So, however much it may be to say 'Hear me,' it is vastly more to say 'Cause me to hear.' However much I have to tell Him, He has more to tell me. This view of prayer will help to clear up for us some of the difficulties that have troubled many minds. We hear people speak of unanswered prayer; but there is no such thing, and in the nature of things there cannot be. I do not mean by that, that to every prayer there will come a response some day. To every prayer there is a response now. In our confused and mechanical conception of the God to whom we pray, we separate between His hearing and His answering. We identify the answer to prayer with the granting of a petition. But prayer is more than petition. It is not our many requests, it is an attitude of spirit. We grant readily that our words are the least important part of our prayers. But very often the petitions we frame and utter are no part of our prayers at all. They are not prayer, yet uttering them we may pray a prayer that shall be heard and answered, for every man who truly desires in prayer the help of God for his life receives that help there and then, though the terms in which he describes his need may be wholly wide of the truth as God knows it. So the real answer to prayer is God's response to man's spiritual attitude, and that response is as complete and continuous as the attitude will allow it to be. The end of prayer is not to win concessions from Almighty Power, but to have communion with Almighty Love. 'Cause me to hear'; make a reverent, responsive, receptive silence in my heart, take me out beyond my pleadings into the limitless visions and the fathomless satisfactions of communion with Thyself. Speak to me. That is true prayer. In the quietness of life, When the flowers have shut their eye, And a stainless breadth of sky Bends above the hill of strife, Then, my God, my chiefest Good, Breathe upon my lonelihood: Let the shining silence be Filled with Thee, my God, with Thee. IX. HAUNTED HOURS Wherefore should I fear in the days of evil, when iniquity at my heels compasseth me about? Ps. xlix. 5.