Now mark what he has led himself into. Prayer will purify a man. To ask God for what he wants won't make the slightest difference in God's acts, but will in your own feelings. Nevertheless, as of course no one would or could pray unless he hoped to be answered, man must be told that God does listen. But this is not true. Therefore, according to theological science, the Bible directly tells us a falsehood in order to lead us into a good action. Is there any escape from this? There is none. The whole meaning and reason of prayer is that God _does_ listen, that He _does_ forgive if asked, that He _does_ help us and save us. Unless a man held this belief firmly he would not pray. Try and you will see. Imagine to yourself, as the theologian declares, that God is quite unmoved by prayer, and that the action of prayer is subjective, and see if you can get up any prayer at all. It is impossible. How much fervency will there be in a request you know will not be granted or attended to? How much subjective action will follow that prayer? The subjective action is absolutely dependent on your belief that God does listen and is influenced by your prayer. But the scientific theologian says your premise is false. Can you imagine this theologian's prayer? Can you see him kneeling and uttering supplications to a god whom he knows he cannot affect or influence, and pausing now and then to see how the subjective effect on himself was getting on? But it is not even a subject to be bitter over, only to be sad. Truly, if I wanted to make a man an atheist and a scoffer, a railer at all religion, at all religious emotions, at all that is best in our natures, I would take him to a scientific theologian and have him taught the scientific theological theory of prayer. And again, though the boy understood how a man could be the son of his father, the husband of his wife, the father of his son, three different relations to three people, it did not help him to understand how he could be so to one person. A man cannot be his own son and his own father, and have proceeding from him a third person different and yet the same. The argument seemed to him childish.