less briefly. We have heard much talk of late against prayer, especially
against prayers for better weather and for the recovery of sick people. As
regards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered to
stand firm, it is that in certain environments prayer may contribute to
recovery, and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure. Being a
normal factor of moral health in the person, its omission would be
deleterious. The case of the weather is different. Notwithstanding the
recency of the opposite belief,(306) every one now knows that droughts and
storms follow from physical antecedents, and that moral appeals cannot
avert them. But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if
we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward
communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can
easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched.
Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
“Religion,” says a liberal French theologian, “is an intercourse, a
conscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in distress with
the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which
its fate is contingent. This intercourse with God is realized by prayer.
Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer
that distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar or
neighboring phenomena as purely moral or æsthetic sentiment. Religion is
nothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save
itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life. This act
is prayer, by which term I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere
repetition of certain sacred formulæ, but the very movement itself of the
soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious
power of which it feels the presence,—it may be even before it has a name
by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no
religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the
soul, even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we have living
religion. One sees from this why ‘natural religion,’ so‐called, is not
properly a religion. It cuts man off from prayer. It leaves him and God in
mutual remoteness, with no intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no
interchange, no action of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom
this pretended religion is only a philosophy. Born at epochs of
rationalism, of critical investigations, it never was anything but an
abstraction. An artificial and dead creation, it reveals to its examiner
hardly one of the characters proper to religion.”(307)
It seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth of
M. Sabatier’s contention. The religious phenomenon, studied as an inner
fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications, has
shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the
consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves
and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related. This
intercourse is realized at the time as being both active and mutual. If it
be not effective; if it be not a give and take relation; if nothing be
really transacted while it lasts; if the world is in no whit different for
its having taken place; then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense
that _something is transacting_, is of course a feeling of what is
illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as
containing elements of delusion,—these undoubtedly everywhere exist,—but
as being rooted in delusion altogether, just as materialists and atheists
have always said it was. At most there might remain, when the direct
experiences of prayer were ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential
belief that the whole order of existence must have a divine cause. But
this way of contemplating nature, pleasing as it would doubtless be to
persons of a pious taste, would leave to them but the spectators’ part at
a play, whereas in experimental religion and the prayerful life, we seem
ourselves to be actors, and not in a play, but in a very serious reality.
The genuineness of religion is thus indissolubly bound up with the
question whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not deceitful. The
conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this consciousness is
the very core of living religion. As to what is transacted, great
differences of opinion have prevailed. The unseen powers have been
supposed, and are yet supposed, to do things which no enlightened man can
nowadays believe in. It may well prove that the sphere of influence in
prayer is subjective exclusively, and that what is immediately changed is
only the mind of the praying person. But however our opinion of prayer’s
effects may come to be limited by criticism, religion, in the vital sense
in which these lectures study it, must stand or fall by the persuasion
that effects of some sort genuinely do occur. Through prayer, religion
insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about:
energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and
operates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of
facts.
This postulate is strikingly expressed in a letter written by the late
Frederic W. H. Myers to a friend, who allows me to quote from it. It shows
how independent the prayer‐instinct is of usual doctrinal complications.
Mr. Myers writes:—
“I am glad that you have asked me about prayer, because I have
rather strong ideas on the subject. First consider what are the
facts. There exists around us a spiritual universe, and that
universe is in actual relation with the material. From the
spiritual universe comes the energy which maintains the material;
the energy which makes the life of each individual spirit. Our
spirits are supported by a perpetual indrawal of this energy, and
the vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing, much as the
vigor of our absorption of material nutriment changes from hour to
hour.
“I call these ‘facts’ because I think that some scheme of this
kind is the only one consistent with our actual evidence; too
complex to summarize here. How, then, should we _act_ on these
facts? Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much spiritual life
as possible, and we must place our minds in any attitude which
experience shows to be favorable to such indrawal. _Prayer_ is the
general name for that attitude of open and earnest expectancy. If
we then ask to _whom_ to pray, the answer (strangely enough) must
be that _that_ does not much matter. The prayer is not indeed a
purely subjective thing;—it means a real increase in intensity of
absorption of spiritual power or grace;—but we do not know enough
of what takes place in the spiritual world to know how the prayer
operates;—_who_ is cognizant of it, or through what channel the
grace is given. Better let children pray to Christ, who is at any
rate the highest individual spirit of whom we have any knowledge.
