Concerning Prayer; Its Nature, Its Difficulties and Its Value

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1916 Excerpt: ...the hills the rivers of Goodness, Beauty and Truth may flow apart, but all have their source in the one field of the eternal snows; and the more completely the love of these becomes conscious of its own nature, the more conscious it becomes of its own essentially religious character and of the real nature of its own object, until at last it becomes completely articulate in that highest verbal expression of conscious human worship: We give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory, O Lord God, Heavenly King, God the Father Almighty. But it is of the first importance that the love of these things should so become conscious of its own character. For without such consciousness it is liable to become itself distorted, and to acquire one-sided and even false conceptions of the things which it loves. It is a matter of everyday experience that the devotees of the concrete embodiments of Goodness, Beauty and Truth, in the shape of the theory or practice of conduct, of art and literature, or of Philosophy and Science frequently fail in their own special department through pursuing it in too great isolation. The intellectual fallacies of the struggle-for-existence philosophy of Nietzsche would have been avoided had he had a clearer grasp of moral values. For the same reason the extraordinary abilities of an Aubrey Beardsley, produced results which aesthetically fell below the first rank. And the crimes of well-intentioned ignorance in every department of life are sufficiently numerous to make unnecessary any particular illustration of the pernicious result of the divorce between the interest in Goodness and the interest in Truth. The activities of the mind and heart, like those of the social organism, are all interconnected, and no specialised activity can produc...