The rock upon which all these theories make shipwreck is the fact that we cannot abolish the reality of sin and leave the reality of {168} goodness intact. Saint and sinner, hero and coward, martyr and traitor, all, as we have seen, are reduced by Determinism to a common level where there is neither admiration nor censure, but at most a vague wonder at all the unnecessary suffering—forthatat any rate remains real—involved in this profoundly futile procession of phenomena; and that is a conclusion to which humanity has always refused, and will always refuse, to reconcile itself. If we wish to see how utterly a deterministic conception empties morality of meaning, we need only turn to the earthly career of our Lord, and ask ourselves what it is that gives to that life and death their poignant significance but the voluntariness with which the Saviour took each successive step on the road from His native Nazareth to the place called Calvary. Think of Him simply as the product of a compelling Force, unable to act otherwise than He did, and at one stroke all that moved us to gratitude, to admiration, all that appealed to us most deeply, is gone. There can be no such thing as compulsory heroism or non-voluntary self-sacrifice; moral judgments upon "inevitable" conduct are merely absurd—we do not bestow moral approval upon this kind of higher automatism.
Sometimes, indeed, in a connection like this, an attempt is made at some sort of compromise: granted, it is said, that each separate action of Christ's was voluntary, yet His life-purpose {169} as a whole was surely pre-determined, and not left to Him to adopt or refuse. Yet how impossible, upon closer reflection, is this species of semi-Determinism! Every single act of Jesus was voluntary; but His whole life and character and purpose—which is just the sum-total of these single, voluntary acts—these, we are to believe, were strictly necessitated. He could choose every step of a way which was yet absolutely chosen for Him, so that He could tread no other! A tremendous decision like His going to Jerusalem lay within His power; but the aim and meaning of His life, viewed as a whole, He had no power of voluntarily determining. That, to our mind, is a wholly irrational position; one might as reasonably say, "Every link of this chain is golden; but the chain itself is iron." Simple consistency requires the admission that if the chain is iron, so must the links be, and if the links are golden, so must be the chain.
We say again—all that enshrines Jesus in our hearts, all that gives its redemptive power to His love-prompted death, and its significance to Calvary, rests upon the fact of His moral freedom. He hadpowerto lay down His life; therein lay the glory of His self-surrender. He was, indeed, God's instrument in effecting the reconciliation of sinners to the Divine Love, but it rested with Him to decide whether He would be that instrument or no, and the course He chose was not that of {170} mechanical necessity, nor was the decision to which He came a following in the line of least resistance. In accepting the pain and shame of the Cross, Jesus worked His Father's will; but that will was not imposed upon Him from without, but freely responded to from within. As the author of theTheologia Germanicahas it, a man should strive "to be to the Eternal Goodness what his hand is to a man": but all the ultimate splendour of the achievement is bound up with the initial possibility of the striving. Not only the yearning love of God, but the conquering freedom of Man is finally attested by that blood-red seal which bears the impressure of a Cross.
[1] Soe.g.,In The Theology of Civilisation, by Charles F. Dole, p. 49.
[2]The Coming People, by the same author, p. 49.
[3]The Over-Emphasis of Sin, by the Rev. Alexander Brown, in theHibbert Journal, April, 1909, p. 616.
[4]The Theology of Civilisation, p. 61. It would, of course, have been easy to give references from other authors; but there is an extraordinary family-likeness between the writers of this School, extending down to the very phrasing of their ideas.
[5]A Study of Religion, vol. ii., pp. 166, 179.
[6]Theology of Civilisation, p. 129.
[7] The Rev. Alexander Brown,loc. cit., p. 619; italics ours.
[8] Dole,op. cit., p. 101.
