The first week of January is set apart as a week of prayer. It is a
custom of more than a half century's age, and it seems that "gracious
answers have been received in proportion to the earnestness and
unanimity of the petitions." That is to say, in this world's speech, the
more Christians that have prayed and the more they have meant it, the
better the result is known to have been. I don't believe all that. I
don't believe that when God is asked to do something that he had not
intended to do he counts noses before making up his mind whether to do
it or not God probably knows the character of his work, and knowing that
he has made this a world of knaves and dunces he must know that the
more of them that ask for something, and the more loudly they ask, the
stronger is the presumption that they ought not to have it. And I think
God is perhaps less concerned about his popularity than some good folk
seem to suppose.
Doubtless there are errors in the record of results--some things
set down as "answers" to prayer which came about through the orderly
operation of natural laws and would have occurred anyhow. I am told that
similar errors have been made, or are believed to have been made, in
the past. In 1730, for example, a good Bishop at Auvergne prayed for an
eclipse of the sun as a warning to unbelievers. The eclipse ensued and
the pious prelate made the most of it; but when it was shown that
the astronomers of the period had foretold it he was a sufferer from
irreverent gibes. A monk of Treves prayed that an enemy of the church,
then in Paris, might lose his head, and it fell off; but it transpired
that, unknown (or known) to the monk, the man was under sentence of
decapitation when the prayer was made. This is related by Ausolus, who
piously explains, however, that but for the prayer the sentence might
perhaps have been commuted to service in the galleys. I have myself
known a minister to pray for rain, and the rain came. Perhaps you can
conceive his discomfiture when I showed him that the weather bureau had
previously predicted a fair day.
I do not object to a week of prayer. But why only a week? If prayer
is "answered" Christians ought to pray all the time. That prayer is
"answered" the Scripture affirms as positively and unequivocally as
anything can be affirmed in words: "All things whatsoever ye shall ask
in prayer, believing, that ye shall receive." Why, then, when all the
clergy of this country prayed, publicly for the recovery of President
McKinley, did the man die? Why is it that although two pious Chaplains
ask almost daily that goodness and wisdom may descend upon Congress,
Congress remains wicked and unwise? Why is it that although in all the
churches and half the dwellings of the land God is continually asked for
good government, good government remains what it always and everywhere
has been, a dream? From Earth to Heaven in unceasing ascension flows a
stream of prayer for every blessing that man desires, yet man remains
unblest, the victim of his own folly and passions, the sport of fire,
flood, tempest and earthquake, afflicted with famine and disease, war,
poverty and crime, his world an incredible welter of evil, his life'
a labor and his hope a lie. Is it possible that all this praying is
futilized and invalidated by the lack of faith?--that the "asking"
is not credentialed by the "believing?" When the anointed minister
of Heaven spreads his palms and uprolls his eyes to beseech a general
blessing or some special advantage is he the celebrant of a hollow,
meaningless rite, or the dupe of a false promise? One does not know, but
if one is not a fool one does know that his every resultless petition
proves him by the inexorable laws of logic to be the one or the other.