Prayer: Five Sermons. By James Thomas O'Brien, D.D., late Bishop
of Ossory. (Macmillan.)—It is only to be expected that sermons preached nearly forty years ago should be somewhat out of relation with the controversy as it stands at present. Adversaries who dispute the efficacy of prayer on the ground of a divine foreknowledge or fore- arrangement of events may be safely disregarded. The real battle turns on the question of natural laws, and as one school sees the opera- tion of these laws in all moral and spiritual action, the moral and spiritual nature being indeed only other phases of the physical, it is a battle for life and death. Dr. O'Brien urges that prayer may well be addressed to a Divine Being for guidance and help, but if the increased intelligence or stronger will from which come this guidance and help can result only from physical causes, and these are as absolute and necessary with regard to the body as they are with regard to the movement of the earth, it would follow that it is as useless to pray for grace as to pray that the sun may not set. Such notions had not occurred, we may venture to say, to the audience that listened to Dr. O'Brien in Dublin, in the year 1836; but the preachers of to-day must deal with them. Yet the volume has both interest and value. It makes assumptions, indeed, which seriously diminish its value. The argument for the divine authority of the Bible founded on the fact that it presents moral difficulties of the most serious kind without 'attempting, as any merely human writer would have done, to solve them, is readily met with the remark that the writers did not perceive them to be difficul- ties. The chronicler, for instance, who tells the story of Elisha and the bears could have had no notion that it would prove a stumbling-block
to his readers three thousand years afterwards. Yet some of the argu- ment is forcible, and it is always urged with a most impressive sobriety and dignity.
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