Vague and formless, in some degree, communion would always be, I think, apart from the personal manifestation of God in Jesus Christ. As soon as God is known as Father, as soon as we turn to Him as identical in being with our own humanity, as suffering with us and loving us even in our imperfection, this communion grows defined and becomes _actual social fellowship_ which is prayer at its best. Paul’s great prayers of fellowship rise to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God whom we know, because He has been humanly revealed in a way that fits our life. We turn to Him as the completeness and reality of all we want to be, the other Self whom we have always sought. The vague impulse to reach beyond our isolated and solitary self gives place to an actual experience of relationship with a personal Friend and Companion and this experience may become, and often does become, the loftiest and most joyous activity of life. The soul is never at its best until it enjoys God, and prays out of sheer love. Nobody who has learned to pray in this deeper way and whose prayer is a prayer of communion and fellowship, wants logical argument for the existence of God. Such a want implies a fall from a higher to a lower level. It is like a demand for a proof of the beauty one feels, or an evidence of love other than the evidence of its experience. Prayer will always rise or fall with the quality of one’s faith, like the mercury in the tube which feels at once the change of pressure in the atmosphere. It is only out of _live faith_ that a living prayer springs. When a man’s praying sinks into words, words, words, it means that he is trying to get along with a dead conception of God. The circuit no longer closes. He cannot heighten his prayer by raising his voice. What he needs is a new revelation of the reality of God. He needs to have the fresh sap of living faith in God push off the dead leaves of an outgrown belief, so that once more prayer shall break forth as naturally as buds in spring. The conception of God as a lonely Sovereign, complete in Himself and infinitely separated from us “poor worms of the dust,” grasshoppers chirping our brief hour in the sun, is in the main a dead notion. Prayer to such a God would not be easy with our modern ideas of the universe. It would be as difficult to believe in its efficiency as it would be to believe in the miracle of transubstantiation in bread and wine. But that whole conception is being supplanted by a _live faith_ in an Infinite Person who is corporate with our lives, from whom we have sprung, in whom we live, as far as we spiritually do live, who needs us as we need him, and who is sharing with us the travail and the tragedy as well as the glory and the joy of bringing forth sons of God.