Here as elsewhere, he teaches us that we must not go by the look of things, but by the reality behind the look. A truth, a necessity of God’s own willed nature, is enough to set up against a whole army of appearances. It looks as if he did not hear you: never mind, he does.

Would he find them believing, despite the tyranny of appearances? Would they be children enough to know God was hearing them and working for them, though they could not hear him or see him work?

The true son-faith is that which comes with boldness, fearless of the Father doing anything but what is right, fatherly, patient, and full of loving-kindness. We must not think to please him by any asceticism even of the spirit; we must speak straight out to him. 

Every gift of God is but a harbinger of his greatest and only sufficing gift—that of himself.

For how can God give into the soul of a man what it needs, while that soul cannot receive it? The ripeness for receiving is the asking

“But if God is so good, and if he knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask him for anything?” I answer, What if he knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God’s idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need—the need of himself? 

If a man be not fit to be refused, if he be not ready to be treated with love’s severity, what he wishes may perhaps be given him in order that he may wish it had not been given him; but barely to give a man what he wants because he wants it, and without further purpose of his good, would be to let a poor ignorant child take his fate into his own hands.

The skeptic may scoff, “We know that the wind blows: why should we not know that God answers prayer?” I reply, What if God does not care to have you know it at second hand?

 Surely this world of my unwilled, unchosen, compelled existence, cannot be shut out from him, cannot be unknown to him, unpresent to him from whom I am! Nay, is it not his thinking in which I think? Whatever passes in me must be as naturally known to him as to me...