I come now to the second group of miracles, those granted to the prayers of the sufferers. First, though, I must treat one case that lies between the last group and this: the woman who came behind Jesus in the crowd. Its classification is uncertain, and it raises peculiar difficulties.
At Capernaum, apparently, our Lord was on his way with Jairus to see the man’s daughter, followed by a crowd that had heard the ruler’s request. A woman ill for twelve years came behind him and touched the hem of his garment, saying within herself, “If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.” So far it was a prayer. But it was no true prayer, since she expected to be healed without the healer’s knowledge or will. She did not ask; she thought, in innocent theft, to steal a cure.
St Matthew’s account gives me no difficulty: she was made whole from that hour, he says, after Jesus had turned, seen her and spoken. St Mark and St Luke say she was cured at the touch, and that his words only confirmed it. They also show Jesus not knowing what had happened, except that a cure had been wrought, without his volition, by contact with his person. He felt a saving influence pass from him, and so knew, in a crowd pressing hard enough that many must have touched him, that someone had touched him with special intent. The accounts differ without being incongruous, but the added circumstances raise inquiries of the hardest kind, which I cannot claim to have satisfied. First is the mode of the cure, which seems at first sight, apart from the healer’s will, to be magic: an influence without a sufficient origin. I would not reject the testimony, for my ignorance of such matters is nearly complete. But I cannot rest without a credible supposition on which the thing might happen without dimming the glory of the one this history is about. The difficulty is that she could be cured by his garment without (not against) his will. I think it all comes from our helpless ignorance of the relations of thought and matter. I say thought rather than spirit because people who reflect on spirit usually picture some vague form of matter. All religion rests on the belief or instinct that matter is the result of mind, spirit, thought; the relation between them is too close for us to understand. Here is my suggestion about the miracle as St Mark and St Luke give it.
If even inanimate things hold healing power of various kinds, and the world may hold absolute cure parted into a thousand forms, who can tell what cure may lie in a perfect body informed, indeed caused, by a perfect spirit? If stones and plants heal by the will of God in them, might not the perfect health of a body in which the Son of God dwelt carry a necessarily healing power? The crowd around him, of whom we hear of no influence received, may seem to refute this. But who can tell what he did even for them, recognized only as a conscious well-being? Those nearest would mostly be the strong, with no empty channel hungering for his life. And who can tell how the faith of her heart, calming or arousing her whole nature, made the woman more fit to receive the sacred influence? She did not pray, but her faith was alive, though small as a mustard seed. Why might not health from the fountain of health flow into the empty channel of her weakness? I shrink from the subject, because of the vulgar forms such speculation has taken in the hands of charlatans, but one must be honest in sorting the probable from the impossible. Fact is not the sole legitimate object of inquiry; if it were, farewell to God, religion and hope. The soul hungers for what lies at the root of fact and of law.
I have anticipated a chapter of speculation still to come. A greater difficulty, for some, is the representation of the Lord as ignorant of the cure, knowing it only by the reaction on his own person of the influence that went out from him to fill the vacuum of suffering the divine nature abhors. This gives me no concern. Our Lord says himself, in one case at least, that he did not know, that only his Father knew. He could discern a necessary future result, but not the day or the hour. Omniscience is a consequence of the divine nature, not an essential. God knows because he creates; the Father knows because he orders; the Son knows because he obeys. The Son neither needs nor desires the Father’s perfect knowledge; his sole care is to do the Father’s will, and in that lies his essential divinity. Although he knew one apostle would betray him, I doubt that when he chose Judas he knew Judas was the one. We must take his words as true: he disclaims perfect knowledge, and once speaks to his Father with an if it be possible. Those who think omniscience essential to divinity are driven to say Christ was not divine, which is their punishment for putting knowledge level with love. No one who does so can worship in spirit and in truth; his heaven will be in the clouds, not in the sky.
But now we come to the holy of holies of the story. Jesus could not leave the woman with half a gift. She had stolen the half; she must come and take the other half from his hand, which means she must know who had healed her. Her will and his must meet, and her eyes and his, her voice and his ears. It is the only recorded case in which he says Daughter. It was not because she was younger than he; they cannot have differed much in age.