But it would be rash to say that Christ himself _hears us_; while
to say that _God_ hears us is merely to restate the first
principle,—that grace flows in from the infinite spiritual world.”
Let us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the belief that
power is absorbed until the next lecture, when our dogmatic conclusions,
if we have any, must be reached. Let this lecture still confine itself to
the description of phenomena; and as a concrete example of an extreme
sort, of the way in which the prayerful life may still be led, let me take
a case with which most of you must be acquainted, that of George Müller of
Bristol, who died in 1898. Müller’s prayers were of the crassest
petitional order. Early in life he resolved on taking certain Bible
promises in literal sincerity, and on letting himself be fed, not by his
own worldly foresight, but by the Lord’s hand. He had an extraordinarily
active and successful career, among the fruits of which were the
distribution of over two million copies of the Scripture text, in
different languages; the equipment of several hundred missionaries; the
circulation of more than a hundred and eleven million of scriptural books,
pamphlets, and tracts; the building of five large orphanages, and the
keeping and educating of thousands of orphans; finally, the establishment
of schools in which over a hundred and twenty‐one thousand youthful and
adult pupils were taught. In the course of this work Mr. Müller received
and administered nearly a million and a half of pounds sterling, and
traveled over two hundred thousand miles of sea and land.(308) During the
sixty‐eight years of his ministry, he never owned any property except his
clothes and furniture, and cash in hand; and he left, at the age of
eighty‐six, an estate worth only a hundred and sixty pounds.
His method was to let his general wants be publicly known, but not
to acquaint other people with the details of his temporary
necessities. For the relief of the latter, he prayed directly to
the Lord, believing that sooner or later prayers are always
answered if one have trust enough. “When I lose such a thing as a
key,” he writes, “I ask the Lord to direct me to it, and I look
for an answer to my prayer; when a person with whom I have made an
appointment does not come, according to the fixed time, and I
begin to be inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased to
hasten him to me, and I look for an answer; when I do not
understand a passage of the word of God, I lift up my heart to the
Lord that he would be pleased by his Holy Spirit to instruct me,
and I expect to be taught, though I do not fix the time when, and
the manner how it should be; when I am going to minister in the
Word, I seek help from the Lord, and ... am not cast down, but of
good cheer because I look for his assistance.”
Müller’s custom was to never run up bills, not even for a week.
“As the Lord deals out to us by the day, ... the week’s payment
might become due and we have no money to meet it; and thus those
with whom we deal might be inconvenienced by us, and we be found
acting against the commandment of the Lord: ‘Owe no man anything.’
From this day and henceforward whilst the Lord gives to us our
supplies by the day, we purpose to pay at once for every article
as it is purchased, and never to buy anything except we can pay
for it at once, however much it may seem to be needed, and however
much those with whom we deal may wish to be paid only by the
week.”
The articles needed of which Müller speaks were the food, fuel,
etc., of his orphanages. Somehow, near as they often come to going
without a meal, they hardly ever seem actually to have done so.
“Greater and more manifest nearness of the Lord’s presence I have
never had than when after breakfast there were no means for dinner
for more than a hundred persons; or when after dinner there were
no means for the tea, and yet the Lord provided the tea; and all
this without one single human being having been informed about our
need.... Through Grace my mind is so fully assured of the
faithfulness of the Lord, that in the midst of the greatest need,
I am enabled in peace to go about my other work. Indeed, did not
the Lord give me this, which is the result of trusting in him, I
should scarcely be able to work at all; for it is now
comparatively a rare thing that a day comes when I am not in need
for one or another part of the work.”(309)
In building his orphanages simply by prayer and faith, Müller
affirms that his prime motive was “to have something to point to
as a visible proof that our God and Father is the same faithful
God that he ever was,—as willing as ever to prove himself the
living God, in our day as formerly, to all that put their trust in
him.”(310) For this reason he refused to borrow money for any of
his enterprises. “How does it work when we thus anticipate God by
going our own way? We certainly weaken faith instead of increasing
it; and each time we work thus a deliverance of our own we find it
more and more difficult to trust in God, till at last we give way
entirely to our natural fallen reason and unbelief prevails. How
different if one is enabled to wait God’s own time, and to look
alone to him for help and deliverance! When at last help comes,
after many seasons of prayer it may be, how sweet it is, and what
a present recompense! Dear Christian reader, if you have never
walked in this path of obedience before, do so now, and you will
then know experimentally the sweetness of the joy which results
from it.”(311)
When the supplies came in but slowly, Müller always considered
that this was for the trial of his faith and patience. When his
faith and patience had been sufficiently tried, the Lord would
send more means. “And thus it has proved,”—I quote from his
diary,—“for to‐day was given me the sum of 2050 pounds, of which
2000 are for the building fund [of a certain house], and 50 for
present necessities. It is impossible to describe my joy in God
when I received this donation. I was neither excited nor
surprised; for I _look out_ for answers to my prayers. _I believe
that God hears me._ Yet my heart was so full of joy that I could
only _sit_ before God, and admire him, like David in 2 Samuel vii.
