THE COMPETING PRAYERS AGAINST PLAGUE.
THE Archbishop of Canterbury has put forth a brief prayer for relief from the cattle plague and cholera, the theology of which has been severely criticized in the Daily News by a pious clergyman of the Church of England, the Rev. William Rothery, who offers a rival prayer of his own, free, as he thinks, from the theological blemishes of the Archbishop's. The curious point about Mr. Rothery's criticism and his rival prayer is, however, that it not only retains, but very much exaggerates, the main error which really lurks in the theology of the Archbishop's prayer, though he points out and avoids in his proposed substitute another certainly less salient, and perhaps only hypothetical, error. Of this last, which is not very prominent in the Archbishop's form, we may as well dispose that. His Grace had written of the cholera, "Keep it, we beseech Thee, far away from our borders, and shield our homes from its ravages,—so shall we ever offer unto Thee the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for these Thy acts of providence over us,"—" as if," remarks Mr. Rothery, "the Lord could be supposed to desire these for His own sake, and so be bribed to compliance with our wishes,"—and he asserts that this form of words "imputes to our Heavenly Father a vain-glorious love of praise such as your Grace would scarcely wish any curate, looking to you for preferment, to imagine likely to influence you." No doubt the theology of the day, espe- cially the evangelical theology, does often make this delight of God in His own glory, merely as glory, repulsively prominent, and speaks as if that glory were something distinct from the purity and righteousness of the Almighty,—something in fact correponding in Him to what we call self-consciousness, self-absorption, and self-satisfaction in us. Granting that a quality which is pure evil in poor dependent natures, all whose springs of life are in God and not in themselves, must be something very different in the fountain of all goodness, it is still cer- tain that there must be far higher glory in the work of im- parting divine life to others than in contemplating it in its source, and that those notions of the Father are infinitely higher and more Christian which represent Him as resting in the beauty and purity of the Son, than those which contemplate Him as a purely self-centred being. To delight in our praise at least can only be divine so far as our praise is not merely gratitude, but the highest attitude of our minds, which, when it is mere grati- tude for relief from suffering, it certainly is not. The criticism which makes it appear that the Archbishop had made our praise conditional upon relief from the cattle plague and cholera is,however, strained and a little unfair. It was suggested, we suppose, by the likeness of the language used to Jacob's conditional promise to worship God—" If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father's home in peace, then shall the Lord be my God," which undoubtedly suggests, as we have heard it put,—and "if not, not." I This, however, is clearly not the Archbishop's meaning. Jacob was certainly a selfish, and probably at the time of this vow, but a half-convinced believer in the God of his fathers. The Arch- bishop of Canterbury does not share the half-subdued heathenism of the third in the line of Patriarchs. His vow of praise can scarcely be meant as an inducement to God, but merely as showing by anticipation that he foresees reason for new thank- fulness, and is ready to pour it forth. We think, however, that it would have been more Christian to pray for thankfulness under the affliction, than to promise it when the affliction should have been removed.
But in the main drift of Mr. Rothery's criticism we think that instead of correcting the erroneous theology of the Archbishop's prayer, he either introduces new error or greatly exaggerates the old. First, he finds fault with the Archbishop for imploring God to remember mercy in the midst of judgment, "which ascribes to our Heavenly Father," says Mr. Rothery, "a want or forgetfulness of mercy in such afflictions as the cattle-plague and the cholera," and in his own prayer he substitutes the petition, "Sanctify to us, we beseech thee, the visitation of murrain and disease," &c. This objection, if there be anything in it at all, would do away with all prayer. Mr. Rothery might just as well say that our Lord's prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread," or "Lead us not into temptation," or his own, "Sanctify to us this visitation," implied that God could forget our need of daily bread, or could lead us willingly into temptation, or might have forgotten to "sanctify to us" this visitation. Prayer is nothing if it is not the free expression of the human heart, and it is unmeaning unless we suppose that God loves such a free communication of our in- most hearts, and permits the fact of that expression often to weigh with Him in deciding for us what shall be. Free interchange of spirit with God may be, probably is, the highest end of human existence, and what He does for us He no doubt does in some measure to promote this free interchange. But we could not express the deepest wants of our hearts at all if we were always to hamper ourselves with the memory that praying for something
that God has not done ascribes (which it does not) a "want or forgetfulness" to God in not having done it. And in his next criticism Mr. Rothery seems to us guilty of a much graver theological error than the Archbishop himself. "The prayer also," he says, "directly ascribes to the Lord the grievous mur- rain with which He is said to have visited us, as if any evil thing could come from the infinite Source of all goodness." And
