The first week of January is by a certain sect 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 earnestly 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 suffered
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 one who
piously explains, however, that but for the prayer the sentence might
have been commuted to service in the galleys. I have myself known a
minister to pray for rain, and the rain came. I fear he knew that the
weather bureau had 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 for weeks
all the clergy of this country prayed publicly for the recovery of
President Garfield 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 many 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 curse and his hope a lie. Is it possible that all
this praying is futilized and invalidated by 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.