OUR experiences are little worth unless they teach us to reflect. Let us
then pause to consider this hourly experience of human beings—this
remarkable efficacy of prayer. There can hardly be a contemplative mind
to which, with all its difficulties, the inquiry is not familiar.
To begin with, ‘To pray is to expect a miracle.’ ‘Prayer in its very
essence,’ says a thoughtful writer, ‘implies a belief in the possible
intervention of a power which is above nature.’ How was it in my case?
What was the essence of my belief? Nothing less than this: that God
would have permitted the laws of nature, ordained by His infinite wisdom
to fulfil His omniscient designs and pursue their natural course in
accordance with His will, had not my request persuaded Him to suspend
those laws in my favour.
The very belief in His omniscience and omnipotence subverts the spirit of
such a prayer. It is on the perfection of God that Malebranche bases his
argument that ‘Dieu n’agit pas par des volontés particulières.’ Yet
every prayer affects to interfere with the divine purposes.
It may here be urged that the divine purposes are beyond our
comprehension. God’s purposes may, in spite of the inconceivability,
admit the efficacy of prayer as a link in the chain of causation; or, as
Dr. Mozely holds, it may be that ‘a miracle is not an anomaly or
irregularity, but part of the system of the universe.’ We will not
entangle ourselves in the abstruse metaphysical problem which such
hypotheses involve, but turn for our answer to what we do know—to the
history of this world, to the daily life of man. If the sun rises on the
evil as well as on the good, if the wicked ‘become old, yea, are mighty
in power,’ still, the lightning, the plague, the falling chimney-pot,
smite the good as well as the evil. Even the dumb animal is not spared.
‘If,’ says Huxley, ‘our ears were sharp enough to hear all the cries of
pain that are uttered in the earth by man and beasts we should be
deafened by one continuous scream.’ ‘If there are any marks at all of
special design in creation,’ writes John Stuart Mill, ‘one of the things
most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should
pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals. They
have been lavishly fitted out with the instruments for that purpose.’ Is
it credible, then, that the Almighty Being who, as we assume, hears this
continuous scream—animal-prayer, as we may call it—and not only pays no
heed to it, but lavishly fits out animals with instruments for tormenting
and devouring one another, that such a Being should suspend the laws of
gravitation and physiology, should perform a miracle equal to that of
arresting the sun—for all miracles are equipollent—simply to prolong the
brief and useless existence of such a thing as man, of one man out of the
myriads who shriek, and—shriek in vain?
To pray is to expect a miracle. Then comes the further question: Is this
not to expect what never yet has happened? The only proof of any miracle
is the interpretation the witness or witnesses put upon what they have
seen. (Traditional miracles—miracles that others have been told, that
others have seen—we need not trouble our heads about.) What that proof
has been worth hitherto has been commented upon too often to need
attention here. Nor does the weakness of the evidence for miracles
depend solely on the fact that it rests, in the first instance, on the
senses, which may be deceived; or upon inference, which may be erroneous.
It is not merely that the infallibility of human testimony discredits the
miracles of the past. The impossibility that human knowledge, that
science, can ever exhaust the possibilities of Nature, precludes the
immediate reference to the Supernatural for all time. It is pure
sophistry to argue, as do Canon Row and other defenders of miracles, that
‘the laws of Nature are no more violated by the performance of a miracle
than they are by the activities of a man.’ If these arguments of the
special pleaders had any force at all, it would simply amount to this:
‘The activities of man’ being a part of nature, we have no evidence of a
supernatural being, which is the sole _raison d’être_ of miracle.
Yet thousands of men in these days who admit the force of these
objections continue, in spite of them, to pray. Huxley, the foremost of
‘agnostics,’ speaks with the utmost respect of his friend Charles
Kingsley’s conviction from experience of the efficacy of prayer. And
Huxley himself repeatedly assures us, in some form or other, that ‘the
possibilities of “may be” are to me infinite.’ The puzzle is, in truth,
on a par with that most insolvable of all puzzles—Free Will or
Determinism. Reason and the instinct of conscience are in both cases
irreconcilable. We are conscious that we are always free to choose,
though not to act; but reason will have it that this is a delusion.
