There are some things which even an omnipotent God cannot do and one of them is to work in opposition to His own laws. During the late war, God could not answer the individual prayers of those so-called Christians who were slaughtering each other, and asking Him at the same time for victory to perch on their respective banners. There is a science of prayer just as there is a science of chemistry, and of mathematics. This does not mean that prayer is valueless any more than it means that steam is worthless. It simply means that Prayer, like steam, must be properly employed if it is to have the desired results.
Prayer is as natural to a soul in sorrow or sickness as a bark is to a dog.
It is a cry of desperation at a certain stage of our development, and an impulse of aspiration at a higher stage of our unfoldment. Constant importuning on the part of man is no more commendable than is constant barking on the part of a dog. The soul should be engaged in something higher than seeking after petty personal benefactions. It should hold itself in such relation to the Universal that benefactions would gravitate in the direction of man, as the vivifying warmth of the sun flows in the direction of the sunflower which opens itself to the light in the morning. What we need at present is that form of prayer which produces results, as unerringly as inner calculations in the science of numbers result in outer solutions of mathematical problems.