THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER.
ItIV'E have before us a very curious proof of the interest taken by the educated and semi-educated class in the subject of the Efficacy of Prayer. It is a heap of letters, all about prayer, sent us for publication in two days, which would fill, as nearly as we can calculate, sixteen pages of this journal. One or two of them, we are bound to say, are mere sermons ; but the majority are attempts, sometimes by half-educated men, at a frank and close reasoning-out of the matter. As the Spectator, though deeply interested in theological questions, is not specially devoted to theology, and is desirous of treating it from the lay observer's point of view, we must refrain from publishing more than a selec- tion from this mass, and can hardly hope that the excluded will approve or understand the principle upon which the selection has been made. The majority of the letters before us are written, as was natural, from the supernatural side ; but a great many of them bear trace of a feeling we had scarcely expected to find, a strong desire on the part of many persons who believe in a sentient God, and of some who are apparently Christians, to get rid of the diffi- culties of the subject by reducing without denying the efficacy of prayer. They seem to be aware of the direct connection between the question of the possibility of an answer to supplication and the existence of a sentient Being ruling the universe, and want to retain prayer as a spiritual exercise, but to find for it another and sufficient spiritual use. Of course they are in part successful. It is quite true, as one correspondent suggests, that the emotion of prayerfulness or state of being prayerful is, when sincere, beneficial ; and true also—though not, we fear, absolutely true in all cases and with all men—that the habit of prayer, even when ineffectual, would tend to produce a habit of submissiveness to the Divine will which might be the very highest attitude of the human soul. It is also true that the majority of believers have a belief as strong as an instinct that in praying they are obeying the will of God—" co-operating" with Him, as one clergyman expresses it— and therefore renewing their moral vigour ; and truest of all, that without prayer there can be no sense of individual communion with God, the point which Canon Liddon in his collection of lectures just published seems disposed to press so strongly. But then, it is also true that if prayer is never answered and never can be answered, and we know that it never is or can be, this be- comes a tainted method of spiritual exercise, tainted with con- scious unreality and sham. A. prayer is more than a monologue in the vocative case, and to join in a long series of supplications, or to make supplication for oneself, while fully confident that no supplication will be heard or attended to, is a great deal too much like lying solemnly.
Moreover, it seems to us that most of these arguments are
beside the point at issue, certainly beside that one raised in the publications with which the controversy commenced. The physicists are not trying to assert that prayer or any other mental operation may not be attended with benefit of some kind, just as the lamb's prayer, the bleat, may in some unknown way
tend to relieve its suffering ; but to show that to expect an answer is unreasonable to absurdity, is to expect that the continuity of cause and effect which, as far as observation extends, is never broken, and, as they maintain, never can be broken, shall be violated for the sake of an individual. This is clearly the argu- ment upon which the whole discussion turns, and the one which im- presses itself even upon the orthodox, for it is this which in all their solutions they are endeavouring—of course quite unconsciously— to evade. We cannot see why they should evade it, or why— admitting fully and earnestly, as we have throughout tried to do, the magnitude of the intellectual difficulties which surround the whole subject—they should feel more difficulty in ascribing to God
this power than, say, the power of creation, or conversion, or any other of the actions which we habitually, and as we think on good evidence, ascribe to the Divine Will. If He exists at all—and we are just now addressing those who admit that cardinal proposition— He must have some power, and the difficulty of comprehending or defining the limits of that power is not greater in one case than in another. Our Buckinghamshire correspondent, for example, seems to be greatly perplexed by the prayer for rain, and suggests, though he does not quite say, that this, at all events, must be ineffectual. Why ? That it would usually be ineffectual may be granted at once, for it would be nine times out of ten one of those selfishly stupid prayers which no Being, at once good and wise, could properly be