[9] The analogy of the tyro and the expert chess-player—the tyro "free," yet the expert foreseeing and holding the issue of the game in his own hands—is only superficially plausible. There seems, however, one other possible explanatory hypothesis, though it is here advanced only in the most tentative manner: may it not be possible for the Most High to impose a limitation upon His infinite knowledge corresponding to that self-limitation of His infinite power which we regard as a necessary assumption? It would be difficult ona priorigrounds to declare such a thing to be inconceivable. When Paul spoke of himself as "determined not to know anything save Jesus Christ," he signified his intention of shutting out from his knowledge whole ranges of facts, for reasons dictated by the purpose he had in hand; and as a matter of every-day experience, we all practise something like this habitually, voluntarily narrowing the range of our consciousness and our immediate interests for one cause and another. Might not God, if the reality of our freedom could not be guaranteed in any other way, and if that freedom was necessary for the attainment of His purpose with man, forbear in some measure, however slight, to exercise His omniscience? We are well aware that the subject admits of nothing more than reverent surmise; and having stated our suggestion, we simply leave it with the reader as one of those possibilities which will appeal differently to different minds.
[10]Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii., pp. 31 ff.
[11]Spinoza, p. 195.
[12] Cp.Pantheism, p. 74.
[13]Spinoza, p. 196.
[14] InMind, October, 1893; quoted in Professor Upton's invaluable Hibbert Lectures onThe Bases of Religious Belief, p. 293, n.
[15] It may be interesting to quote a recent popular statement of the neo-Hegelian position in regard to this question: "The feeling that we are free is true in this sense, that the cause of a moral deed is a motive within us, and not some power outside us. But this motive moves us because of what we are, because of our characters, and the character is the product of inherited instincts, appetites and passions, modified by controlling ideas which have been acquired since our birth. Mr. Blatchford is so far right in his book,Not Guilty. The inward and outward conditions of a man's life, of course,make him what he is inevitably. We choose, but our choice is governed by all our past, and by present circumstances. . . We have our ancestors rolled up in us. A man is the last result of the universe. All is law. All is inevitable by the laws of life:" (The Rev. G. T. Sadler, B.A., LL.B., in theClarion, June 11th, 1909). That, of course, is not liberty at all; and the logical honours appear to rest with Mr. Blatchford, who, arguing on the same assumptions, declares sin to be a meaningless term, seeing that "man is not responsible for his nature, nor for the acts prompted by that nature."
[16]System of Logic, vol. ii., p. 412 (third edition).
{171}
That minimising or denial of moral evil with which we dealt in the preceding pages, is common to, and follows as the corollary from, all systems in which the personality and transcendence of God are either explicitly denied or virtually ignored. Monism, that is to say,—whether of the idealistic or the materialistic variety, whether pantheist or atheist in complexion—finds its ethical counterpart in Determinism.
There are, however, in our pathetically restless age a number—probably a growing number—of serious men and women who attack the problem from the opposite end. Weary of speculation, and leaning on the whole to the side of negation rather than affirmation in matters of theology, they say that one thing at any rate is left, a certainty of which no one can deprive them, an ideal sufficient to inspire mankind—the supreme worthiness of the good life. While the creeds of the Churches divide their respective adherents from each other, here, they tell us, is a basis upon which all can unite, and which therefore {172} should assuredly prove adequate and attractive; nay, since religion is valued for the kind of life it produces—since the tree is judged neither by its name, nor age, nor foliage, but simply and solely by its fruit—shall we not say that morality itself is the true and only religion, that residuum of valid and vital truth which remains when all the errors of supernaturalism have been purged and filtered away? Certainly there are those in our own day who, while definitely rejecting the sanctions and authority of religion in its commonly accepted meaning, are fully convinced that to live an unselfish life is a duty incumbent on man, and who honestly endeavour to practise what they believe. That being so, is not faith shown to be practically superfluous, and the autonomy and sufficiency of ethics a demonstrated fact?
