"I wish you would tell me exactly what you feel about prayer, Father. I never quite understand. You always speak as if it played a great part in your life, and yet I never am sure what exactly it means to you." "You might as well say," he said, smiling, "that you never felt quite sure what breakfast meant to me." He stopped and looked at me for a moment. "Do we know what anything _means_? We know what prayer _is_, at any rate--one of the commonest and most natural of instincts. What is your difficulty?" "Oh, the usual one," I said, "that if the God to whom we pray is the Power which puts into our minds good desires, and knows not only what is passing in our thoughts, but the very direction which our thoughts are going to take--reads us, in fact, like a book, as they say--what, then, is the object or purpose of setting ourselves to pray to a Power that knows our precise range of thoughts, and can disentangle them all far better than we can ourselves?" "Why," said Father Payne, "that is pure fatalism. If you carry that on a little further it means all absence of effort. You might as well say, 'I will take no steps to provide myself with food--if God is All-Powerful, and sends me a good appetite, it is His business to satisfy it!" "Oh," I said, "I see that. But if I set about providing myself with breakfast, I know exactly what I want, and have a very fair chance of obtaining it. But the essence of prayer is that you must not expect to get your desires fulfilled." "I certainly do not pretend," said he, "that prayer is a mechanical method of getting things; it isn't a _substitute_ for effort and action. Nor do I think that God simply withholds things unless you ask for them, as a dog has to beg for a piece of biscuit. I don't look upon prayer as the mere formulating of a list of requests; and I dislike very much the way some good people have of getting a large number of men and women to pray for the same thing, as if you were canvassing for votes. And yet I believe that prayers have a way of being granted. Indeed, I think that both the strength and the danger of prayer lies in the fact that people do very much tend to get what they have set their hearts upon. A recurrent prayer for a definite thing is often a sign that a man is working hard to secure it. It is rather perilous to desire definite things too definitely, not because you are disappointed, but because you are often successful in attaining them." "Then that would be a reason for not praying," I said. Father Payne gave one of his little frowns, which I knew well. "I'm not arguing for the sake of arguing, Father," I said; "I really want to understand. It seems to me such a muddle."