expected to grant,—for why, on any theory of His love, should He grant John's desire, when to grant it is to refuse Joseph's,—but we could imagine a tenth time, a time of drought in a tropical land, when the heavens were as brass and the earth as iron, and all hearts and brains absorbed in the desire of rain till the spiritual life was in danger of being overmastered as by a lunacy, when the selfish supplication might become a true and an un- selfish, and even a spiritual prayer, and why should it not be answered then ? To say it might not be is reasonable, for to say that God knows best whether it is better for His usual modes of action to be supplemented by a new one, or for the people of ' Orissa to perish, is not to ascribe to Him any incredible degree , of wisdom—little more than the wisdom of a great General who lets a regiment perish that a people may be free ; but to say that He could not answer it is, at all events, to deny Him creative power, to go infinitely farther than a very strong physicist, Dr. Carpenter, is, in his inaugural address to the British Association, prepared to go. He, unless we mistake him in a curious way, holds that the final end of physical research may be, and probably will be, the discovery that a Mind was the final cause ; and if it can be the cause of matter, why not of the phenomena of matter ? It may be terribly difficult for the mind to conceive of God creat- ing a cloud, or modifying by volition the physical conditions of a sick man ; but it is not more difficult than to conceive His creating anything at all which did not exist before, or changing the opera- tions of a man's mind by invisible agency, or issuing the Law ac- cording to which, even on Dr. Carpenter's apparent theory, Nature maintains her immutability. That legislation surely is a high effort of absolutism. That is no answer to Dr. Tyndall, or the writer he edits, or to Mr. Galton, but it seems to us a complete answer to any one who accepts a sentient Creator, even though he thinks, in defiance of common justice, that a creator may create, yet be irresponsible to himself for the fate of the created. Why God should so exert His authority at the request of man is a dif- ferent matter, depending on the proof that the creative mind must establish, and does establish, relations with His creatures which in some way must be sympathetic or beneficent, but that He can is included in the argument that He is Creator. The difficulty of miracle—that is, of the intervention of a power whose laws we have not ascertained—is but part of the difficulty of conceiving a creating Being at all. No conceivable miracle is equal to that implied in the words Longinus thought so sublime, "And God said, 'Let light be.' Light was." It is not more difficult to conceive that God blighted a fig-tree, man needing that par- ticular lesson, than to conceive that he issued and maintains a law under which all fig-trees under certain conditions must be blighted. Mr. Silvanus's retort that the fig-tree could not be blighted except under the conditions, because departure from the conditions would imply their imperfection, which, they being God's work, is impossible, is either no retort at all, or is only a re-statement of the old difficulty of free-will. If God cannot change aught of His eternal law, He is not free, is more bound than us ; but why is it incredible that one of the eternal conditions of matter should be amenability to the volition which, on Mr. Silvanus's theory, created it? A. correspondent in another page has put this point, as we think, unanswerably:—" In regard to the supposed argument from the perfection of the Divine plans, which should require no interference, why am I to assume that it is not part of these very plans that certain results should be brought about by prayer ? If man has been gifted with such a constitution of mind and charac- ter that prayer is needed to educate its highest capacities—and even Mr. Galion does not deny the possibly beneficial subjective influence of prayer—then the perfection of his Creator's plan implies that room has been left for such interferences in the way of guidance and direction as may be involved in answer& to prayer. Nay, it is evident that it may Very well be that only in and through these, as in and through the felt necessity to wor- ship on the part of man, can the best results both of physical and hyperphysical nature be developed." At all events, it cannot be fair to accept the power of God to create, and deny His power to modify His creation. Nor, so far as we can see, is it fair to talk of the magnitude of any effort of the supreme volition. We do not know what is great or little to God, do not even know that in His creative work there can be inequality of effort.
We are most anxious not to introduce any reference to Scripture, which to most of our opponents would seem beside the mark, and to some the taking of an unfair ad- vantage ; but it has interested us to notice that the " refusal " of Christ's prayer in Gethsemane has in some minds definitely decreased the idea of the efficacy of prayer. Mr. Stubbs mentions this, and accidentally another correspondent asks if it is not proof against the orthodox view, and a third quotes it as proof positive that earnestness is no guarantee for acceptance. As Christ prayed only as human being, as his prayer was that God's will might be done, and as his prayer in his agony was contrary to the perpetual interest of all mankind, the illustration seems a weak one ; but we want to ask why it is so universally asserted that the prayer was rejected ? The prayer was not to be relieved from death, but from the cup of bitterness, and it seems to us, accepting, of course, the literal accuracy of the record, that the narrative may mean that it -was answered ; that the certainty which overcomes that bitterness had arrived when He conveyed the assurance to the penitent thief, though it was again lost in physical agony ; that in the words "It is finished" was announced a new and full conception of the whole plan of His life, which must have extinguished for ever all that was of bitterness in the cup. That is perhaps but a "view," but it is at least sufficiently borne out to deprive an argument upon which too much stress is laid by many minds of its operative force.
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