Many of the wholly disappointed petitioners closed their complaints or doleful faultfinding outbursts with the stereotyped quotation, "nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done!" To some "the heavens are as brass"; to others, their prayers did not go "higher than their heads," and to still others their prayers became meaningless and like "words called into the thin air." This phase of our topic could not be followed up as far as a careful investigator could wish, because it involved so much correspondence and so much delay. But a general statement of the conclusions reached by those whose prayers had, seemingly, not been answered can be safely made. They all naturally and necessarily formed a concept of God by imagining him to be an all-mighty and all-good man. The human mind seems incapable of forming any other idea of God than can be obtained from a human model, greatly enlarged. Jesus knew what was in man when he taught his disciples to say, "Our Father." Human kings, human fathers, human saints human sinners are really pictured in the minds of all who strive to visualize the Almighty, or his Son, or the angels. No Hindu can even think Nirvana. No mind can meditate on nothing. Everything conceived in the mind must be like something else. Reasoning from "the known to the unknown," or "the lesser to the greater," is the only possible process by which man can know God. So all those seemingly defeated ones had looked up to God as to a great man, and when he seemed to do nothing in answer to their requests they concluded that he either did not hear or that he would not even reply. They did not think, however, of their heavenly Father as they would of an earthly father who was perfectly good. A good and wise father must often deny his child the article for which he asks, but he will not dismiss the matter with a curt denial. He will try to find something else for his child, as has been already stated in a previous chapter. The testimonies which asserted that the all-good God had denied or ignored the requests of his followers were the strongest proofs of the fact that God had granted their requests. The father who would not give a stone to his child who asked for bread would not give a stone to his starving child who asked for a stone. In those seasons when the attention of the people was centered specially on the results of prayer there was often heard the expression, "Perhaps He sees that it is best for me that I should not get the blessing for which I asked." But a consensus of opinion taken from the mass of correspondence showed a general belief that there are no unanswered prayers. They believed that in some other way which was better and wiser God sent his child a more valuable token of his love.