THE DISCUSSION ABOUT PRAYER.
AFEW remarks, in conclusion, on the very remarkable corre- spondence which we have published and which we have suppressed,—mere considerations of apace have compelled us to suppress many times as much as we have published, includ- ing some very able letters,—concerning the Efficacy of Prayer, may perhaps bring out the opposite views taken by the scientific and by the religious mind of this generation with more clear- ness than was possible when it began. In the remarkable paper by Mr. Galton which recommenced the discussion, there were two main threads of the argument. First, Mr. Galton, with happy results for his own case,—though in perfect con- formity with the true statistical spirit, which always, and quite rightly, endeavours to get free of the error likely to result from studying individual instances, and to test general laws by large averages,—appealed to the results of formulated prayers for the life of kings, for the grant of grace, wisdom, and understanding to the nobility, and so forth, and showed by figures that those prayers are by no means answered by any special lengthening of the life of Sovereigns, and appear to be explicitly rejected as regards the wisdom of the nobility, since insanity, a characteristic the most opposite to "grace, wisdom, and understanding," is commoner in their caste than in most others. And Mr. Galton made a strong point of the lives of missionaries. There, he very fairly said, if any- where, you would be sure that the ground of the prayer for length of life is eminently rational and disinterested. A great part of a missionary's life is spent in acquiring a thorough command of the means of communicating with the people he is to convert. Yet missionaries die like other men from the effects of climate before they have even brought their devout purposes to bear on the people they address. Even if they do not, there is no supernatural lengthening of their lives. Their averages of life are not unlike the averages of profane lives. They, as a class, appear to owe nothing to their religious purpose or the prayers for a long career which their religious purpose may be supposed to occa- sion. Such was his first point, and it is only fair to add that he did not assume, but carefully repudiated, any abstract ideas of physical law as bearing on these questions. He was can- did enough to point out,—what some of our correspondents, who otherwise take Mr. Galton's view, have forgotten or ignored, —that apart from the supposed invariability of physical laws, many means are open to the Christian's Providence of answer- ing such prayers as these through the mere exertion of inffnence over the minds of the missionaries or other subjects of the prayer. God may keep a man out of peril of tropical fever, or wreck, or assassination, by simply so guiding his thoughts and purposes as to restrain him from exposing himself to the conditions or causes of these dangers. If he does not so guard us, it is not from any want of purely spiritual resources for so doing. Mr. Galton's second point was, that there is quite enough to account for the universal use of prayer and for the relief it gives, without sup- posing that prayers are answered. The germ of feeling, he said, which leads to prayer is common to the lower animals, especially to mothers which have lost dick young. "There is a yearning of the heart, a craving for help," he said, with a good deal of eloquence and pathos, "it knows not whence, certainly from no source that it sees. Of a similar kind is the bitter cry of the hare when the greyhound is almost upon her ; she abandons hope through her own efforts, and screams, but to whom ? It is a voice convulsively sent out into apace, whose utterance is a physical relief." And he added, in a subsequent letter printed in these columns, that prayer is in no other sense than this intuitive with men ; and that it acquires the apparent character of an imperative instinct only through the ascendancy of a habit early implanted by the piety of mothers or other friends and teachers.
To Mr. Galton's arguments it has been replied by ourselves or some of our correspondents that there is no real basis such as Mr. Galton is so eager to assume for a statistical treatment of the results of Prayer ; since, in the first place, prayers are not mere utter- ances in the vocative case of which any specimen is as good as another, but vary in proportion to the depth and intensity of the life thrown into them, so that the very kind of prayers by which chiefly Mr. Galton tests his case,—the formulated prayers for classes of persons,—are probably those which partake least of all of the spiritual essence of Prayer. Again, we might have added that the general prayers in question are not exclusive prayers, the efficacy of which, if they have efficacy, implies that the classes named shall have longer lives than other people,—since allelasses are successively included, all "the sick" and all "the afflicted," until we reach the comprehensive prayer for "all thy people,"—but, on the contrary, they are mere classifications to help the imagination of the petitioner, in other words, are prayers which would be answered rather by the greater health, bodily and mental, of the whole people, than by any comparative favour to a particular section of them. Further, it has been replied that the intenser and the truer is the spirit of any prayer, the more completely is a prayer offered in that spirit wholly outside the reach of classificatory observa- tion, and the less would it prescribe to God the exact mode in which it should be answered, so that even if it could be observed and classified, it would be hard indeed, without cross-examin- ing him who offered it on the deepest secrets of his spiritual life, to determine whether it bad been answered or not. Finally, we have observed that the only prayer which we know to have been offered throughout all the ages of the Christian Church from the depth of the Christian heart,—the prayer for the progress of Christ's Gospel,—has been granted in the most marvellous way, and that against all the a priori probabilities of the case, if there were no God who answers prayer. In relation to Mr. Galton's second thesis, that though prayer, so far as it is a blind cry of nature for help, directed it knows not whither, may be intuitive, yet so far as it is a conscious spiritual address to a perfect and all-powerful invisible being, it is a result of the educa- tion (we use the word in its highest and truest sense) of complex faiths and affections, there is, we think, a very general disposition to agree with Mr. Galton, and we confess that we do not see the bearing of this part of his argument on his scepti- cal position. His drift appeared to be, "Do not argue that prayer in your sense is inseparable from the higher nature of'k- man ; the mere blind cry for help may be inseparable from that nature, but the *belief in the reality of that help depends on the special line of development of the intellectual and moral life,"—to which we reply that, of course, so far as the blind cry for help is not naturally and essentially connected in man with the sense of right and wrong, with the tran-
soesdent obligation of doing right, and the need of getting grace to do it, so far, certainly, intellectual development may fail to give this blind cry any more certain object than is present to the lower animals in the agony of their death-spasm ; bat, in our opinion, the normal development of the emotion which sends this instinctive cry into the night for help, is bound up with the growth of moral law within us, and with the growing faith in the grace and love of a Law-giver. On this last point, the believers in prayer are, no doubt, at issue with Mr. Gallon, but not, many of them, as far m we can see, on the point which he presented to us. If disbelief in a God who can give, at the very least, ample moral power in answer to earnest appeals for it,—and with it the many physical gifts of which such moral power may be the source, —is a natural and normal result of the accumulation of experience, inward and outward, then Mr. Galton's position as to the 'intuitive' origin of prayer comes to something. If not, not.