Such, in short, is the contention of the Ethical Movement, so ably and often eloquently represented by leaders like Felix Adler, W. M. Salter, Washington Sullivan, Stanton Coit, and others; all these teachers with one accord deprecate and dismiss theological doctrines as at best not proven, at worst a hindrance, and commend instead morality as the all-embracing, all-sufficing and all-saving religion. To quote Mr. Salter, who certainly speaks with authority for his side:—
A religion that will teach us how to live, that will hold up clear and high the laws of life and win us to obedience {173} to them—this is the religion the world needs, and it is the only true religion; all others, all that seek to make something else sacred, that make men put their trust in "God" or Christ or the Virgin or the Bible or the Church or its sacraments and rites, are a diverting of man from the real issue; they are the blind leading of the blind; they are a delusion and a snare.[1]
Mr. Salter is, indeed, willing to show "charity" for the belief "that the authority of the right is in some way connected with God"; but it is the charity that may be extended to an exploded superstition on account of certain beneficent associations that cling to it. "If by the term 'God,'" he says,[2] "was meant simply the reason and nature of things, it might perhaps be freely used; but the word means something else to most persons"—and therefore the honest ethicist will not employ it. For this sensible and candid course we cannot but feel thankful; Mr. Salter at any rate knows well enough that there is all the difference between "the reason and nature of things"—between a mere "totality of being"—and a personal God.
We cannot disguise from ourselves that the present juncture is in many respects singularly favourable to the ethical movement; to not a few who have lost their earlier faith and feel the need of something to take its place, Ethicism will seem to meet that want, and they will accordingly give a wistful, grateful {174} hearing to what Mr. Salter and his colleagues have to preach. Probably, indeed, it will be people of a higher than the average intellectual and moral calibre who will seek to fill the void left by Agnosticism by embracing "morality as a religion"; and more particularly is this likely to happen when this cult has for its apostles, men of high character and gracious personality. It is for that very reason that we are bound to examine this plea carefully, and to ask ourselves whether it is really possible, as we are assured, "by purely natural and human means to help men to love, know, and do the right." [3] The issue is no less than a momentous one; for if religion, as generally understood, is a mere graceful superfluity when it is not "a delusion and a snare," very vast changes are bound to follow the recognition of such a fact. Dr. Coit may be a little premature in making his voluminous arrangements for the adaptation of the Established Church and the Book of Common Prayer to the uses of ethical religion; but if ethicists can convince us of the validity of their claims, then we must look forward to the fruitful service of man taking the place of the fruitless service of God.
Now the first remark we have to make is that as a matter of fact and of history a high morality has never made its appearance apart {175} from religion. Such as they are, our moral code and moral standards at their best are the product of the Christian faith; the ethical movement has neither evolved a morality of its own, nor has it anything better to put in the place of that which we owe to Christianity. Such suggestions of alleged defects in the ethics of the Gospel as are brought forward by Mr. Salter—e.g., that Jesus lacked "a scientific sense of cause and effect"; that He failed to inculcate "intellectual scrupulousness and honesty"; that we cannot go to Him for "political conceptions" and "industrial ethics," and so forth—strike one as palpably trivial, irrelevant, and made to order;[4] and leaving these not very imposing criticisms on one side, it is simply a fact that the highest laws of life were declared by Jesus Christ, and have never been superseded. And since ethicists have nothing better to propose in the domain of conduct than what we find in the Gospel—since the "higher law," as formulated by Mr. Salter, reduces itself to altruism versus living for self—there is nothing harsh in saying that the ethical movement proposes merely to take over Christian morality minus its Christian setting. If a simile may be allowed, we should say that this new firm has no goods of its own manufacture; it intends to trade with the stock, and hopes to take over the goodwill, of the old. {176} Whether that is a feasiblemodus operandiis another question, at which we shall glance presently; for the moment we would simply insist upon the fact that hitherto at any rate the ultimate sanction of morality has always been thereligioussanction. The Churches, in basing morality on religion, can at any rate point to some actual achievements in the past; on the other hand those who maintain that morality is independent of religious belief, and that human conduct will actually rise to a higher level when this truth is recognised, must pardon us if we tell them that they are merely issuing promissory notes which may or may not be honoured when they fall due. A certain extremely important thing has been done—we will not say perfectly, but nevertheless done—in a certain way and by certain means for a very long time; anyone who assures us that he will accomplish the same important thing for us without the means which we have hitherto deemed indispensable, can hardly be surprised if we reply that while we do not doubt his entire good faith, we cannot possibly content ourselves with his bare promises in so vital a matter.
