There has, however, always been a logical difficulty about offering petitions to an all-wise and all-powerful Providence. Thus in the _Dialogue of Dives and Pauper_, which was published in 1493, the question is put: “Why pray we to God with oure mouth sithe he knowyth alle oure thoughte, all our desire, al our wyl and what us nedeth?” To this question the only answer which was not evasive came from the mystics who led a life of contemplation. Prayer, they said, is not mere petition; it is communion with God. It is not because prayer gives a man what he wants, but because it “ones the soul to God,” that it is rational and necessary. This, too, is the conception of prayer held by a liberal pastor like Dr. Fosdick who looks with scorn upon “clamorous petition to an [p148] anthropomorphic God” and says that “true prayer ... is to assimilate ... (the) spirit which is God (that) ... surrounds our lives.” The same idea, stated in somewhat more precise language, is set down by Mr. Santayana when he says that “in rational prayer the soul may be said to accomplish three things important to its welfare: it withdraws within itself and defines its good, it accommodates itself to destiny, and it grows like the ideal which it conceives.” But, of course, this is not the way the common man through the ages has conceived prayer. In fact he must have prayed before he had any clear conception of what a prayer is or of whom it is addressed to. Thus we are told that in Arcadia the girls invoked Hera by the title of “Hera the Girl,” the married women prayed to “Hera the Married One,” and the widows prayed to “Hera the Widow.” Sometimes the prayer is a spontaneous expression of sorrow or of delight, a lyrical cry which has no ulterior purpose and is addressed to no one. Sometimes prayer is a magical formula which compels the deity to listen and to obey. The subject is both complicated and obscure. But this much at least is clear: along with elements which can be described only as spontaneous and lyrical, with traces of magic, and at times with a purely disinterested desire to commune with God, simple people have looked upon prayer as “an instrument for applying God’s illimitable power to daily life.”