There is no logical clue to the _impasse_. Still, reason
notwithstanding, we take our freedom (within limits) for granted, and
with like inconsequence we pray.
It must, I think, be admitted that the belief, delusive or warranted, is
efficacious in itself. Whether generated in the brain by the nerve
centres, or whatever may be its origin, a force coincident with it is
diffused throughout the nervous system, which converts the subject of it,
just paralysed by despair, into a vigorous agent, or, if you will,
automaton.
Now, those who admit this much argue, with no little force, that the
efficacy of prayer is limited to its reaction upon ourselves. Prayer, as
already observed, implies belief in supernatural intervention. Such
belief is competent to beget hope, and with it courage, energy, and
effort. Suppose contrition and remorse induce the sufferer to pray for
Divine aid and mercy, suppose suffering is the natural penalty of his or
her own misdeeds, and suppose the contrition and the prayer lead to
resistance of similar temptations, and hence to greater happiness,—can it
be said that the power to resist temptation or endure the penalty are due
to supernatural aid? Or must we not infer that the fear of the
consequences of vice or folly, together with an earnest desire and
intention to amend, were adequate in themselves to account for the good
results?
Reason compels us to the latter conclusion. But what then? Would this
prove prayer to be delusive? Not necessarily. That the laws of Nature
(as argued above) are not violated by miracle, is a mere perversion of
the accepted meaning of ‘miracle,’ an _ignoratio elenchi_. But in the
case of prayer that does not ask for the abrogation of Nature’s laws, it
ceases to be a miracle that we pray for or expect: for are not the laws
of the mind also laws of Nature? And can we explain them any more than
we can explain physical laws? A psychologist can formulate the mental
law of association, but he can no more explain it than Newton could
explain the laws of attraction and repulsion which pervade the world of
matter. We do not know, we cannot know, what the conditions of our
spiritual being are. The state of mind induced by prayer may, in
accordance with some mental law, be essential to certain modes of
spiritual energy, specially conducive to the highest of all moral or
spiritual results: taken in this sense, prayer may ask, not the
suspension, but the enactment, of some natural law.
Let it, however, be granted, for argument’s sake, that the belief in the
efficacy of prayer is delusive, and that the beneficial effects of the
belief—the exalted state of mind, the enhanced power to endure suffering
and resist temptation, the happiness inseparable from the assurance that
God hears, and can and will befriend us—let it be granted that all this
is due to sheer hallucination, is this an argument against prayer?
Surely not. For, in the first place, the incontestable fact that belief
does produce these effects is for us an ultimate fact as little capable
of explanation as any physical law whatever; and may, therefore, for
aught we know, or ever can know, be ordained by a Supreme Being.
Secondly, all the beneficial effects, including happiness, are as real in
themselves as if the belief were no delusion.
It may be said that a ‘fool’s paradise’ is liable to be turned into a
hell of disappointment; and that we pay the penalty of building happiness
on false foundations. This is true in a great measure; but it is
absolutely without truth as regards our belief in prayer, for the simple
reason that if death dispel the delusion, it at the same time dispels the
deluded. However great the mistake, it can never be found out. But they
who make it will have been the better and the happier while they lived.
For my part, though immeasurably preferring the pantheism of Goethe, or
of Renan (without his pessimism), to the anthropomorphic God of the
Israelites, or of their theosophic legatees, the Christians, however
inconsistent, I still believe in prayer. I should not pray that I may
not die ‘for want of breath’; nor for rain, while ‘the wind was in the
wrong quarter.’ My prayers would not be like those overheard, on his
visit to Heaven, by Lucian’s Menippus: ‘O Jupiter, let me become a king!’
‘O Jupiter, let my onions and my garlic thrive!’ ‘O Jupiter, let my
father soon depart from hence!’ But when the workings of my moral nature
were concerned, when I needed strength to bear the ills which could not
be averted, or do what conscience said was right, then I should pray.
