CURRENT LITERATURE.
Christian Prayer and General Latrs. By George J. Romanes. (Mac- millan.)—This essay obtained the Burney Prize at Cambridge in the year 1873, and adds another to the list of really valuable works which these competitions have of late years called forth, both there and at Oxford. Mr. Romanes's argument, which, we may say in passing, would have been far more available for general purposes if it had been given in a compendious as well as in a detailed form, carries the attack, so to speak, into the enemies' country. It bears some general resemblance to Mr. Manses argument in the Bampton Lectures. The man of science is told that be becomes unscientific, when he passes from the region of natural laws with which he is conversant to argue about the possibility or impossibility of action which, if it is conceivable at all, must transcend these laws The fallacy of arguing from the action of general laws to the action of that which transcends them be- comes thus strikingly apparent. For it is simply to apply a derivative mode of argument to that which transcends that from which it is derived. It would be sufficiently illogical, because 'infinitely precarious,' to institute an analogy between the action of one natural law and that of another,—such, for instance, as that because the planets travel in orbital curves in obedience to the law of gravitation, therefore the light and heat radiated from their surfaces, and which are inde- pendent of that law, should also move in orbital curves. But illogical as this obviously is, because glaringly opposed to common-sense, it is not so fundamentally illogical as endeavouring to institute an analogy between the action of natural law—a sphere of action from which the idea of analogy alone arises, and in which alone it must terminate—and the action of that which, in transcending natural law, also transcends that sphere." We cannot even summarise the argument of which this is the outcome, but we may say that it is unquestionably able, though we think it might have been presented in a more terse and striking form. We question indeed whether it will be practically effective. It may be said that arguments seldom are effective, but perhaps the least effective are those which deny competence to judge. Mr. Romanes has added
an interesting appendix, in which he has considered the views set forth in relation to prayer by Messrs. Knight, Robertson, and Stopford Brooke, the last of whom he speaks of, oddly enough, as "Mr. Brooks," an instanJe of what Aristotle in his " Rhetoric " describes as a kind of is.syesp;e. Against Mr. Knight's division of the two spheres, the spiritual and the physical, into the latter of which prayer must not pretend to intrude, he makes out a good case. Generally we find the key of his position in his criticism of a sentence of Mr. Brooke's. That
gentleman has been saying, "I believe that God could stay the rain and dismiss the -pestilence, if it were His will, at the voice of prayer. He may do so, for all I know, but it would make me miserable to think it were so." This last, comments the essayist, is "the most philosophical sentence that is to be found throughout the whole discussion." "He may do so for all I know," probably represents the popular belief on the subject, and it is perhaps the strongest available position.
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