Harry Emerson Fosdick

When anyone undertakes to study the meaning and to cultivate the habit of prayer, it is well for the person to understand, from the beginning, that he is dealing with a natural function of his life and not with an artificial addition. For instance, raising palm trees in Greenland would be an unnatural proceeding. They never were intended to grow there and never can grow there save under stress of artificial forcing. The culture of prayer would be just as strained a procedure, were it not true that the tendency to pray is native to us, that prayer is indigenous in us, that we do pray, one way or another, even though fitfully and without effect, and that we humans always have prayed and always will pray.