And, if I had done my best in the same direction, I should trust in the
Unknowable for help.
Then too, is not gratitude to Heaven the best of prayers? Unhappy he who
has never felt it! Unhappier still, who has never had cause to feel it!
It may be deemed unwarrantable thus to draw the lines between what, for
want of better terms, we call Material and Spiritual. Still, reason is
but the faculty of a very finite being; and, as in the enigma of the
will, utterly incapable of solving any problems beyond those whose data
are furnished by the senses. Reason is essentially realistic. Science
is its domain. But science demonstratively proves that things are not
what they seem; their phenomenal existence is nothing else than their
relation to our special intelligence. We speak and think as if the
discoveries of science were absolutely true, true in themselves, not
relatively so for us only. Yet, beings with senses entirely different
from ours would have an entirely different science. For them, our best
established axioms would be inconceivable, would have no more meaning
than that ‘Abracadabra is a second intention.’
Science, supported by reason, assures us that the laws of nature—the laws
of realistic phenomena—are never suspended at the prayers of man. To
this conclusion the educated world is now rapidly coming. If,
nevertheless, men thoroughly convinced of this still choose to believe in
the efficacy of prayer, reason and science are incompetent to confute
them. The belief must be tried elsewhere,—it must be transferred to the
tribunal of conscience, or to a metaphysical court, in which reason has
no jurisdiction.
This by no means implies that reason, in its own province, is to yield to
the ‘feeling’ which so many cite as the infallible authority for their
‘convictions.’
We must not be asked to assent to contradictory propositions. We must
not be asked to believe that injustice, cruelty, and implacable revenge,
are not execrable because the Bible tells us they were habitually
manifested by the tribal god of the Israelites. The fables of man’s fall
and of the redemption are fraught with the grossest violation of our
moral conscience, and will, in time, be repudiated accordingly. It is
idle to say, as the Church says, ‘these are mysteries above our human
reason.’ They are fictions, fabrications which modern research has
traced to their sources, and which no unperverted mind would entertain
for a moment. Fanatical belief in the truth of such dogmas based upon
‘feeling’ have confronted all who have gone through the severe ordeal of
doubt. A couple of centuries ago, those who held them would have burnt
alive those who did not. Now, they have to console themselves with the
comforting thought of the fire that shall never be quenched. But even
Job’s patience could not stand the self-sufficiency of his pious
reprovers. The sceptic too may retort: ‘No doubt but ye are the people,
and wisdom shall die with you.’
Conviction of this kind is but the convenient substitute for knowledge
laboriously won, for the patient pursuit of truth at all costs—a plea in
short, for ignorance, indolence, incapacity, and the rancorous bigotry
begotten of them.
The distinction is not a purely sentimental one—not a belief founded
simply on emotion. There is a physical world—the world as known to our
senses, and there is a psychical world—the world of feeling,
consciousness, thought, and moral life.
Granting, if it pleases you, that material phenomena may be the causes of
mental phenomena, that ‘la pensée est le produit du corps entier,’ still
the two cannot be thought of as one. Until it can be proved that ‘there
is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity,’—which will
never be, till we know how we lift our hands to our mouths,—there remains
for us a world of mystery, which reason never can invade.
It is a pregnant thought of John Mill’s, apropos of material and mental
interdependence or identity, ‘that the uniform coexistence of one fact
with another does not make the one fact a part of the other, or the same
with it.’
A few words of Renan’s may help to support the argument. ‘Ce qui révèle
le vrai Dieu, c’est le sentiment moral. Si l’humanité n’était
qu’intelligente, elle serait athée. Le devoir, le dévouement, le
sacrifice, toutes choses dont l’histoire est pleine, sont inexplicables
sans Dieu.’ For all these we need help. Is it foolishness to pray for
it? Perhaps so. Yet, perhaps not; for ‘Tout est possible, même Dieu.’
Whether possible, or impossible, this much is absolutely certain: man
must and will have a religion as long as this world lasts. Let us not
fear truth. Criticism will change men’s dogmas, but it will not change
man’s nature.