But when we say this, we shall at once be met with the rejoinder that it is manifestly unfair to argue as if Ethicism were all promise and no performance. Are there not plenty of kindly, conscientious, well-conducted agnostics who might serve as models to some of {177} their Church-going neighbours? And have we not already referred to some of the ethical teachers themselves as men of high character and gracious personality? All this may be very readily admitted; but all this has not an atom of bearing upon the matter in hand. The question really is not whether certain avowed agnostics are not as good men as certain professing Christians; but whether the moral excellences of the good agnostic are theproduct, the fruit, of agnosticism, in the same sense in which the virtues of the Christian are theproductof Christianity. The answer to that question must be unhesitatingly in the negative. There is no disputing the historical fact that the force which has been most potent in building up our Western civilisation is none other than Christianity; the ethics which have shaped and guided right conduct through all these centuries are Christian ethics. Think as we will about dogma, few will feel competent to contest Lecky's verdict, when the historian of Rationalism and of European Morals declares that Christianity "has been the main source of moral development in Europe"; we know what this religion has done, because its actual record is open to inspection. To quote Lecky again, "Christianity has produced more heroic actions and formed more upright men than any other creed." Now Agnosticism has not created its own moral system; agnostic morality at its {178} highest has so far grown in Christian soil, and to say that the flower will continue to grow in quite a different soil is to make a very bold and very hazardous prophecy. In the West we have never had anything like an agnostic civilisation, which would allow us to test the effects of non-belief upon conduct on a large scale; in the East, it is true, Japan offers us something like an agnostic civilisation, but those who are best acquainted with that nation are least inclined to exalt her performances in the domain of ethics. Japanese commercial morality is notoriously low; while Japan's dealings with Korea have called forth the unmeasured denunciations of European eyewitnesses. The material advances and military exploits of this virtually agnostic nation must not blind us to other and less admirable features; it would, indeed, seem that this highly-gifted race, while frantically eager to "gain the whole world," has not yet discovered its own soul, and the familiar question, "What shall it profit?" inevitably suggests itself.
But not only has Agnosticism so far not grown its own morality; there is yet another consideration which leads us to listen with a certain measure of scepticism to the assurances of those who say that right conduct will survive though religion be surrendered. It has perhaps not been generally observed that just as the virtuous agnostic is generally the child of Christian parents, so by a seeming irony he is {179} often found to be the father of Christian children: there is hardly a genuine case on record where "free-thought," Agnosticism, Rationalism, has descended from parents to children to the third or fourth generation without a break, and the practical non-existence of such cases proves something of real and great importance. It has been said that pure-bred Londoners die out in three generations at most, unless new blood from the country is brought in to replenish their failing vital power. If unbelief shows the same incapacity to propagate itself by natural descent—if the descendants of unbelievers show a marked tendency to "revert to type,"i.e., to religion—such a fact suggests only one adequate explanation,viz., the instinct of self-preservation, a return to the soil which made the growth of the flower possible. The virtues of the agnostic may be not unfairly compared to cut flowers, which may continue to shed their perfume for awhile, but are bound to fade before long. Our agnostic ethicists, being themselves the products of a Christian civilisation, may commend, approve and practise—they maywearthe Christian virtues; that those virtues will bear transplanting into an agnostic soil and flourish in an agnostic climate is a highly dubious proposition. We can only say that available experience seems to be against it. The Christian morality implies the Christian religion which has created it; as for the {180} high-minded, altruistic individual agnostic, he must simply be pronounced a credit to Christianity.
