully spread table and beg for food. What we need is to open our mental eyes, to see as did the young man with Elisha that we are encircled by God's protecting power, that we are safe with Him at all times, and that no good thing is ever withholden from us.

Prayer is the effort to realize that we already have all that we could rightly ask for, the only hindrance being our lack of faith and understanding. God has made man in His own image; He has bestowed upon the true man the ability to reflect infinite intelligence, power, wisdom, and Love; what more can He do for him? Is it not time that Christians began to accept these truths and apply them to their needs, instead of shutting their eyes and beseeching God to bless them as they have done so long? Is it not folly to ask God for a pure heart when He gave it to man at the beginning and has never taken it from him? Is not the better prayer to begin casting out of our consciousness the things that defile, so that we may discover the divine image reflected within?

The spiritual sense of man and the material represent the truth and the error of the whole human problem. The material sense is always in discord and trouble, always identified with sin and disease and misery, and hence it represents that which God did not make. Spiritual sense is always harmonious, normal, and perfect, always under the divine control, and hence it represents the real man, the man that has never fallen. Is it not an unrighteous prayer to ask God's blessing upon something that He did not make? Is it not better to resist and overcome the suggestion, as presented by the serpent in Eden, that anything exists apart from the divine creation? Is it not a more righteous prayer, and one more likely to be effective, to deny material sense altogether, to deny the authority or power of material law, and rest one's faith wholly in God, good? Christian Science prayer is offered on this basis. It begins with the student's first gleam of Truth to destroy that much of error. As he understands more he applies more, as he understands God better he learns to pray better, but all the way along it is his own work to overcome evil with good, no matter what form the evil may seem to take. Only as we learn the truth about God can we correct our erroneous sense of man.

What can be the real object of prayer if it is not to enable the individual to see man as God's child, ‹ to enable him through persistent effort to so apply the truth to all in his consciousness that is unlike the Father as to destroy it? What could be a more simple, effective, or reverent prayer than the treatment of sin with right thinking and living, of hatred with love, malice with charity, anger with kindness? Every one understands in a greater or less degree what love is and what righteousness is, and that their opposites are the devastating demons which seem to mar the harmony of human existence. Every one should understand that these evils become powerless and extinct in the presence of divine Love and goodness. Knowing this, knowing that we can always love instead of hate, can always do right instead of wrong, what other prayer dare we offer than the prayer of a loving and righteous life?

When the student of Christian Science gains his first glimpse of the real significance of the allness of God, it fills him with awe and reverence unspeakable; and as this light grows upon him, he sees that all the woe and wickedness of earth is but an unreal shadow in human consciousness; that it has no place in the Divine, and that it rests with him to banish this shadow from thought through the reception of the true knowledge of God. As every sense of discord asserts its wrongful claim, he applies to it, so far as he is able, the truth of man's perfection in God, despite material evidence to the contrary. The result of this method is proof of its wisdom and correctness, for it restores the right relation of things, physically and morally, as nothing else in human ken can do, and produces in the student a purer love for God and man than he ever knew before. This is not the helpless prayer of a beggar, but it is the prayer that "availeth much."

The whole subject of prayer is reverently and fully explained by our Leader in the first chapter of the Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," and the one who studies it with a sincere desire to know Truth, ‹ to draw near to God, ‹ may begin the work of demonstrating Christian Science, for he can begin to apply his first thought of Truth to the problem confronting him, and he will surely realize the fulfilment of Jesus' promise to him who is faithful in that which is least. The little grain of Christian truth which we have gleaned, if rightly planted, cared for, and kept free from the weeds of wrong thinking, will blossom and bear fruit, some thirty, some sixty, and some an hundredfold.

Back