To most persons the conception of a godless world is the conception of
a world with the bottom dropped out. It is a world from which all the
high values, all the splendid consolations have disappeared. This is
true even for many who feel that they cannot, in reason, any longer
believe in a personal God. For all their honest disbelief, the world
has turned grey for them. It has lost its old wonder and joy. It has
become a dead world.
It is interesting to ask ourselves whether all this need be true;
whether the high values and the finer consolations may not be just as
real when the belief in a personal God has vanished. With the
vanishing of that belief, of course, the whole attitude toward the
universe is altered. Hopes and comforts that were deeply and warmly of
the older order of beliefs have no place in the new order; while
loyalties and aspirations that were the breath of its life are become
meaningless and without force. But may not new loyalties and
aspirations, hopes and comforts find their place strongly and
inspiringly in the later order of belief?
It will be interesting, as an answer to this question, to ask how
differently a society would behave all of whose members, disbelieving
utterly in the reality of a personal God, had no other thought of the
divine life than that it was their own larger and more ideal
existence.
I remember at the time of the San Francisco earthquake passing one of
the cathedrals of the city and finding its broad stone steps, covering
a goodly portion of a city square, black with kneeling worshippers.
There could be no question of their reason for being there. They were
setting themselves right with their God, hoping that in the fervor of
their devotion he would have mercy upon them and save them from
destruction. So on shipboard in times of great danger one will find
the passengers gathered in the cabin praying to God for
deliverance,—always, to be sure, with the proviso, “Yet if it be thy
will that we perish, thy will be done!”
These are dramatic but typical instances of what occurs constantly in
homes and churches where people pray to a personal deity. Could such
an attitude of prayer have any meaning for a man who disbelieved in a
personal deity? Obviously not. Would he cease to pray? It all depends
upon what one is to mean by prayer.
Prayer of the kind indicated is an effort to secure assistance in
circumstances where the normal human means fail. Normally, for
example, if a man would have bread, he sets about to plant the proper
seed, or grind the flour, or mix the dough. He finds out, in short,
the laws that govern the production or manufacture of breadstuffs; and
he does not expect to secure his desired result until he has
accommodated himself in all the requisite ways to these laws and
conditions. If a man would save himself from a burning house, he looks
for a fire-escape, or a rope, or calls for a ladder; again
accommodating his action to the fundamental conditions of the
situation. But if the heavens are long without rain and the seed dry
up, or the fire burns away the means of escape, the man, at the end of
his human resources, calls to another power for help.
Such a call for help is based upon two assumptions, which in some
respects scarcely support each other. They are the assumption, first,
that there is a power able to control to his beneficent purposes
forces that are humanly uncontrollable; but, second, that this power
will not act unless attracted by very special and fervent appeal. The
latter fact, that special appeal is needed, may be due to the God’s
impotence, his inability to be in all places at once: he does the best
he can, hurrying hither and thither from one distressing circumstance
to another. Or it may be due to his demand that his creatures shall
continually turn their minds to him, an attitude which he succeeds in
securing in them for the most part only when they are hard pressed
with danger.
Stated thus baldly, it would be difficult even on the naïve planes of
religious thought to find persons who would acknowledge either that
their God was a jealous god, refusing help until all the requisite
ceremonies of abasement and supplication had been fulfilled, or that
he was a finite God, half distracted by the imploring voices calling
to him from all quarters of his universe. And yet, in prayer as it is
ordinarily practised, both of these views are more or less
unconsciously mingled. What prevents the emergence of their absurdity
into clear consciousness is the relatively healthy thought underlying
all prayer that if a man would secure something for himself he must
himself spend some effort in the process. _Ex nihilo nihil._ In
situations that pass beyond all his power of practical human control,
there is nothing for him to do but to give his mere effort of
adoration and hope.
On the higher levels of religious experience, this semi-magical
conception of prayer grows increasingly in ill-repute. The thought is
more and more in evidence that if God wished to prevent certain
distresses, he would do so of his own beneficent accord. A request for
specific aid, in short, would insinuate in him, either a failure to
know in all circumstances what was best to be done, or an inability to
keep wholly abreast of the tasks which he ought to perform. To save
the majesty of God, prayer must become simply a turning of the mind to
him, not for specific help, but for that general uplift of spirit
which comes from the contemplation of his supreme perfection.
Here obviously is the germ of a higher and radically different
conception of prayer. In the more naïve conception, help was to come
from the “power not ourselves”; in the maturer conception, help is to
come _through the stimulation in ourselves of our own highest
powers_—a stimulation effected by the turning of our minds and
spirits to the highest conceivable Reality.