We say "the high-mindedindividualagnostic," because candour compels us to go on to state that generally speaking those who have thrown religion to the winds hardly strike one as standing on a particularly high ethical level. One can only go by facts; and the facts are that the frequenters of the betting-ring, the dram-shop, the light-minded, pleasure-seeking throng that flutters from amusement to amusement without any interest in life's serious duties—these are hardly drawn from the Church-going strata of society. Religion says "no" to this whole mode of life; and unbelief is most frequently, and in its most typical forms, found where the restraints of religion have proved too irksome to be tolerated. Before arguing in the abstract that morality is independent of religion, and will be advanced by its abandonment, it would perhaps be better to observe the average, concrete case of the man who has cut himself adrift from religious beliefs and influences; then it will be time to decide whether we should like to see the experiment tried on a national scale. It is easy to theorisein vacuo; in practice we are well aware that without the sanctions and the guardianship of religion morality tends to sink to the level where the accepted motto is the hedonist's "Let us eat and drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die."
{181}
But at this point another objection will be raised; "surely," it is said, "we do not seriously maintain that men are kind to their families, honest in their every-day transactions, truthful in speech, and so forth, merely because they believe that to do so is to act in accordance with Divine injunction, and that if this belief were suddenly destroyed we should be reduced to moral chaos." But this argument, so frequently met with in this connection, misapprehends the real issue. We do not dispute that the elements of moral conduct begin to be inculcated wherever there is any social life at all. Where there is any living together, complete selfishness is impossible; there must come into being a rough law of give-and-take, a recognition of mutual rights to be respected, a certain loyalty from the individual towards the tribe, which in turn befriends and defends each of its members. Quite a number of rudimentary virtues are thus developed by the force of public opinion, which cannot tolerate flagrantly anti-social acts from one member of the community towards the rest; murder, violence, theft, false witness—these and the like offences are suppressed with a strong hand, without the need of a special supernatural revelation to decree "Thou shalt not." To be brief, there is no doubt that this social pressure is powerful enough to insist upon behaviour which will regulate most of the ordinary relationships of life in a fairly {182} satisfactory manner—i.e., relationships between equals or members of the same community. The latter is a highly important qualification; where purely natural sanctions obtain, equal rights might be enjoyed by allbona fidemembers of the tribe, but the same rights would not necessarily extend to an alien. And even within the community governed by such sanctions the weaker, and especially the weakest, did not rank as equals; among the most highly civilised nations of antiquity, the Greeks and Romans, infanticide and exposure flourished—indeed, as Lecky points out,[5] by the ideal legislations of Plato and Aristotle, and by the actual legislations of Lycurgus and Solon, infanticide was positively enjoined. Nothing can be more significant than to find in theSelf-Tormentorof Terence the very character who expresses the noble sentiment, "I am a man, and deem nothing that is human alien from me," giving instructions that if the child that is to be born to him should be a girl, it is to be put to death. The public opinion of an enlightened and cultured paganism countenanced such deeds without reproach; it was Christianity, or rather He who said, "Suffer the little children to come unto Me," that put a stop to these barbarities.
The point which we wish to establish is this: that while "evolutional ethics" and natural {183} sanctions will carry us a certain way, they will certainly not carry us all the way; indeed, the moment we come to the higher reaches of character, these sanctions are seen to be quite inadequate. Why,e.g., should the conviction be born in man, and become a governing conviction, that he must under no circumstances commit a certain act, though to do so would be easy and advantageous, and detection not to be feared? Why should the moral consciousness of the higher races accept the principle which places self-sacrifice above self-seeking? There is only one explanation for this paradoxical phenomenon: it is that, as men rise in the moral scale, there dawns on them the sense of a law that is not of this world, anOught-to-be, which speaks with a strange authority, and will not be denied; and when this authority is properly interpreted, it reveals a Righteous and Sovereign Will to which we owe unconditional obedience.
