The narrator refutes Malcolm’s criticism that his view of church services is “man-centred,” arguing that belief in a supernatural event makes the priest’s actions less, not more, important. Turning to Rose Macaulay’s letters, he says he was staggered but not repelled by her constant search for ready-made prayers, partly because he met her and found her civilized, and partly because he thinks Malcolm’s outlook is too narrow. He argues for diversity within the church, recalling a Greek Orthodox mass where varied congregational behaviors were simply ignored.

He admits that he is no longer a purist about prayer methods. For years after his conversion, he tried to pray without words, but he now realizes that this requires being at one’s best. He cites Pascal’s “Error of Stoicism”—the belief that one can always do what one can sometimes do. His current practice uses his own words as the staple with a modest use of ready-made prayers. He lists three benefits of ready-made prayers: They keep him in touch with sound doctrine, remind him of permanent objective necessities, and supply a ceremonial element. He rejects Malcolm’s analogy equating ready-made prayer with using poetry to make love, arguing that the relationship with God involves both immense distance and profound intimacy. He finds Malcolm’s view too snug and confiding. Reflecting that the low-church milieu he grew up in was “too cosily at ease” (14), he contrasts his grandfather’s imagined “interesting conversations with St Paul” (14) in Heaven with Dante’s depiction of the apostles as being “like mountains.” He concludes that formal prayers correct irreverence.

The narrator expresses annoyance at Malcolm for lecturing him on the “holiness” of sex, stating that sex itself is amoral but that human sexual behavior can be good or bad. He dismisses the topic as a red herring that moderns have made boring. Acknowledging his digression on devotion to saints, he briefly summarizes the theological defense and practical dangers of the practice. He distinguishes between praying to saints (on which Christians are divided) and praying with them (on which all are agreed), sharing that he has recently added the line invoking angels, archangels, and all the company of Heaven to his prayers, finding it greatly enriching.

He clarifies that by prayer without words, he did not mean the mystical prayer of silence, and that being at one’s best includes physical well-being. He agrees with Malcolm that bedtime is the worst time to pray and describes his practice of seizing any available moment, such as in a crowded train. He explains that he does not often pray in churches because they are cold or he is interrupted by an organist or a “cleaning woman.” He affirms the importance of the body in prayer, praising it for the senses that let humans alone appreciate a realm of God’s glory. He concludes that a concentrated mind in a sitting body is better for prayer than a kneeling body with a sleepy mind, noting that his osteoporosis makes kneeling difficult. He admits that he often prays for people he cannot name and adds that he will not write next week because of exams.

The narrator addresses two difficulties with prayer raised by Malcolm, starting with one often used by critics of Christianity: the apparent absurdity of making requests known to an omniscient God. He concedes that the core problem remains: Petition and confession seem to tell God what He already knows. He proposes that while God’s knowledge of us is constant, the quality of our being known can change. Ordinarily, we are objects of divine knowledge, like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae. However, when we become aware of and assent to being known by God, we relate to God as persons, not things: We unveil ourselves. By confessing and petitioning, we assume the high rank of persons before God, and God is personally revealed to us. He cites philosopher and theologian Martin Buber that God addresses one as a person would when one addresses God as Thou. Anthropomorphic images and metaphysical abstractions, he adds, are concessions to human weakness and are mutually corrective.

He then turns to Malcolm’s second question: how important a need must be to be a proper subject for petition. The narrator gives the theoretical answer as Augustine’s concept of properly ordering loves (prioritizing the spiritual over the carnal), but argues that one must lay before God what is actually in one’s mind, not what one thinks should be. He recalls a time when a great blow fell on him, and he tried to hide it from Malcolm, who saw through the pretense. One must even express a strong desire for trivial things in prayer, as trying to exclude them is a hopeless distraction. The narrator concludes that having the right priorities in prayer is a blessing to be prayed for, not a prerequisite for praying. Learning to ask God for childish things, he suggests, builds the habit of asking for great ones.

The narrator agrees to describe his private “festoonings” of the Lord’s Prayer petitions, explaining that a festoon is a private overtone hung on the general meaning of a prayer. He interprets “Thy kingdom come” on three levels: in sinless nature, in the lives of good people, and in Heaven among the blessed dead. In interpreting “Thy will be done,” he first took it solely as submission to future suffering but later added a second meaning: a petition to become an active agent in doing God’s will. He now contemplates a further festoon—submitting not only to future afflictions but also to future blessings—while observing that people often reject new blessings because they still seek a past good, setting up a previous perfect experience as a norm. He suggests that the prayer God is least likely to grant is the request to relive a past “golden moment,” which nourishes as a memory but torments if one tries to conjure it back.

He takes “our daily bread” to mean all necessities, physical and spiritual. In considering “Forgive us […] as we forgive,” he states that the real difficulty is forgiving the same offense every time one remembers it, and his technique is to recall a similar failing of his own. Regarding “lead us not into temptation,” he notes that the Greek word means “trial” in a broad sense. He credits Malcolm with a long-ago thought on it at a pub in Coton: that this petition acts as a reservation on all previous requests, asking God not to grant them if they would lead to snares or sorrows. He interprets “kingdom” as God’s claim on human obedience, “power” as God’s omnipotence, and “glory” as God’s essential beauty.