Then why does He tell us to ask for these things? The reason He commands it is, of course, not in order to have us make our prayers an instruction to Him as to what He ought to give us, but in order to have us acknowledge and confess that He is already bestowing many blessings upon us and confess that He can and will give us still more. By our praying, therefore, we are instructing ourselves more than we are Him.—Martin Luther, Sermon on the Mount, AE 21:144.
They are trying to inoculate the child with the preposterous view that one’s mother is simply a fellow citizen like anyone else, to make it ignorant of what all men know and insensible to what all men feel. They are trying to drag the featureless repetitions of the collective into the fuller and more concrete world of the family. A convict has a number instead of a name. That is the collective idea carried to its extreme.—C. S. Lewis, Business of Heaven, p. 211
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