CANON KINGSLEY ON REASONABLE PRAYER.
CANON KINGSLEY preached last Sunday at Westminster Abbey on a part of the subject which seems to have agitated so much the Presbyterians of Dundee, —the right we have to expect an answer to prayer. If we may argue from the imperfect report of his sermon which we have seen, it must have been a very flue one. At least he put with very great force one point which people iu their worldly and corrupted view of spiritual things almost always lose sight of, and that is, that when prayer means, and is, nothing but a selfish wish launched into the invisible spaces around the heart, on the chance, as it were, of its over-persuading a spiritual listener who has power to give that wish effect, there is no kind of reason, on either Christian or natural grounds, for hoping that it will be granted. The first condition of prayer is that it shall be really offered to God; and God can mean nothing less to any one who prays than the highest and purest Will of which he can form any apprehension. Now the very meaning of prayer to that Will is that the being who offers it desires to be brought closer to him to whom it is offered, does not desire to overrule, but to be overruled by him. Hence the launching of a selfish wish into the unseen world, in the dim hope that it will become operative through the good-nature of .a Being who has infinite power to do as he will, is not in any sense prayer at all, for it is not offered to God as God ;—it does not seriously profess to desire that God should be more and more in the universe, and selfish creatures less and less ; it is not, in short, addressed to the perfect righteousness and perfect love, but only to the most potent of all administrative agencies ; it is directed, not to the infinite purity, but to a mighty Executive of the universe, and would be addressed to that mighty Executive much more hopefully if infinite good-nature instead of goodness were his essence. Now this is certainly not, in Christ's sense, prayer at all. In his sense, it is of the very essence of prayer that it aims at the establishment of the Divine will, and the annihilation of all that is inconsistent with that will. It is not to God's omnipotence primarily, but to his spiritual nature, that Christian prayer is addressed ; the whole purport of it being that the unity of the Divine Kingdom may be asserted and its laws established. If this be not the first condition of any petition, then in the Christian sense, that petition is not prayer at all. Prayer is not a short and easy cut to the thing next your heart ; but the chief method by which-the eager and shortsighted and imperfect mind gradually learns to purify itself in the flame of divine love. People talk and think as if prayer only meant bringing pressure to bear for private purposes on the power which touches the secret springs of life. Certainly, in Christ's teaching,- it does not mean that at all. It means, on the contrary, bringing divine influences to bear on these private purposes, so as to extinguish or transform them ;—to obtain the means of giving full effect, not to the latter, but to the former. - "If ye then being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Heavenly Father give the holy spirit to them that ask him." In other words, the central idea of all prayer is the holy spirit, and all other petitions are to be asked and are likely to be granted only in strict subordination to that. The disciples were to believe that if they had " faith iu God," they might say to the moun- tain on which the Jewish Temple was built, " Be thou removed and cast into the sea," and that it should be done,—as it virtually was done,—but only because that faith of theirs was faith in God, because its essence was the belief in the kingdom of God as revealed in Christ, not because the drift of it coincided with a private wish of their own, so that the request would be, if granted, an astounding example of the power accorded them to pull the invisible strings by which the universe is moved. All this Canon Kingsley evidently must have explained with his usual force. He told his hearers very plainly that most men who cry to God to save them are expressing a mere selfish desire to be saved from pain and dis- comfort, which there is no reasonable hope that God will grant. They do not want to be blest, but to be comfortable. And God, who wills to bless, but by no means wills to make us merely comfort- able, is much more likely to refuse to save, in their sense, what only cumbers the earth, and promises, here at least, no good fruit. " Why should Christ save you? What use is your life to God or to any human being ? Why should Christ keep you alive, if you are not doing your duty? Why should he not take you away, if you are an offence, an injury, nay, a nuisance to him and his kingdom, and put some one else in your place?" The only conceivable answer is that there may be, per- haps is, something in every man which admits of saving in the higher sense, which admits of being united to God, and of being expanded till it swallows up all that is evil and selfish in the man,—which is therefore really worth salvage, and in the infinitely minute and tender economy of God will not be allowed to perish in the wreck of the lower nature.