The efficacy of prayer, in short, in this conception of it, will lie
not in what it brings to us from without, but what it effects
within,—what powers, efforts, aspirations it develops in us. Let us
return to the kneeling worshippers. As they bowed their heads in
fervent supplication, other men and women were distributing bread and
clothing to destitute families, or were building shelters, or were
clearing the streets of débris, or were patrolling with gun on
shoulder against criminal disorder. Is it correct to say, as the older
religions have always said, that the latter were engaged wholly in
earthly affairs, while the former were entering the higher life of God
and the spirit? Or is it truer to hold that the digging away of débris
was a far more effective and powerful prayer to God than supplication
to him for help?
The kneeling worshippers were indeed turning their minds to their
highest conceivable Reality. It was a Reality that they hoped would do
things for them. But the diggers of débris, or the distributers of
bread and clothing, were likewise, unconsciously no doubt, but in
actual effect, turning their minds to their highest Reality. Face to
face with the destruction of those things that give order and beauty
and power to life, they were thinking (in their unconscious selves) of
what a city for men and women and children _ought to be and could be_.
It ought not to be a tumbled mass of bricks and burning wood; it ought
not to be filled with starving people; it ought not to be given over
to looters and murderers; it ought to be a city clean, ordered, happy.
With their smoke-blinded eyes, they may not have seen far beyond the
immediate demands of their ideal; but ideal it nevertheless was to
which they lifted their souls in service. With all its vague
inadequacy, it was for them then and there their highest Reality,
their God—the ideal life in their members—to which they felt that
they must devote themselves with full power of brain and muscle. They
asked nothing of this their God; rather it was their God _that asked
everything of them_, that stimulated them to the full, devoted
summoning of all their essential powers.
When a child lies sick unto death, what is the effective form of
prayer? If the divine life, as we have held, is our own ideal life,
prayer to such God is the tireless, unflinching effort to bring some
measure of that ideal life to realization. The death of a little child
of causes that might be controlled is hardly in keeping with the ideal
of life. Hence devotion to the ideal calls for every straining of
effort,—the loving care, the ceaseless watching, the sacrifice of
pleasure and comforts to purchase the best knowledge and skill to save
the little life. This is the essential prayer; not the bowing in
helpless misery and supplication before a God who needs to be called
from some far forgetfulness to his proper tasks.
During recent winter storms, when New York was filled with hundreds of
thousands of unemployed, several hundred of these unfortunate men, as
reported by _The New York Times_, marched through the snow-filled
streets to one of the large evangelical churches where the weekly
prayer meeting was being held. As they filed in, consternation spread
among the worshippers. Their minister, however, stopped the oncoming
crowd and asked them what they wanted. “We want shelter for the night
in your church,” they said. The minister, looking at his cushioned
pews, replied that he could not permit it. “But cannot we sleep in the
basement?” they asked. No, the minister said, they could not, and he
advised them to leave the church quietly, at the same time whispering
to one of his congregation to call up the police. The police came in
due order and rough-handled the men; and the prayers to God were
resumed. Meanwhile, at another place in the city, a great body of men
and women were gathered, drawn together at the instance of the
American Association for Labor Legislation, to consider ways and means
for relieving the distressing conditions of unemployment. At the
latter meeting men spoke of municipal employment bureaus, of
scientific plans for unemployment insurance; they brought forth facts
and figures to prove the possibility of regulating business in such a
way as to prevent the alternation of slack and rush seasons. They did
not mention God. And yet one wonders whether their earnest and
forceful deliberations were not a far more fervent prayer to God, a
far more devoted yielding of themselves to the power of their ideal
selves than the windy prayer of that minister (or of his people) who
trusted his God so poorly that he called in the city’s police to help
Him out of an ugly scrape.
Once the divine life is believed to be not a beneficent Person other
than ourselves to whom we may call for help, but the finer life that
lives potentially in ourselves, prayer ceases to be a semi-magic
formula applicable to an order of existence beyond our own. Prayer is
then nothing more or less than the turning of mind and spirit to the
service of the ideal that lives in us. And it is most effectually
realized not by departing from human activity, by yielding oneself to
a power not oneself; but rather by a vigorous turning to the problems
and difficulties of our life and enlisting every last shred of effort
to set them right.
It follows then that there is prayer wherever there is service,
_service of any kind_ that makes for life-betterment. The chemist who
learns a new control has received an answer to his year-long prayer;
the physician who finds the saving serum has prayed long and fervently
and has been heard of his God. The business man who finds a way of
juster coöperation with his men need never have named the word God or
joined in holy adoration. But he has prayed—to his ideal of human
brotherhood; and has prayed so vigorously that his God has heard and
answered.
But in each case the God that has heard and answered has been the
deeper possibilities of these men’s own life—their ideal life—which
they, by their loyal devotion, have wrought out of mere possibility
into some manner of actuality.