How does a man acquire an uncorrupted consciousness? How does he become confident that his consciousness will become uncorrupted, and that he will not simply be deceiving himself? The Christian's answer ought to be to pray to God for it, and to have the confidence to believe that his prayer will be granted. The Church is diffident about this. It refuses to take literally the exhortation, “Ask, and ye shall receive”; instead it says that though God always answers prayer, often his answer is not the expected one. The secular mind is equally sceptical, and says, “If God always answered prayer, I would ask for a big income, a Georgian house, a Rolls Royce car, and a beautiful painted wife”. The trouble is that money has no absolute value, it is worth only what people think it is worth, it is commercial credit; and God only has things of absolute value to give. As regards worldly possessions, God thinks that the fewer worldly possessions a man has, the better; and painted women should not be included among those few. So evidently if God does always answer prayer, and always gives what is asked, the ability to ask and to mean it, to want one's request to be granted with all one's heart, must be very limited. No-one would give a man even precious worldly possessions, when his idea of enjoyment was…