ABSTRACT
Prayer is the soul's speech to God, and it takes different forms to match the various emotions it would express. Thus, when it would give utterance to our hopes and our needs, it takes the form of petition and supplication. Of all the various kinds of prayer those are the highest that ask for nothing—nothing for ourselves. It is both natural and right that we should tell our Father of our needs; the very telling of them soothes and comforts us. The Jewish Prayer Book seems to have been framed under the sway of such ideas. It contains fewer petitions than praises; but, besides this, the sombre sense of sin is never suffered to intervene between the worshipper and glad adoration of his Divine Master. What prayer has been for the Jew, his history and his literature alike abundantly testify. It has been his solace when darkness has settled on his life, his song when the clouds have broken.