With a woman’s modesty, deepened by the painful shrinking of her peculiar suffering, she dared not show herself, and meant only to gather a crumb unseen from under his table. I do not believe our Lord wanted her to tell her tale of grief and, as she saw it, shame; it would have been enough had she stood before him silent. Nor did she come in weakness, for knowing herself healed must have been strength. Yet she trembled. Filled with awe and gratitude, she fell at his feet and, hiding her face in her hands, I presume, forgot the multitude and was alone with the Son of Man. Love, gratitude and holy awe joined in an impulse to tell him all. When the lower approaches the higher in love, even between men, the longing is to be known: the prayer is “Know me,” as in David’s “Search me and know me.” He had a right to know all, painful as it was. It was her sacrifice to the Lord, and hiding anything would now hurt more than telling it, for it would be a barrier between them; she would be one-fold, her whole being open. I do not mean such thoughts took shape in her mind, but a single consciousness can sometimes be represented only by analysing it into twenty thoughts. He accepted the offering and let her tell all.
It was painful, and he understood it well. His heart yearned to shield her from her innocent shame, to make a heaven about her whose radiance would hide it by its very clarity. Her story appealed to all that was tenderest in humanity, for the secret her modesty had hidden her conscience had spoken aloud; so the tenderest word the language could afford must be hers. “Daughter,” he said. It was the fullest reward he could give, and the sign of his perfect love. The degrading spirit of the commonplace, which lowers everything to its own capacity to believe, will say it was an eastern idiom more common than with us. I say that whatever Jesus did or said, he did and said like other men and as no other man did. If he said Daughter, it meant what any man would mean by it, and what no man was good enough, great enough or loving enough to mean. In him the Father spoke to this one woman the eternal truth of his relation to all the women he has made, though individually it can be heard only by those who lift filial eyes and lay bare a filial heart. If she dared not lift her eyes before the men present, she might depart in shameless peace, having been called Daughter. It was the deepest gift of the divine nature, the recognition of the eternal in her by him who made it; between true father and true daughter nothing is painful. Possibly, the moment she knew herself healed, she felt compunction over how she had gained the cure and thought him offended when he called; her contrition for the little fault, if fault it was, may have added to the agony of her confession. But he soothes her: “Be of good comfort.” He heals the shy, suffering spirit where old marks of deep wounds remained, and confirms the cure she perhaps feared would be taken from her: “Go in peace, and be whole of thy plague.” More, he attributes the cure to her own faith: “Thy faith hath made thee whole.” She must not be left in danger of associating power with the mere garment of the divine. She must be brought face to face with her healer, not left kneeling on the outer threshold of the temple but taken to the Saviour’s heart, and only then is she redeemed utterly. He gives no reproach for what she had condemned; if it was evil, confessing it made it vanish from between them for ever. Her faith was ignorant, but it was true. The very strength of it, working in ignorance, may have made her extend his power to the skirts of his garments, and he met that ignorance not with rebuke but with more grace. If even her ignorance was so full of faith, of what confidence was she not capable? Through the garment of his Son the Father would cure her who believed enough to touch it. The kernel of faith was none the worse for its uncomely shell of ignorance and mistake. When did he ever quench the smoking flax? He is never slow to commend; the first quiver of an upturning eyelid is faith to him. He commends the feeblest faith in the ignorant soul, and rebukes it only lightly in apostolic souls where it ought to be greater. However poor, her faith was enough to save her. Between death and the least movement of life lies a gulf wider than between the gates of heaven and the depths of hell. He said “Daughter.”
I come now to the first plain request: the leper who fell before him saying, “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.” This lovely human plea appeals to the power in the one addressed; his power is the man’s claim. Plenty and need, strength and weakness, health and disease make a poor bond between men, whose plenty, strength and health can only supplement, support and mitigate, never satisfy, transform or slay. But with God, whose power is all creative, any need of his creatures is a perfect bond; his magnificence must flow into the channels of the indigence he has created.
Jesus answers in the terms of the man’s request. The woman found healing where she sought it, in the hem of his garment. One man says, “Come with me,” and the Lord goes; another says, “Come not under my roof,” and he stays. Here the man says, “If thou wilt,” and the Lord answers, “I will.” But he goes far beyond the request.
His complaint was sore to mind as well as body: it made him an outcast and ashamed, and no one would come near. Physical evil had come to the surface in him; he was “full of leprosy.” Men shrink from skin diseases more than from any other.[2] [Footnote 2: They are also among the hardest to cure, as the skin diseases of the soul linger after the heart is largely cured: the petulance, fastidiousness, censoriousness and disagreeableness of so many good people, all in the moral skin, are exceedingly repulsive. I say good people, not very good, nor Christ-like.]
