"There can be no objection to praying for certain special things. God forbid! I cannot help doing it, any more than a child in the dark can help calling for its mother. Only it seems to me that when we pray, 'Grant this day that we run into no kind of danger,' we ought to lay our stress on the 'run' rather than on the 'danger,' to ask God not to take away the danger by altering the course of nature, but to give us light and guidance whereby to avoid it." CHARLES KINGSLEY. "Special prayer is based upon a fundamental instinct of our nature. And in the fellowship which is established in prayer between man and God, we are brought into personal union with Him in Whom all things have their being. "In this lies the possibility of boundless power; for when the connection is once formed, who can lay down the limits of what man can do in virtue of the communion of his spirit with the Infinite Spirit?" Bishop WESTCOTT. Prayer October 11 "It is abundantly clear that answered prayer encourages faith and personal relations in a way which broad principles only cannot effect. As the _Spectator_ put it many years ago, much that would be positively bad for us if given without prayer, is good if sent in answer. We feel (do we not?) that all the evil of the world springs from mistrust of God. Nothing can recover us from this state of alienated unrest like answered prayer." _Life of F. W. Crossley_, RENDEL HARRIS. "Prayer will in time make the human countenance its own divinest altar; years upon years of true thoughts, like ceaseless music shut up within, will vibrate along the nerves of expression until the lines of the living instrument are drawn into correspondence, and the harmony of visible form matches the unheard harmonies of the mind." _The Choir Invisible_, JAMES LANE ALLEN. Prayer OCTOBER 12 "Pray, till prayer makes you forget your own wish, and leave it or merge it in God's will. The divine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means by which we learn to do without them; not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet it. 'There appeared an angel unto Him from heaven, strengthening Him.' This was the true reply to the prayer of Christ." F. W. ROBERTSON. "Never let us get into the common trick of calling unbelief--resignation; of asking, and then because we have not faith to believe, putting in a 'Thy will be done' at the end. Let us make God's Will our will, and so say 'Thy will be done.'" CHARLES KINGSLEY. Prayer OCTOBER 13