And here we may quote in support some significant words of Mr. Salter's—words whose full significance, we venture to think, that able and distinguished writer hardly realised when he penned them: "The whole meaning of ethics is in the sense of an invisible authority; to bow to custom, to public opinion or to law, is moral idolatry." [6] "Whatever else I may doubt about, I cannot doubt the law of duty—that there is a right and a wrong; that the {184} right obliges me, that I ought to do it. . . . The law is over all, though it were never obeyed. . . . Ethics is nothing but the response which man and man make to the higher order of things. . . . Ecstasy is the grace heaven sets upon the moment in which the soul weds itself to the perfect good." [7] Let us see what is implied in these truly remarkable statements. The real sanctions of moral conduct are not the sanctions of expediency or force, but are derived from a higher law, an invisible authority; the finest morality is man's free response to a higher order. But, we ask, what is this higher order, this note of command, but the expression of a higher Will? And how can there be a higher Will without a Higher Personality, a God who impresses His law upon us and makes us aspire after the ideal good? Mr. Salter explicitly denies that the moral virtues come "from below, from prudence, from the sense of decency, from longsighted selfishness; they who think so," he declares, in a fine burst, "never breathed the climate of morality." [8] But if not from below, they must come from above; and this "above" really must be something more than an atmospheric conception. Will Mr. Salter help us to determine its nature more clearly? He says, "The Mighty Power, hid from our gaze by the thin screen of nature and of nature's laws . . . is {185} with our struggles after a perfect right" [9];but if this Mighty Power, which is not so much expressed as hidden by nature's laws—which therefore transcends nature—is in the highest sense moral, how can it be less than personal? It is this Power which, according to our author, gives us the vision of the ideal, this Power which sets the mark of its approval upon our surrender to its behests, this Power which manifests its character in doing justice upon individuals and nations alike, weeding out the selfish, the wanton, the luxurious, and preserving the pure and upright; may we not ask what reason there is for withholding from that Power the one adequate name of God?[10]
Let us pursue and emphasise this thought a little further. Already we have seen that—testeMr. Salter—the highest ethics require our belief in a mighty, transcendent and benevolent Power; that admission means nothing less than the surrender of naturalism {186} in morals—it is an acknowledgment that ultimately a true ethic involves and presupposes a metaphysic. Indeed, when Mr. Salter speaks of ethical religion, the same implication is there. Religion signifies a living and personal relationship between the worshipper and the object of his worship: we can stand in such a relationship to a living, personal God, in harmony with whose will alone we are able to find our true happiness; we cannot stand in such a relationship to an impersonal power or a universal order. Mr. Salter speaks of man "bending hushed and subdued, as he thinks of those mighty laws on which the health and safety of the race depends," and calls that a religion; we submit that so far as such an emotion is religious, it means that behind those mighty laws there stands a mighty Lawgiver, whom we worship and seek to obey because He is good. We can keep a law, we can conform to it so as to escape hurt, but we cannot worship it except when we conceive of it as the manifestation of a good Will; neither can we derive moral stimulus from an abstract ideal. It is when the ideal speaks in us and to us as the behest of the Living God—above all, when it stands before us incarnated, made actual in the Son of God—that it becomes dynamic, drawing and uplifting and transforming men into the Divine likeness. We are not greatly helped by such a statement as that the bare idea of morality, {187} quite apart from faith in God, "may be the supreme passion to a man"; we have to deal with things as they are, and in actual life we well know that the most commonplace presentation of the Gospel has been more of a force in the making of character and as an inspiration to righteousness than the most refined philosophical Ethicism.
And now let us show, from yet another point of view, as we think may be done quite simply and cogently, that it is impossible rationally to get away from the theistic position if we are in earnest about morality, viewed as the pursuit of the ideal. In order to engage in such a pursuit, we must in the first place be free agents, able to choose between conflicting motives and to follow the right. If our actions are necessitated, then to speak of our "pursuing" this or that course, choosing and rejecting, is of course a mere contradiction in terms. But if the universe, including ourselves, is simply the resultant outcome of the interaction of unconscious mechanical forces, freewill is an absolute illusion, and Determinism the only true theory; and again, if Determinism is true, we cannot choose, we cannot strive—in a word, we cannot help being what we are. Hence, if morality in any intelligible sense is to exist at all, we must be free; and only a personal and transcendent God could have conferred on us the faculty of freewill.