Jesus could have cured him with a word. Was there no need to touch him? There was every need, for no one else would. The healthy human hand, always more or less healing, was never laid on him; he was despised and rejected. The Lord must comfort and cure his sore heart as well as his body, and of all men a leper needed the touch of the hand of love. Spenser says, “Entire affection hateth nicer hands.” It was not for our master, our brother, our ideal man, to draw in his skirts and speak a lofty word of healing so that the man might first be clean. The man was his brother with an evil disease clinging to him: out went the loving hand to the ugly skin, and there was his brother as he should be, with the flesh of a child. I thank God the touch went before the word. By it the leper knew what kind of God there is in the earth: not the God of the priests, but one only he can reveal to his own. It was to the leper what Daughter was to the woman in the crowd, and Neither do I to the woman in the temple: the sign of the perfect presence, the outermost sign revealing the innermost heart.
Let me linger on this meeting of creative health and destroying disease. The health flowed out; the disease could not enter, and Jesus was not defiled. Even if he could have been, he would not have drawn back: he respected the human body in its worst state, and so acknowledged it as his own. The reader must call up the analogies between curing body and soul, though they are more than analogies, for here they were combined in one act: the touch went to the man’s heart. Hand to hand cures a bodily disease; heart to heart Jesus will visit the man deep in evil habits who still lifts to him a despairing cry, and his healthful heart will cure the heart spotted with plague, so that it comes again as the heart of a child. Only this kind goeth not out save by prayer and abstinence.
The Lord gave him something to do at once and something not to do: go to the priest and hold his tongue. Doing is easier than abstaining. He went to the priest, and did not hold his tongue.
That the Lord sent him to the priest needs no explanation. He constantly recognized the sacred customs of his country, and seeing more in them than the priests did was no reason to pass them by. The testimony he wanted the man to bear lay in offering the gift Moses commanded: his healing was in harmony with the ancient law, coming from the same source and in time completing what the law began. The only other thing he required, silence, the man did not give. Probably he needed the injunction more for his own sake than the master’s: he was talkative and demonstrative, his better life always in danger of evaporating in words, and the Lord wanted him to think and give the seed time to root before putting leaves out into the world. Are there not some today who, having glimpsed truth across the darkness of a moral leprosy, begin at once to blaze it abroad and teach their fellows from an intellectual twilight in which they see men as trees walking, instead of retiring for a time into the wilderness to be still and commune with their own hearts? The Lord had touched this man; his nature was in commotion with gratitude, his self-conceit swelled high, and his tongue would not be still. Perhaps he thought himself favoured above his fellow-lepers, a selfish mistake that makes men talkative. He would befriend his healer against his will, only to impede the Wise, for the Lord found his popularity a great obstacle to the only success he sought: “He went out and began to blaze abroad the matter, insomuch that Jesus could no more openly enter into the city.” The man could not yet understand the kingdom that cometh not with observation, and out of presumption mixed with affection he would serve the Lord otherwise than by doing his will. He had his reward: a share in bringing his healer to the cross.
Obedience is the only service.
* * * * *
I take now the cure of the ten lepers, done apparently in a village of Galilee toward Samaria. They stood afar off in a group, probably afraid of offending him by coming nearer, and cried, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” Instead of pronouncing their cure, he told them to go and show themselves to the priests. This was partly for the priests’ sake, perhaps to justify his mission, but more certainly to give the men something to obey, as he often did. It also served, as the sequel shows, to individualize their relation to him: as a group they were not enough; it must be man to man. Their bond was a common suffering; it must become a common faith in the healer, and individual faith must break up the group for a deeper reunion. His intention worked in them, at first with small apparent result. They obeyed and set off, their faith so small it was hardly recognizable. Going, they found themselves cured. Nine held on their way; the tenth, forgetting in his gratitude the Master’s word, turned back and fell at his feet. A moral martinet, a scribe or a Pharisee, might say he ought to have kept to the letter of the command. Not so the Master: he accepted the gratitude as the germ of an infinite obedience. Real love is obedience and all things besides; the Lord’s own devotion burned up the letter with the fire of love, fulfilling and setting it aside, and high love needs no letter to guide it. The letter is all that weak faith is capable of, and well for those who keep it, but ill for those who do not outgrow it, forgetting it by outgrowing it.