It will be observed that in this account of the opposite positions taken by Mr. Galton and by his opponents, we have excluded the somewhat irrelevant discussion, carefully excluded also by Mr. Galton himself, as to the means by which God may answer prayer without miraculous interference with natural laws. We may fairly assume that no modest Christian will pray for a miracle for his own particular benefit or that of his friends,—i.e., for any inter- ference which would unsettle all other men's confidence in the great invariable laws known to 112, and therefore their trust in the God of Nature,—nay, even that he could hardly believe it per- mitted to a religions mind so to pray. But it does not follow from this at all that it is permissible to pray for spiritual blessings only. How any clear-headed man can doubt that, if we are to assume any scope for a real answer to prayer at all, it can be strictly limited to spiritual blessings, we cannot see. If God gives what is beat for us independently of all prayer, then to pray for even spiritual blessings is quite superfluous, except on the dis- honest theory of re-acting upon yourself by a kind of dramatic spiritual fiction. If, as all who believe in prayer suppose, He has, for the sake of securing free communion between Him- self and His creatures, thought right to leave many good things ungiven till they are asked for from the bottom of the heart in an act of free intercourse with Himself, then, though good men will always suspect their prayers for happiness and the supposed means of happiness much more, and offer them much more submissively, than their prayers for goodness, it seems to us impossible to say that it is wrong or useless to include them in their prayers. As to God's conceivable power of answering such prayers without miracle, Mr. Galton himself points out how wide and close is the interweaving of the physical and spiritual, so that to an all-power- ful Being it is hard to conceive what even physical ends might not be gained by mere action on the spirits of men. If, for example, as some sober observers believe,—we are not implying any belief in it ourselves, but putting a mere hypothesis,—even heavy physical objects can be raised and serious physical ailments cured by new forms of purely " psychic" force, it would not be in the least inconceivable that the climatological causes of rain itself might be controlled without " miracle " by the agency of prayer. At all events, we certainly know far too little of the interweaving of spiritual with physical laws, to dogmatise about the impos- sibility that God should answer earnest and humble prayers for even physical blessings without miracle. Undoubtedly, how- ever, the whole strength of the belief in prayer centres on that conscious and imperious need of man for spiritual and moral help which makes prayer to the Source of all righteousness a vital function of his inner life,—a need which may often justify and oftener excuse the prayer for physical blessings, such as the life of those dear to us, or even much meaner things, so far as these seem really bound up with the deepest needs of the spirit.
It will be said with perfect truth that this review of the con- troversy with Mr. Galton only comes to this,—that while his statistical argument against the efficacy of prayer goes for very little or,—to give our own true valuation of it,—for nothing, , the argument on our own side, being merely a priori, has no force for those who look at the matter, as Mr. Galton does, as a mere case for impartial investigation by the methods of inductive science. And this we freely admit. We utterly deny that all truth is attainable by the same avenues. We do not doubt that Mr. Galton could disprove the " efficacy " of (human) love quite as successfully (or unsuccessfully) as the efficacy of prayer. We feel little doubt, for instance, that beautiful faces have, on the whole, attracted to themselves more love both at home and abroad than homely faces, and very likely Mr. Galton could prove beyond all doubt that the owners of beautiful faces have reaped from the love thus lavished upon them, much more
anguish and calamity than joy. If, however, Mr. Galton were to argue from this that human love has no " efficacy " to shed glad- ness on human life, the common-sense of mankind would probably laugh him down, and declare that this was not a region in which,— at present at least, —statistical methods can be applied with any kind of advantage. We say the same of the argument against the "efficacy of prayer." Apart from the a priori scientific precon- ceptions which Mr. Galton himself disowned, but which consti- tuted all the real attraction of his argument for the great majority of those who eagerly seized upon it, the statistical method has just as much applicability to the question of the "efficacy of prayer," as it has to the question of the efficacy of the human affections to produce happiness,—in other words, none at all.
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