The narrator disagrees with Malcolm’s suggestion to abandon petitionary prayer. Christianity would be intellectually easier without it, but the New Testament provides clear precepts and examples for the practice, including Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane. Though God did not grant Christ’s request to ease His suffering, Christ’s reservation (“not my will but thine”) did not affect the petitionary nature of the prayer, just as a polite request remains a request.

The narrator argues that objections to petitionary prayer, if valid, would equally undermine other universal human behaviors. He addresses two major objections. The first is scientific determinism (the theory that all willful acts, natural occurrences, and social or psychological phenomena are predetermined by preceding events or natural laws): Even determinists continue to make requests of others, so a determinist who believes in God could pray no more or less rationally than anyone else. The second objection the narrator addresses is theologian John Burnaby’s argument that divine intervention would make the world unpredictable and thus undermine human freedom. The narrator counters that we already live in an unpredictable world: People insure against uncertainties and pray about unpredictable matters like battles or medical outcomes, but never about eclipses.

He argues that science does not predict concrete historical events. Science predicts events only as instances of universal laws, deliberately abstracting away the unique particularities that make an event unique. No two sunrises are identical: Science studies their abstract commonality, but their differences are inherent to life. A well-designed experiment can only minimize historical particularities.

The narrator illustrates this by citing Malcolm’s decision to marry Betty, which led to George’s birth. In 1,000 years, George’s descendants might include someone with enormous historical impact—unpredictable yet real.

The narrator dismisses his previous letter as trivial after receiving a card from Betty with troubling news about George. The abstract question of whether God hears prayers now seems unbearably distant from the concrete plea, “Will God grant our prayers for George?”

The narrator acknowledges that he cannot fully share Malcolm’s parental anguish, recalling Malcolm’s similar recognition during the narrator’s past crisis. He resists offering false reassurances about misdiagnoses, knowing from his own grief that false hopes become an additional torment. While waiting for X-ray results and specialist observations, Malcolm experiences the by-products of anxiety: circular thoughts and prayers that are themselves forms of anguish.

The narrator insists that anxiety is an affliction, not a sin—that it’s part of our share in Christ’s Passion. The Passion began in Gethsemane, where Christ’s foreknowledge must have been withdrawn for Him to genuinely pray that the cup might pass. Otherwise, He could not have experienced the torments of suspense and false hope that define human suffering. The angel brought not consolation but strengthening and renewed certainty that Christ must endure the ordeal. This shows that the anxiety preceding suffering is part of God’s will for humanity.

The narrator traces the Passion’s stages as a pattern of human abandonment: unanswered prayer, sleeping friends, a condemning Church, an expedient State, and a murderous mob. Every support fails, leaving only God, yet Christ’s final words are “Why hast thou forsaken me?” The narrator wonders if God must effectively vanish to truly become human. Creation involves separation; the more perfect the creature, the greater the potential alienation. Saints experience the “dark night”; inanimate matter does not. Thus, God-made-man would be the most forsaken by God.

The narrator calls himself a “Job’s comforter,” deepening Malcolm’s darkness with his own. However, he finds meaning in this shared darkness on the “main-road” of suffering. Their earlier conversations were too abstract; the raised stakes force serious engagement. He challenges the notion that clear thinking requires emotional detachment, noting that the ancient Persians debated matters twice: once drunk, once sober. He closes by requesting immediate news.

Twenty-four hours after receiving Betty’s card with good news, the narrator expresses profound relief and notes how quickly the crisis receded. He explains Malcolm’s feeling of flatness rather than joy as simple emotional exhaustion.

The narrator addresses Malcolm’s question about the Gethsemane prayer. He explains that the disciples could have recorded the prayer’s brief opening words before sleep overtook them. They were only a stone’s throw away, it was night, and people prayed aloud in that era. He provides a historical parallel: St. Augustine’s surprise that St. Ambrose could read silently. As a second example, he analyzes St. Luke’s account of the orator Tertullus prosecuting St. Paul in Acts. The impossibly short speech (84 words, 40 of which are introductory flattery) suggests that Luke captured the opening verbatim but then provided an inadequate summary of the rest.

The narrator agrees that the most pressing prayer problems arise within Christian theology itself. He and Malcolm share the belief that since God exists outside time, prayers are granted “from the foundation of the world” (65)—heard before they are made and even before the person praying exists. The core theological problem is how prayer can be a real cause acting on an “impassible” God without making God a passive recipient.

One can always dismiss empirical evidence of answered prayers as coincidental. Belief in the connection rests on faith in God’s character, not proof. The narrator suggests that strict causal thinking is inadequate for understanding the God-human relationship. He applies this to the theological puzzle of Grace and free will: Scripture at once proposes two pieces of guidance, which are in tension with each other but ostensibly are not contradictory: “Work out your own salvation” (Pelagian) and “it is God who worketh in you” (Augustinian).

The narrator proposes that the divine-human junction has “two-way traffic.” To be a created rational being is to be an agent. God forgives sins, making God’s mercy dependent on human action. Rather than saying that humans “act upon” God, the narrator prefers to say that God’s single, timeless creative act considers all creatures’ actions, including prayers.

The narrator observes that Scripture barely guards the doctrine of Divine Impassibility (that God is immutable and impassive), frequently depicting humans exciting God’s emotions. Though this language is analogical, replacing it with theological abstractions may be more misleading. The abstraction “impassible” is valuable only for preventing absurd conclusions, not for positive understanding. The narrator proposes two interpretive rules: Never literalize images, and when images conflict with abstractions, trust the images. Abstract thinking relies on legal or mechanical analogies, while Scripture uses richer organic and personal images. Demythologizing often substitutes poorer mythology.

The narrator acknowledges that his phrase “taken into account” regarding prayer retreats from 17th-century Blaise Pascal’s statement that prayer makes creatures “causes.” Pascal’s formulation wrongly suggests that God is a passive recipient. More importantly, viewing prayer solely as a cause for achieving outcomes misses the deeper point: Being “heard” matters more than being “granted.” Religious people speak of prayers being “answered,” not of their “results.” The narrator emphasizes that people can endure being refused but not being ignored. Even an unwanted outcome from God’s hand is nourishment, while a desired outcome that is a mere accident is not.

The true opposition to this view is Alexander Pope’s maxim that God “acts not by partial, but by general laws.” This “Managerial God” concept is inherently anthropomorphic, projecting onto God the human limitation of distinguishing between intended plans and unintended by-products. A college changing dinner times for staff convenience inadvertently affects students—some positively, some negatively—without intention toward any individual. However, for an omniscient, omnipotent, good God, this distinction must vanish. Even in human creativity, better plans have fewer by-products. A genius composing music makes every note essential, not merely consequential. Echoing Blake, the narrator argues that broad generalization is a tool for finite minds, not God’s infinite lucidity.

The narrator rejects the Managerial God. If Providence exists at all, he argues, everything is providential, and every providence is special. Since Christ died for each individual, God’s creative act is for each soul. He believes this because prayer, which people are taught to practice, would be meaningless otherwise. Prayer testifies that the universe is created like art, not governed like a state, where every being makes a conscious contribution and is both the end and the means. God made this great work of art for the sake of everything it contains and accomplishes, down to the smallest details of the natural world.