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We pass on to one or two final considerations. One of our ethicists, who genially informs us that "theology is discredited . . . and the world is indifferent to what the Church either thinks or says," writes as follows: "The Ethical Movement believes that the good life has an imperative claim upon us because of its supreme worth for humanity." [11] As against this statement we have no hesitation in affirming that only religion, in the accepted sense of the term, can give us the absolute conviction of the absolute supremacy of moral claims—the assurance that it were better to suffer, to hunger, to be despised and rejected of men, to die on a cross, than to violate one of these. Grant that the good life is of supreme worth for humanity; yet supposing a man is sorely tempted to obtain some immense advantage or to gratify some consuming passion, at the cost of injuring someone else—suppose he can do so with safety and success—why should he prefer humanity's interests to his own? Why, indeed? We make bold to say that no one in the throes of conflict between duty and desire, at the moment of moral crisis, has ever been influenced by the worth of his action for humanity. The ultimate sanction of right conduct must be drawn from a Source beyond humanity, which enjoins the right at all costs—from Him who is humanity's Maker and Ruler.
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And the same fact is borne witness to by the experience which waits upon wilful wrong-doing, by the sense of sin. Such an emotion can never be inspired by an impersonal order with which we have come into conflict, but only by a personal Will against which we are conscious of having offended. The man who disregards the law of gravitation and falls from a ladder, experiences one kind of painful sensation; but the man who disregards the law of righteousness and falls into sin, experiences quite a different kind of painful sensation—the sensation, not of self-pity, but of self-accusation and remorse, because it is God's holiness against which he has transgressed; and that feeling finds utterance age after age in the agonised cry, "Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight."
The truth is, those who claim to set up morality as a religion, while declaring "the personal Deity of theology illusory," are engaged in an impossible task; and it is because of the inherent hopelessness of their enterprise that we must raise our voice in warning to any who may be tempted to put faith in their fair promises. The ethicist's intentions are admirable; but he sets about their realisation in a manner which dooms him and them to failure. Let us have practice without theory, he says, the superstructure without the foundation, the fruit without the root, works without the {190} faith which produces works: and such being the nature of his undertaking, he fares accordingly, a spectacle of ineffectual goodness, wondering why the world declines to listen to his so reasonable gospel. But the world continues to cling to an ultra-rational Gospel because it is instinctively aware that morality rests upon ultra-rational sanctions. Ethicism may borrow from Christianity the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, but it has no explanation to give of the basis supporting that axiom—why we ought to regard each human being as having certain indefeasible claims upon us, so that we may not treat him as a mere means subserving our ends. That position can never be defended on purely natural grounds; in the last analysis the brotherhood of man has a right to be accepted as true only by those who believe in the Fatherhood of God.
In conclusion, as all true morality pre-supposes religion, so it is only religion which can supply the strongest incentive and encouragement to the good life; for it is religion alone which has the promise that the Good shall and must prevail, that the stars in their courses are fighting on the side of right and truth, and that it shall be well or ill with us according as we range ourselves on that side or in opposition to it. Take away the idea of a God whose will is that righteousness shall triumph, that life shall be lord of death, and {191} love victorious over all, and we have no guarantee but that all the efforts and sacrifices of martyr and reformer may be in vain, and the hope of the world a delusion. It is only the believer who can never despair, who knows that his work will endure and enrich the world—that there will be no collapse or final disarray, that the world is no blot nor blank, but means intensely and means good. It is that faith which makes endeavour and surrender worth while; that faith—the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen—which alone gives us a right to sing Felix Adler's noble hymn:—
And the work that we have builded,Oft with bleeding hands and tears,Oft in error, oft in anguish,Will not perish with our years,It will rise and shine transfiguredIn the final reign of light;It will pass into the splendoursOf the City of the Light.
For the assurance which breathes in these lines rests on a previous, deeper assurance: it is that which the Christian expresses in the words, "If God be for us, who is against us?"
[1]Ethical Religion, p. 48.
[2]Ibid, p. 39.
[3] SeeA Few Points about Ethical Societies, a tract issued by the Union of Ethical Societies.