This man was a stranger, as the Jews called him, a Samaritan, and the Lord praised him to his followers: “See, Jews, who think yourselves the great praisers of God! Ten lepers are cleansed; where are the nine? One comes back to glorify God, and he a Samaritan!” To the man he says, “Arise, go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole.” Again he commends individual faith. Was it not the faith of the others too that healed them? Doubtless; had it been enough to bring them back, he would have told them their faith had saved them. But they were content to be healed, and until their love, the deeper faith, brought them to his feet, their faith was not ripe for praise. Probably this man’s faith had prompted the cry of all ten, and he was the salt of the little group of outcasts, the righteous tenth. The others were content with the cure; he forgot it in his gratitude, and a moment more would have overtaken them on the way to the priest.
I may not find a better place to remark on the variety of our Lord’s treatment of those he cured; the record shows, I think, no two cases treated alike. He does not mass people together: in his dealings, as in their relation to his Father, every man is alone with him. With the ten, I think he sent them away partly so that this individuality could assert itself. They had stood afar off, so he could not lay the hand of love on each; now one left the group and brought his gratitude to the Master’s feet, glorifying God the Healer with a loud voice.
In reflecting on the cures, then, we must seek the causes of their diversity mainly in the individual differences of those cured, remembering that the accounts are brief and our capacity poor. God treats man as a father treats his children, only infinitely more a father than any man can be; each stands before him as an individual child, as if there were no one else, and the relation is awful in its singleness. Even when God deals with a nation as a nation, the individual must be aroused to a sense of his own wrong before he can understand how the nation sinned or turn to change it. A nation changes only as its members change, and the few who begin the change are its elect. Ten righteous individuals would have restored life to the festering masses of Sodom, festering because individual life had ceased and the community was nowhere; even nine could not. All communities exist for the sake of individual life, for the love and truth in each heart, which are not cumulative. Yet all that is precious in the individual heart depends on his relation to other individuals: alone, how can he love, and where is his truth? A community is the true development of individual relations, and its possibility lies in the conscience of its men and women. No setting right can be done in the mass; there are no masses except in corruption. Vital organizations come only from individualities and the needs that follow, which fit into each other and make combination unavoidable. Then the truth that has informed the community reacts to perfect the individual. By standing alone in God a man stands with his fellows and receives from them divine influences without which he cannot be perfected; a common conscience in a nation is possible only through the living consciences of its individuals.
I cannot work this out here, but I would avoid being misunderstood. Though every man stands alone in God, two or many can meet in God as they cannot otherwise; only in God can they truly meet, and only as they recognize their oneness with God can they become one with each other.
In the variety of his treatment of the sick, then, Jesus did the works of his Father as his Father does them. The Spirit of God speaks to the spirit of the man, and God’s Providence arranges everything for the individual’s best good, counting even the hairs of his head. Every man and woman had a cure of their own, one in principle, individual in application. This was the foundation of the true church. And yet its members will try to separate over individual and unavoidable differences!
But once more the question recurs: why say so often that this one’s or that one’s faith had saved him? Was it not enough that he had saved them? Our Lord would knit the bond between him and each man by arousing the man’s individuality, which is in deepest fact his conscience. A cure did not depend on any uncertain or arbitrary movement of Jesus’s feelings. He was always ready to heal, and no one who asked was ever refused. It rested with the man: the healing could not enter unless he opened his door. There was then no danger of the diseased self-consciousness that nowadays keeps asking, “Have I faith? Have I faith?”, searching for grounds of self-confidence and turning its eyes from the only source of confidence, the native home of power and love. How shall faith be born except from beholding the faithful? That disease was not a Jewish complaint, nor possible in the Master’s bodily presence, so praise of a man’s faith made him glad and more faithful. This disease needs his curing hand more than all the leprosies of Judaea and Samaria.
The remaining cases in this group are of blind men. First, in St Matthew, two followed Jesus crying, “Thou Son of David, have mercy on us.” He asked whether they believed he was able to do it, drawing the bond closer, and when they said they did, at once touched their eyes: again bodily contact, as with the blind man already considered, especially needed with the blind to link the healing to the healer. But there are differences. The man who had not asked to be healed went through a longer process, I think to call his faith and will into exercise, with closer contact to help them develop: he made clay, put it on his eyes, and sent him to wash. Where prayer and confession of faith show the spiritual contact already made, the cure is immediate. “According to your faith,” the Lord said, “be it unto you.”