At last I cast myself flat down upon my face and burst forth in
thanksgiving to God and in surrendering my heart afresh to him for
his blessed service.”(312)
George Müller’s is a case extreme in every respect, and in no respect more
so than in the extraordinary narrowness of the man’s intellectual horizon.
His God was, as he often said, his business partner. He seems to have been
for Müller little more than a sort of supernatural clergyman interested in
the congregation of tradesmen and others in Bristol who were his saints,
and in the orphanages and other enterprises, but unpossessed of any of
those vaster and wilder and more ideal attributes with which the human
imagination elsewhere has invested him. Müller, in short, was absolutely
unphilosophical. His intensely private and practical conception of his
relations with the Deity continued the traditions of the most primitive
human thought.(313) When we compare a mind like his with such a mind as,
for example, Emerson’s or Phillips Brooks’s, we see the range which the
religions consciousness covers.
There is an immense literature relating to answers to petitional prayer.
The evangelical journals are filled with such answers, and books are
devoted to the subject,(314) but for us Müller’s case will suffice.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
A less sturdy beggar‐like fashion of leading the prayerful life is
followed by innumerable other Christians. Persistence in leaning on the
Almighty for support and guidance will, such persons say, bring with it
proofs, palpable but much more subtle, of his presence and active
influence. The following description of a “led” life, by a German writer
whom I have already quoted, would no doubt appear to countless Christians
in every country as if transcribed from their own personal experience. One
finds in this guided sort of life, says Dr. Hilty,—
“That books and words (and sometimes people) come to one’s
cognizance just at the very moment in which one needs them; that
one glides over great dangers as if with shut eyes, remaining
ignorant of what would have terrified one or led one astray, until
the peril is past—this being especially the case with temptations
to vanity and sensuality; that paths on which one ought not to
wander are, as it were, hedged off with thorns; but that on the
other side great obstacles are suddenly removed; that when the
time has come for something, one suddenly receives a courage that
formerly failed, or perceives the root of a matter that until then
was concealed, or discovers thoughts, talents, yea, even pieces of
knowledge and insight, in one’s self, of which it is impossible to
say whence they come; finally, that persons help us or decline to
help us, favor us or refuse us, as if they had to do so against
their will, so that often those indifferent or even unfriendly to
us yield us the greatest service and furtherance. (God takes often
their worldly goods, from those whom he leads, at just the right
moment, when they threaten to impede the effort after higher
interests.)
“Besides all this, other noteworthy things come to pass, of which
it is not easy to give account. There is no doubt whatever that
now one walks continually through ‘open doors’ and on the easiest
roads, with as little care and trouble as it is possible to
imagine.
“Furthermore one finds one’s self settling one’s affairs neither
too early nor too late, whereas they were wont to be spoiled by
untimeliness, even when the preparations had been well laid. In
addition to this, one does them with perfect tranquillity of mind,
almost as if they were matters of no consequence, like errands
done by us for another person, in which case we usually act more
calmly than when we act in our own concerns. Again, one finds that
one can _wait_ for everything patiently, and that is one of life’s
great arts. One finds also that each thing comes duly, one thing
after the other, so that one gains time to make one’s footing sure
before advancing farther. And then everything occurs to us at the
right moment, just what we ought to do, etc., and often in a very
striking way, just as if a third person were keeping watch over
those things which we are in easy danger of forgetting.
“Often, too, persons are sent to us at the right time, to offer or
ask for what is needed, and what we should never have had the
courage or resolution to undertake of our own accord.
