Prayer
By Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev
Whatever a man pray for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces to this: 'Great God, grant that twice two be not four.'
Only such a prayer is a real prayer from person to person. To pray to the Cosmic Spirit, to the Higher Being, to the Kantian, Hegelian, quintessential, formless God is impossible and unthinkable.
But can even a personal, living, imaged God make twice two not be four?
Every believer is bound to answer, he can, and is bound to persuade himself of it.
But if reason sets him revolting against this senselessness?
Then Shakespeare comes to his aid: 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,' etc.
And if they set about confuting him in the name of truth, he has but to repeat the famous question, 'What is truth?' And so, let us drink and be merry, and say our prayers.
July 1881.