Whoever wrote it built the prayer on two elegant structures. The first half is a series of sowings, asking that where there is hatred the speaker may sow love, where injury pardon, where doubt faith, where despair hope, where darkness light, where sadness joy. The second half turns inward through paradox, asking to console rather than be consoled, to understand rather than be understood, to love rather than be loved, and closes with the triple reversal that it is in giving that we receive, in pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are born to eternal life. The text's career outran every other modern prayer. It circulated widely during the two world wars, when its petitions matched the moment, and it crossed denominational lines with unusual ease, adopted by Protestants, Anglicans and Catholics alike and quoted far beyond Christianity.
Mother Teresa had it recited at her Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1979, and Margaret Thatcher quoted it on the steps of Downing Street the same year. Sebastian Temple's 1967 hymn setting, Make Me a Channel of Your Peace, carried it into congregational song, and that setting was sung at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. The false attribution, once corrected, leaves the prayer no poorer, a modern text good enough that the world assumed a saint had written it.