But may it not be said that this doctrine is too high for the simple, affectionate, and so to say, confidential character of prayer, as illustrated by revelation, and would have prevented Abraham's praying for Sodom on condition that ten righteous men could be found there, and St. Paul's praying for the lives of those who were in the ship with him on his voyage to Rome ? How could either of these know that the divine law did not require the prayer to be rejected, and how could it be right to attempt to sway the infinite Good away from its perfect purposes, for the sake of a mere sinking at the heart which distressed a short-sighted man when he contemplated the apparent tendency of those purposes? If all prayer is in essence a yearning for the triumph and prevalence of the divine Will over life, where is the room for those specific petitions which embody little but the natural and kindly feelings of a tender-hearted man, expressed, perhaps, in wishes that may be the blindest in the world ? The answer seems to be that though the highest prayers are prayers for the fulfilment of God's will, whatever it be, even by the drinking of the cup that human nature shrinks from, there is so much of spirit- ual education in the habit of intimate communion with God,—that is, of constantly bringing our human desires into a presence in which nothing merely selfish can long remain,—that we are induced to pour out our hearts even to their most childish wishes before Him, by the assurance that it is often his will to give what we ask because we ask it, even where it would not have been God's purpose to give it, had we not asked it. Is there anything necessarily incon- sistent between this belief,—that there are some human prayeis which God grants iu order to draw closer the tie between him and man, which he could not grant if they were never prayed,— and the belief that the true object of prayer is to lift man up to God, to subdue the human will to the Divine, to dissolve the arbitrary dictation and ignorance of our self-will ? Does the belief that God grants to prayer what is not so necessarily good in itself that he would grant it without prayer, really lend any sanction to the petty interference of human caprice in the providence of the universe, or restore under the form of a divine compromise what had been virtually forbidden by the teaching that all true prayer centres in the divine will, and demands the perfect surrender of the anarchy of human wishes ? We do not think so, and for the following reason. The whole purpose of Christian teaching is to impress upon us not that man must be extinguished in God, but that he must be utterly willing and desirous to surrender himself to God. Hence he is to have a self to surrender, a permanent self, which he is to mould more and more into the divine image, but never to lose. The very dif-
ference between Christianity and the various Pantheistic systems is that in it this human self is sedulously respected, even, so to say, by God. One great reason, according to the Christian teach- ing, why God became man in Christ,—emptied himself of divine glory to take up human infirmities,--was to make man feel that he really is more than a mote in the divine sunlight, that he has a life and freedom of his own which is the object of God's infinite love, and if not worthy, at least treated as if it were worthy, of divine suffering and sacrifice. Now this same doctrine seems to us to be virtually repeated and reaffirmed in the teaching that there are things which God will grant to prayer which he would not have granted without prayer, though they must be of course perfectly consistent with the over-ruling laws of his holiness. It is not Christian to regard even redeemed humanity as a mere inner circle of the divine life. Man is to have affections of his own, the independent life of which God approves, and to which he gives what he would not give without the cry of human love imploring it. Granted, that this really involves the admission that the prayers of other men may make our own lots other than they would have been had they been moulded by God's will without relation to those prayers ; that some men may live, for instance, longer, and wearier, and lonelier lives than they would have lived had none prayed for the prolongation of their lives, just because God chooses that human affection and human prayer should have a real weight in his providence, when they are subordinated to his will. Is there anything terrifying in that? So long as we are within the divine rule, and live under its love, is it so terrible to think that the prayers of shortsighted mortals may make our lives other than they would be without them ? Why that is what we all believe as to each other's outward actions. No one doubts that our lots are in matter of fact altered materially by the actions of those amongst whom we live ; and so long as we believe the government of God to be over all, we do not shrink from the conviction that human wrong often makes our lives sadder, and human goodness sweeter than they might otherwise have been. And if we hold that God thus gives human freedom of action a real moulding influence over our lives, why fear any the more the secret influence freely conceded to prayer by the divine love ? It is as severely regulated, as much under control, in the one region as in the other ; indeed it is hardly possible to believe in the real influence of human freedom over the lot of man in the outward sphere, unless it has a aimilar influ- ence in the inward. We wish Canon Kingsley would add to his very fine sermon on the " reasonable " influence of prayer over the petitioners' own lot, another on the reasonable influence of intercessory prayer over the lot of others,—that is, over the divine government of society.
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