Sonnet

Dieu a établi la prière pour communiquer à ses creatures la dignité del la causalité* - PASCAL

The Bible say Sennacherib's campaign was spoiled
By angels: in Herodotus it says, by mice--
Innumerably nibbling all one night they toiled
To eat his bowstrings piecemeal as warm wind eats ice.

But muscular archangels, I suggest, employed
Seven little jaws at labour on each slender string,
And by their aid, weak masters though they be, destroyed
The smiling-lipped Assyrian, cruel-bearded king.

No stranger that onmipotence should choose to need
Small helps than great--no stranger if His action lingers
Till men have prayed, and suffers their weak prayers indeed
To move as very muscles His delaying fingers,

Who, in His longanimity and love for our
Small dignities, enfeebles, for a time, His power.
~C.S. Lewis, Poems, "Sonnet", (1st pub. in Oxford Magazine, May 14, 1936)

*God has instituted prayer so as to confer upon his creatures the dignity of being causes.