But true prayer is something higher. It is immediate spiritual fellowship. Even if science could demonstrate that prayer could never effect any kind of utilitarian results, still prayer on its loftier side would remain untouched, and persons of spiritual reach would go on praying as before. If we could say nothing more we could at least affirm that prayer, like faith, is itself the victory. The seeking is the finding. The wrestling is the blessing. It is no more a means to something else than love is. It is an end in itself. It is its own excuse for being. It is a kind of first fruit of the mystical nature of personality. The edge of the self is always touching a circle of life beyond itself to which it responds. The human heart is sensitive to God as the retina is to light waves. The soul possesses a native yearning for intercourse and companionship which takes it to God as naturally as the home instinct of the pigeon takes it to the place of its birth. There is in every normal soul a spontaneous outreach, a free play of spirit which gives it onward yearning of unstilled desire.
It is no mere subjective instinct--no blind outreach. If it met no response, no answer, it would soon be weeded out of the race. It would shrivel like the functionless organ. We could not long continue to pray in faith if we lost the assurance that there is a Person who cares, and who actually corresponds with us. Prayer has stood the test of experience. In fact the very desire to pray is in itself prophetic of a heavenly Friend. A subjective need always carries an implication of an objective stimulus which has provoked the need. There is no hunger, as Fiske has well shown, for anything not tasted, there is no search for anything which is not in the environment, for the environment has always produced the appetite. So this native need of the soul rose out of the divine origin of the soul, and it has steadily verified itself as a safe guide to reality.
What is at first a vague life-activity and spontaneous outreach of inward energy--a feeling after companionship--remains in many persons vague to the end. But in others it frequently rises to a definite consciousness of a personal Presence and there comes back into the soul a compelling evidence of a real Other Self who meets all the Soul’s need. For such persons prayer is the way to fullness of life. It is as natural as breathing. It is as normal an operation as appreciation of beauty, or the pursuit of truth. The soul is made that way, and as long as men are made with mystical deeps within, unsatisfied with the finite and incomplete, they will pray and be refreshed.