he states positively that if we lived according to God's holy will, "no plague, spiritual or natural, can possibly approach us." In
short, Mr. Rothery's doctrine is that all such calamities "are but results, in the world of effects, of corresponding evils in our own souls,"—calamities "needed to reveal to us such evils or sins that we may cease to love them and do them." Now no doubt it is the defect of the Primate's prayer to assume that this cattle plague is a " judgment " for sins, and may with some certainty be removed by "acknowledging our transgressions," and repenting of them. But if the Primate's prayer implies this assumption, Mr. Rothery does much more ; he expressly denies that such calamities can come direct from God at all. He main-
tains that they are pure self-caused results of our own sins, and that if we perfectly performed God's will no suffering could approach us at all. In the first place, who told Mr. Rothery that all suffering is evil ? Is it not true that mere ignorance is to an eager and thirsty mind a species of suffering—sometimes keen suffering ?—and yet ignorance is neither sin nor the result of sin. If it be true that "whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth," is it not also true that such chastening is often not for the sake of purifying, often not for the sake of cleansing away stains, but for the sake of enlarging, strengthening, elevating ? Was the suffer- ing of our Lord suffering to purify? Is not all suffering of good men in sympathy with the suffering of crime, or vice, or sin, a suffering enlarging rather than purifying, a suffering which is really a privilege, and not a penalty? Mr. Rothery exaggerates the error apparently implied in the Primate's prayer, that the cattle plague is certainly sent upon us for our sins, by his positive asser- tion that it can only be due to human sin, and could not exist but for human sin. The sufferings of genius are unquestionably not due to special sin, but to special sensitiveness, which is a privilege, and not a penalty,—and so the sufferings of moral genius, of the highest human perfection, are often conditions of greatness, not penalties for transgression. No current theological dogma offends cultivated consciences more than this assumption that all pain is divine judgment, and may be removed by repentance. Men know well enough what they have to repent of, and recognize the judg- ment of God when it puts their old sins before them, but who re- cognizes the judgment of God in this cattle plague, unless it be those who have ill-treated and neglected their cattle? No honest conscience will accuse itself solely because of a mysterious cattle plague, for which it feels no responsibility,—yet Mr. Rothery presses its judicial character home upon us even more closely than the Archbishop.
The true criticism on the Archbishop's prayer is that it assumes too certain a connection between the calamities of life and the sins, and this, too, only in a narrow department, which because the life of the Jews was mainly agricultural, is specially associated with religious thoughts. No one would dream of asking the Archbishop to write a prayer in a commercial crisis, attributing a crash in the City to God's judgments on our sins, yet it would be infinitely nearer to the truth than it is in the case of this mysterious plague. It is, in the main, dishonesty, and speculative trading on other people's money, and laxity of mercantile morality generally, which is judged and punished in a commercial crisis,—but the less we can trace the connection between calamity and sin, the more willing, in general, are we to admit it. We are not objecting to prayers for relief from any great national calamity. They are as natural as prayers for any great national blessing, but as we never think of finding a motive for God's blessings in our own goodness, we do object to finding (necessarily) a motive for the sufferings He in- flicts in our sins. Our sufferings axe often doubtless as much and as solely due to His goodness as our blessings.
Probably one great reason for this practice of habitually con- fessing our sins as if they must be the origin of our calamities,— is that by this means these public prayers seem less purely selfish and assume an apparently religious character. Prayer merely against physical losses, unless they be of a kind to affect our moral and spiritual nature, seems grasping, and hence the cloak of pre- tending that they must be due to our sins is welcome. The truth is, we take it, that we ought not to pray at all for any blessings or against any troubles which do not go deep enough to affect consciously the moral and spiritual life of those who pray. "Daily bread" does do this, and to the very poor is almost as natural a subject for prayer as being kept from temptation and delivered from evil. But no reverent man would pray for a good dividend or a low rate of discount. The clergyman-farmer, who on riding over his farm drily observed he thought he should pray for rain to-morrow, as the crops looked dry,' was really translating a man's selfish wish for a good income into the form of prayer, and if instead of being a farmer he had been a stockbroker, and prayed for a rise or fall in stocks, every one would have felt the blasphemy. The uniformity with which such misfortunes as the cattle plague are described as results of sin in our public prayers is, we imagine, rather convenient for the purpose of deprecating them without grossly praying that we may not lose property, than due to any assignable theological principle. It would be better if no public prayer were ever offered up, until its theme had become one of the clearest spiritual and moral import to the nation at large.
Previous page