On these men, as on the leper, he laid a charge of silence, and they too sadly disregarded it. That he went into the house and let them follow before curing them shows he wanted to avoid publicity, a wish they foiled. Their gladness overcame the higher faith that is one with obedience. The other leper’s turning back to give thanks was only a moment’s delay in fulfilling the command, but a gratitude that disobeys an injunction and plunges into the irretrievable needs a development almost amounting to a metamorphosis to be a virtue.
In the one remaining case the records are slightly confused. St Luke says it happened as Jesus entered Jericho; St Mark says as he left it, and gives the beggar’s name and parentage, in a considerably more detailed account; St Matthew agrees with St Mark about the occasion but has two blind men. We shall follow St Mark.
Bartimaeus, having learned the cause of the tumultuous passing of feet, calls, like the former two, on the Son of David to have mercy on him.[3] [Footnote 3: In these two cases the cry is to the Son of David. I wonder whether the blind had come to think it the correct form of address to the new prophet, but the cases are too few to justify even a passing guess at generalization.]
The multitude finds fault with his crying. I presume he was noisy in his eagerness after his vanished vision and they thought it indecorous; or perhaps it was the common resentment of a crowd at anyone who makes himself unreasonably conspicuous, claiming attention they cannot claim themselves. But the Lord stops and tells them to call him, and some of them, either friends or changing their tone now that the great man takes notice, begin to comfort him. Casting away his garment in his eagerness, he rises and is led through the yielding crowd to the Lord. To enter somewhat into the man’s personal knowledge before curing him, and to consolidate his faith, Jesus began to talk a little with him, in tones full of the life of God that a blind man’s cultivated hearing would best interpret.
“What do you want me to do for you?”
“Lord, that I might receive my sight.”
“Go your way; your faith has made you whole.”
Immediately he saw, and the first use he made of his sight was to follow the one who had given it.
Neither St Mark nor St Luke, whose accounts are almost the same, says he touched the man’s eyes; St Matthew says he touched the eyes of the two blind men he places in otherwise identical circumstances. With a crowd around who knew them, touching was less necessary than in private, and there is no need to decide which account is more correct: the first two may have omitted a fact, or St Matthew may have combined this story with the earlier one of two blind men, of which he alone tells. In any case there are, I think, only two recorded instances of the blind praying for cure; most likely there were more, perhaps many.
I have now to consider, as this group suggests, the question of prayer generally; for Jesus did the works of him who sent him, and as Jesus did, so God does.
I have not seen an argument against the efficacy of prayer that has force except from some narrow conception of the divine nature. If there is a God, it is absurd to suppose his ways of working destroy his side of the highest relation that can exist between him and those he has made: the relation of the creator’s will to the individual will of his creature. That God should be bound by laws that are just his nature in action is absurd enough. But that such laws should contradict the highest consequences of the creation that alone gives occasion for them, setting God’s will against his own earlier action and nature; that an unchangeable order of material causes and effects should cage for ever the winged aspirations of the human will, made in the image of his own, away from its natural air of freedom in his will: this would be called inconceivable were it not that it has been conceived and uttered, though only by minds to which this relation was, if present at all, present only vaguely. That he should leave himself no willing room toward those to whom he gave need, room to go wrong and then turn and look up and pray and hope, is to me grotesquely absurd. It is far easier to believe that the laws of nature and the human will, proceeding from the same eternally harmonious thought, are in harmony, so that neither need infringe on the other, and what seems an infringement would show itself, to a deeper knowledge of both, as perfectly harmonious co-operation. It would not matter that we know so little, were we not so ready to fancy at each discovery that now we know all. We have neither humility enough to be faithful nor faith enough to be humble. Unfit to grasp any whole, yet with an inborn idea of wholeness that ought to keep us pressing toward Unity, we keep calling each new part the whole and settling onto the couch of self-glorification, and so pride perverts our very need of unity to our ruin. Then it is easy to refuse certain considerations, even facts, a place in our system, since it would cease to be a system once they were admitted. They may hold the germ of life and truth, but what is that if they destroy this Babylon we have built? The main point is this: what it would not be well for God to give before a man asks, it may be not only well but best to give when he has asked. [Footnote 4: Well and Best must be the same thing with God when he acts.]
