But to prayer as a personal experience I find only one single allusion. When Darwin was a boy, he was a good runner, often took part in races, and was often successful. His explanation of his success at that time is interesting: ‘When in doubt I prayed earnestly to God to help me, and I well remember that I attributed my success to my prayers and not to my quick running, and marveled how generally I was aided.’[303] This recalls the youthful experience of Moody, who was caught under a fence rail and could not move, but put up earnest prayers to God, and then was able to lift the rail quite easily. Prayer played a very different part in Moody’s later life from what it did in Darwin’s, so far as any tangible evidence goes. It is true that probably a good many men pray whom one would never suspect of doing so. I had an old friend, who had been brought up devoutly but had been a Unitarian for years, rarely going to church, apparently indifferent to religion, and discussing speculative, ultimate problems with annihilating freedom. Yet he told me, in an outburst of confidence, that every night, when he went to bed, he repeated, in substance, if not in words, the prayers that he had learned at his mother’s knee. ‘I don’t know what it means,’ he said; ‘I don’t know whether there is a God, or whether He hears me, or what I want of Him; but I pray.’ And I, who had not prayed for thirty years, heard him with amazement. Nevertheless, I do not believe that Darwin repeated ‘Now I lay me’ to the end, or prayed for triumph with evolution as he had prayed for triumph in the foot-race. The question of a future life seems to have had as little actuality for Darwin as that of prayer, and we have more explicit evidence on the point, because correspondents were always writing for a statement of his beliefs. He never committed himself to any complete assertion of disbelief. On the contrary, he is quite ready to admit some forcible positive arguments: ‘Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.’[304] Yet the difficulties seem insuperable, and he is hardly able to accept any definite belief: ‘Many persons seem to make themselves quite easy about immortality ... by intuition; and I suppose I must differ from such persons because I do not feel any innate conviction upon such points.’[305]