Five gems from Letters to Malcolm
The distance between the abstract “Does God hear petitionary prayers?” and the concrete “Will He – can He – grant our prayers for George?” is apparently infinite.
The prayer preceding all prayer is “May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.”
A man who first tried to guess ‘what the public wants’ and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a petty mixture of fool and knave.
I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling and contend with the greatest disinclination. For these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling.
Liberal Christianity can only supply an ineffectual echo to the massive chorus of agreed and admitted unbelief. By the way, did you ever hear of anyone who was converted from skepticism to a liberal or demythologized Christianity? I think that when unbelievers come in at all, they come in a good deal further.