I believe the first half of our training is up to the asking point; after that the treatment has a grand new element. God can give, when a man is fit to receive, what he cannot give before because the man cannot receive it. How could you teach the harmony of colours or tones to someone who cannot yet tell shade from shade or tone from tone? A man cannot receive unless another gives; no more can a man give if another will not receive; he can only offer. Doubtless God works on every man, or he could have no divine tendency, no thither to turn toward, only a sense of want. But once the man has given in to God, the spirit he prays for can work in him, all with him and no longer (as it appeared then) against him. Every worthy parent knows there are occasions when the child’s asking makes the giving natural. In a way infinitely higher, yet the same at root, God can give when the man asks what he could not give without the asking, since otherwise the man would take the husk of the gift and cast the kernel away, a husk poisonous without the kernel, wholesome with it.
But some will say, “We may ask, but we shall certainly not have everything we ask for.”
No, thank God. We shall have nothing we would not ourselves wish to have if we could judge with open eyes its true relation to us. If God gives otherwise, it must be as a healing punishment of excessive and harmful desire. The parable of the father who divided his living at the younger son’s request must be true of God’s individual sons, or it could not have been true of the Jews and the Gentiles. He will grant some such prayers because he knows the swine and their husks will send his son back with quite another prayer.
If my supposed questioner asks, “What then is the good of praying, if it is not to go by what I want?” I can only say, “You have to learn, and it may be by a hard road.” The things men desire differ essentially. In physical well-being there is a divine good; in sufficient food and clothing, a divine fitness; in wealth as such, none. A man may pray for money to pay his debts, for healing of the sickness that keeps him from labour, or for just judgment from his fellows, with a confidence altogether unlike what he could have praying for wealth, for bodily might to surpass others, or for vengeance on those who judged him differently. Even then the divine soul will say with his Saviour, “If it be possible: Not my will but thine,” for he knows God gives only the best.
“But God does not even cure every one who asks him. And so with the other things you say are good to pray for.”
Jesus did not cure all the ills in Judaea, but those he cured were real ills and real needs. There was a fitness in the condition of some, favoured by his bodily presence, which met the virtue ready to go out from him. But God is always present, and I have yet to learn of any man who prayed for money to be honest with and meet his family’s needs, and did the work of him who called him from the market-place of the nation, who did not receive his penny a day. If it seems otherwise to anyone, I believe the contradiction will one day be cleared up. God has to satisfy the judgment of men not as they are but as they will be once they have learned his high, honest and grand way of things. To give men just what they want would often be like giving gin to the night-wanderer whom one could take home and set to work. I believe many of the ills men complain of would be quickly cured if they worked in the strength of prayer. Had the man not taken up his bed when Christ bade him, he would have been a great authority with the scribes and chief priests against the divine mission of Jesus; the power to work is a diviner gift than a great legacy. But these are individual affairs, to be settled between God and his child, and cannot be pronounced on in general. Here as there, now as then, what is lacking is faith. A man may say, “How can I have faith?” I answer, “How can you, when you do what you know you ought not and have not begun to do what you know you ought? It is not well that you should be cured yet; it would have hurt these men to cure them if they would not ask. And you do not pray.” The man who has prayed most is, I suspect, the least doubtful whether God hears prayer now as Jesus heard it then. But the man who believes and prays now has answers even better than those the sick in Judaea received: although Jesus’s bodily presence favoured them, the Spirit of God, after widening its channels for nearly nineteen hundred years, can flow in greater plenty and richness now. So answers to prayer must not only differ from those then but be better, coming closer to the heart of the need, whether the one praying knows it or not. The change lies in man’s power of reception, for God is always the same to his children; only, being infinite, he must speak and act for them in the endless diversity their growth requires, so that they can receive of the fulness of him who is all in all and unchangeable.
In our imperfect faith and understanding, the whole question of asking and receiving must be surrounded with mist and the possibility of mistake. It can be met only by the man who asks and hopes for himself. It lies in regions too lofty, with too many unknown conditions, to be reduced to our formulas; God must do only the best, and man is greater and needier than he can know.
Yet he who asks shall receive, of the very best. One promise without reserve remains, and only one, because it includes all: the Holy Spirit to those who ask for it. He who has the Spirit of God, God himself, in him has the Life in him, possesses the final cure of all ill, and has in himself the answer to all possible prayer.