Popular discussion of prayer has often been extremely practical: “How can prayer be made most efficient? Is it by ordinary Masses or by other offices? Is it by the elaboration or the multiplication of services?” Lady Alice [p149] West who died in 1395 ordered 4400 Masses “in the most haste that it may be do, withynne xiiii nyght next after my deces.” Thomas Walwayn who died in 1415 left orders for 10,000 Masses “with oute pompe whyche may not profyt myn soule.” John Plot, however, wished his Masses said “with solempne seruise that ys for to sayn wyth Belle Ryngyng.” There was debate as to whether prayers were most effective if said in Rome or in the Holy Land ... by certain priests rather than by others ... by the friars rather than by the priests ... whether there were more potent prayers than the _Pater_ ... whether prayers should be addressed to the Father, the Son, or to St. Mary ... whether St. Mary could be approached best through her mother, St. Anne.... It is not necessary to dogmatize by saying that prayer is magic, or soliloquy, or communion, or petition for this and that, in order to see that it is the expression of a human need. The quality of the need varies. It may be anything from a desire for rain to a desire for friendship with unseen spirits, but always it illustrates the saying that “all men stand in need of God.” If we ask ourselves what we mean by ‘need,’ we must answer, I suppose, that the resources of our own natures and the power we are able to exercise over events are insufficient to satisfy the cravings of our natures. We must eat, but we cannot be sure that drought will not destroy the crops. We are beset by enemies, and we are not sure we can conquer them. We are threatened by earthquake, storm, and disease against which we cannot wholly protect ourselves. We become deeply attached to other persons. But they must die and we must die, and we cannot stay [p150] the doom. In brief, we find ourselves in a world in which our hopes are defeated. Somehow we are so constituted that we demand the impossible. There is in us somewhere an intimation that we ought not to be defeated. But where did this intimation come from? How is it that we are not born satisfied with our mortality, content with our fate? Why is it that the normal fate of man seems to us abnormal? What is there in the back of our heads which keeps telling us that life as we find it is not what it ought to be?