Prayer

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.

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His novel 'Fathers and Sons' is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction. Turgenev's work is often considered a reflection of the social and political atmosphere of his time, marked by his opposition to serfdom and his advocacy of liberal reforms. He spent much of his later life in Western Europe and was a contemporary of fellow Russian literary figures Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

English

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