“Through all these experiences one finds that one is kindly and
tolerant of other people, even of such as are repulsive,
negligent, or ill‐willed, for they also are instruments of good in
God’s hand, and often most efficient ones. Without these thoughts
it would be hard for even the best of us always to keep our
equanimity. But with the consciousness of divine guidance, one
sees many a thing in life quite differently from what would
otherwise be possible.
“All these are things that every human being _knows_, who has had
experience of them; and of which the most speaking examples could
be brought forward. The highest resources of worldly wisdom are
unable to attain that which, under divine leading, comes to us of
its own accord.”(315)
Such accounts as this shade away into others where the belief is, not that
particular events are tempered more towardly to us by a superintending
providence, as a reward for our reliance, but that by cultivating the
continuous sense of our connection with the power that made things as they
are, we are tempered more towardly for their reception. The outward face
of nature need not alter, but the expressions of meaning in it alter. It
was dead and is alive again. It is like the difference between looking on
a person without love, or upon the same person with love. In the latter
case intercourse springs into new vitality. So when one’s affections keep
in touch with the divinity of the world’s authorship, fear and egotism
fall away; and in the equanimity that follows, one finds in the hours, as
they succeed each other, a series of purely benignant opportunities. It is
as if all doors were opened, and all paths freshly smoothed. We meet a new
world when we meet the old world in the spirit which this kind of prayer
infuses.
Such a spirit was that of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.(316) It is that
of mind‐curers, of the transcendentalists, and of the so‐called “liberal”
Christians. As an expression of it, I will quote a page from one of
Martineau’s sermons:—
“The universe, open to the eye to‐day, looks as it did a thousand
years ago: and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the beauty
with which our own familiar sun dressed the earliest fields and
gardens of the world. We see what all our fathers saw. And if we
cannot find God in your house or in mine, upon the roadside or the
margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the
day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret
grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and
solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think we should
discern him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the
moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of
greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed
us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far
spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God’s hand
is, _there_ is miracle: and it is simply an indevoutness which
imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of
God. The customs of Heaven ought surely to be more sacred in our
eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High
is never tired, than the strange things which he does not love
well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath
the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the
Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which
Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise. It is no outward change,
no shifting in time or place; but only the loving meditation of
the pure in heart, that can reawaken the Eternal from the sleep
within our souls: that can render him a reality again, and
reassert for him once more his ancient name of ‘the Living
God.’ ”(317)
When we see all things in God, and refer all things to him, we read in
common matters superior expressions of meaning. The deadness with which
custom invests the familiar vanishes, and existence as a whole appears
transfigured. The state of a mind thus awakened from torpor is well
expressed in these words, which I take from a friend’s letter:—
“If we occupy ourselves in summing up all the mercies and bounties
we are privileged to have, we are overwhelmed by their number (so
great that we can imagine ourselves unable to give ourselves time
even to begin to review the things we may imagine _we have not_).
We sum them and realize that _we are actually killed with God’s
kindness_; that we are surrounded by bounties upon bounties,
without which all would fall. Should we not love it; should we not
feel buoyed up by the Eternal Arms?”
Sometimes this realization that facts are of divine sending, instead of
being habitual, is casual, like a mystical experience. Father Gratry gives
this instance from his youthful melancholy period:—
“One day I had a moment of consolation, because I met with
something which seemed to me ideally perfect. It was a poor
drummer beating the tattoo in the streets of Paris. I walked
behind him in returning to the school on the evening of a holiday.
His drum gave out the tattoo in such a way that, at that moment at
least, however peevish I were, I could find no pretext for fault‐
finding. It was impossible to conceive more nerve or spirit,
better time or measure, more clearness or richness, than were in
this drumming. Ideal desire could go no farther in that direction.
I was enchanted and consoled; the perfection of this wretched act
did me good. Good is at least possible, I said, since the ideal
can thus sometimes get embodied.”(318)
In Sénancour’s novel of Obermann a similar transient lifting of the veil
is recorded. In Paris streets, on a March day, he comes across a flower in
bloom, a jonquil:
“It was the strongest expression of desire: it was the first
perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man.
This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world,
arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so
instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of
relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless
beauty.... I shall never inclose in a conception this power, this
immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will
contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which,
it seems, nature has not made actual.”(319)