The kneeling worshippers were indeed turning their minds to their highest conceivable Reality. It was a Reality that they hoped would do things for them. But the diggers of débris, or the distributers of bread and clothing, were likewise, unconsciously no doubt, but in actual effect, turning their minds to their highest Reality. Face to face with the destruction of those things that give order and beauty and power to life, they were thinking (in their unconscious selves) of what a city for men and women and children _ought to be and could be_. It ought not to be a tumbled mass of bricks and burning wood; it ought not to be filled with starving people; it ought not to be given over to looters and murderers; it ought to be a city clean, ordered, happy. With their smoke-blinded eyes, they may not have seen far beyond the immediate demands of their ideal; but ideal it nevertheless was to which they lifted their souls in service. With all its vague inadequacy, it was for them then and there their highest Reality, their God—the ideal life in their members—to which they felt that they must devote themselves with full power of brain and muscle. They asked nothing of this their God; rather it was their God _that asked everything of them_, that stimulated them to the full, devoted summoning of all their essential powers. When a child lies sick unto death, what is the effective form of prayer? If the divine life, as we have held, is our own ideal life, prayer to such God is the tireless, unflinching effort to bring some measure of that ideal life to realization. The death of a little child of causes that might be controlled is hardly in keeping with the ideal of life. Hence devotion to the ideal calls for every straining of effort,—the loving care, the ceaseless watching, the sacrifice of pleasure and comforts to purchase the best knowledge and skill to save the little life. This is the essential prayer; not the bowing in helpless misery and supplication before a God who needs to be called from some far forgetfulness to his proper tasks.