Getting Things from God: A Study of the Prayer Life

From the intro: "INTRODUCTORY I suppose every thoughtful person from time to time takes up with himself the question of prayer. It was not a good man who said: "What profit should we have, if we pray unto him?" (Job 21:15). But it was a very natural question and a thousand others than he has framed it, sometimes in thought, and at other times in words. How can God answer prayer if He be all-knowing and all-powerful? Why should a Being who could create a universe like this care to listen to beings like us, so ignorant, so short-lived, so sinful, so helpless? Nevertheless, the impulse to prayer is irresistible. Someone has said: "Man is incurably religious; man is incurably prayerful." I was talking with a lad not long since, and asked him if he prayed. He replied: "Yes, sometimes." I said: "When do you pray?" He said: "When I get scared." He was not peculiar in this respect; in a cyclone or in a storm at sea, in a time of deathly illness or of financial disaster, men pray, naturally they do this. They do not have to be taught, they simply pray. Infidels, even those who call themselves atheists, when- these times of stress and storm come upon them, reach out into the dark for God."