Philip prays to God to cure his clubfoot, but is not healed. The episode turns a child’s hope for bodily change into a test of religious certainty: taught that faith can move mountains, Philip applies the promise to the disability that marks him out, and receives no miracle. His effort to explain the failure briefly preserves belief by turning the blame inward; its eventual collapse makes the failed prayer an early step toward religious doubt.

The promise and the child’s hope

At school a wave of religiosity sweeps through the boys, and Philip, whose restless mind eagerly takes up new ideas, joins the Bible League. He sends the required half-crown and agrees to read a prescribed portion of Scripture every night for a year. In return he receives a calendar of daily readings and a framed prayer to say before beginning. The arrangement gives devotion a practical routine: each evening, before the gas is put out, Philip hurries through the task, reading without questioning stories of cruelty, deceit, ingratitude, and dishonesty because they occur in the biblical narrative.

One night he reads Christ’s assurance that sufficient faith can move a mountain and that whatever is asked for in believing prayer will be received. A few days later the same words are used as the text of a sermon. The boys sit in the choir, far from the pulpit, and the Canon’s voice is not well suited to the cathedral; nevertheless, because Philip has just encountered the passage in his reading, its promise reaches him with unusual force. He takes it personally. A cure for his foot, he reasons, is a much smaller request than the removal of a mountain.

At home Philip asks his aunt and uncle whether genuine belief could make such a miracle happen. His uncle answers that it is a matter of faith and that the deed would be possible by God’s grace. Philip has obtained the assurance he wanted. That night, in his cold room, he kneels and prays with all his might for his clubfoot to be made whole. He treats the discomfort of prayer as an offering: cold hands and feet seem to him more pleasing to God. The next morning he repeats the request and fixes a date for the miracle—the night before he must return to school.

Prayer becomes a test

The desired cure is not an abstraction. Philip imagines running faster than the other boys and taking part in football and the Easter-term races, especially the hurdles. He longs to be like everyone else, rather than to be stared at by new boys who do not yet know about his deformity. At the summer baths, his foot requires elaborate precautions while he undresses so that he can hide it in the water. These anticipated changes give his prayer a concrete bodily and social stake: he hopes not only to walk differently, but to escape the scrutiny and restrictions attached to his visible difference.

As the appointed night approaches, he intensifies his devotion. Snow lies outside, and while his aunt has a fire in her bedroom, Philip’s room is bitterly cold. He turns back the rug to kneel on bare boards, then decides his nightshirt may be too comfortable for the petition and prays naked. The added hardship makes the effort feel more urgent to him. He sleeps so soundly that Mary Ann has to shake him the next morning. On waking he remembers that this is the day of the miracle and is filled with joy and gratitude.

At first Philip is reluctant even to touch his foot, because doing so seems to question God’s goodness. He believes it has been healed. Eventually he tests it with the toes of his right foot and then passes his hand over it. The foot is unchanged. He limps downstairs and sits at breakfast, carrying the knowledge of failure into an ordinary family morning. When he asks what it would mean if a person truly believed that God would do something and it nevertheless did not happen, his uncle replies that the person had not had faith.

The failure and its consequences

Philip accepts the explanation, although it does not resolve the contradiction. If God has not cured him, then he must not really have believed; yet he cannot understand how his belief could have been stronger. He allows for the possibility that he gave God too little time: he had prayed for only nineteen days. He begins again, this time choosing Easter, the day of Christ’s resurrection, as the hoped-for deadline, and continues to repeat his petition in identical words because he thinks consistency matters.

His effort expands beyond formal prayer. Philip wishes on new moons and dappled horses, looks for shooting stars, and breaks a lucky bone over chicken at the vicarage, each time asking for the same cure. The additional rituals show how insistently he tries to secure the desired outcome even as he begins to doubt that his faith can meet the condition set for it. The promise has become a test that he cannot tell how to pass. He starts to generalize from his own case, wondering whether anyone ever has enough faith.

Before Easter he gives up. The text about moving mountains now seems to him like the story of catching a bird by putting salt on its tail: a tantalizing instruction that cannot be carried out. He feels dull resentment toward his uncle for taking him in and decides that the biblical words say one thing while meaning another. The episode ends not with bodily change but with a breach in trust. Philip’s clubfoot remains, and the failed petition leaves him suspicious that religious assurance has offered him an impossible bargain: believe completely, but explain the absence of the promised miracle as proof that belief was incomplete.

Significance in Philip’s religious development

The scene makes Philip’s disability the immediate ground on which a religious claim is tested. His hope of a cure is tied to ordinary experiences—running, sport, changing at the baths, and other boys’ looks—rather than to an abstract desire for supernatural power. The narrative thus shows the pressure of a model in which bodily difference appears as something that ought to be corrected, while the failure of correction is turned into a judgment about the petitioner’s faith. Philip’s body does not change; the explanation of what his body means begins to change instead.

The episode also establishes a pattern in Philip’s later loss of belief. At this stage he does not yet reject religion outright. He first tries harder, revises the deadline, repeats the prayer, and adds customary wishes to his appeal. Only after those efforts fail does suspicion take hold. Later, in a different setting, he will find that he has ceased to believe in God; here the earlier movement is smaller and more intimate, but its logic is already visible. A promise is encountered, applied to lived experience, and found unable to bear the weight placed on it. The failed prayer is therefore both a childhood disappointment and an early fracture in the faith Philip has inherited.