[4]Ethical Religion, pp. 81, 84, 86, 89; for a concise treatment of this subject the reader may be referred to the present writer'sJesus or Christ? chapter iv.
[5]History of European Morals, ii., p. 26.
[6]Op. cit., p. 38.
[7]Ibid.pp. 16-18.
[8]Op. cit., p. 17.
[9]Ibid., p. 57.
[10] "If for the word 'God' you read the 'universal life,'" writes the Rev. R. J. Campbell, "you have at once gained the ear of every high-minded thinking man to whom you appeal." (The Christian Commonwealth, April 14th, 1909.) Are we, then, to understand that if we want to appeal to high-minded thinking men, we must drop the term "God" and substitute for it, as being less offensive to these higher thinkers, some non-committal phrase like "universal life?" We say quite frankly that we are not prepared to pay such a price for making such a successful appeal; for the "universal life"—just because it is universal and all-embracing—is no more "good" than "bad"—it has no moral character, and hence can exercise no moral authority, nor generate any moral enthusiasm.
[11]What the Ethical Movement is, by Harry Snell.
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In the opening chapters of this book we had occasion once or twice to ask ourselves in passing how the new emphasis on the doctrine of Divine immanence was likely to affect the question of prayer; in turning now to a more direct treatment of the latter subject, this is again the first and most important query we shall have to consider. Truth, as we all know, is a "mean"—it represents a balance between opposing extremes; what is, however, not always recognised is that the extremes are not necessarily equidistant from the true centre, and there are cases when it is of the greatest importance to discern which of them is nearer and which more remote from the truth. In the present instance we have insisted all along that of the two possible extremes of Deism and Pantheism the former, with its exclusive insistance upon God's transcendence, is not only more intelligible but far more true than the latter, with its one-sided stress on His immanence; for, as we previously expressed it, in the exercise of religion it is the transcendent God {193} with whom we are concerned. In fact, Deism may be a very faulty type of religion, theoretically considered; but Pantheism is religion's practical annihilation. It is not for nothing that in Persia,e.g., the name ofSufi—in theory a pantheistic believer in the identity of the worshipper with his Deity—signifies in current use not a mystic, but a freethinker!
So far as the religiouslifeis concerned, we repeat that Deism is the lesser error and the lesser danger; and nowhere is this more closely brought home to us than when we consider the reality and the meaning of prayer. For however far-off God may be thought to be, it has never been suggested that the voice of prayer is not able to travel across the distance—He may "hear us in heaven, His dwelling-place, and when He heareth, forgive;" but if His presence is so universally diffused that we ourselves form part of it, we shall hardly know to whom or to what to address ourselves in the act of adoration. We can pray to a Deity conceived as solely transcendent, but not to a Deity conceived as solely immanent,i.e., as the Sum of Being. A vague "cosmic emotion" differstoto coelofrom worship; we cannot worship that which includes us, for if we did we should be indulging in self-worship, and as for prayer, we could no more seriously offer it to the universe than to the atmosphere. This point cannot be too clearly realised. Prayer is the soul's communion with God; but if the soul is an {194} integral constituent of God, a mode or phase of the Divine Being, then this communion, being already an accomplished and unalterable fact, cannot be so much as desired, still less does it need to be brought about by prayer or any other means whatsoever. Nothing could be more instructive in this connection than what is apparently a favourite illustration with those for whom immanence is only a synonym for Monism, and which likens the relation of God to the individual soul to that subsisting between the ocean and some individual bay: "the hundred bays and gulfs and creeks that succeed each other round the island," we read, "are in the ocean, and the ocean is in them." [1] Now let us see what this means. There may be the most urgent necessity for digging channels to connect a reservoir with the sea, so that it may be filled with its fulness; but it would be absurd to speak of opening up or renewing communication between bay and ocean—a communication whose uninterrupted nature is implied in the very terms of the image. On such an interpretation of immanence, prayer in any real sense is either superfluous or impossible; for if no one hopeth for that which he {195} seeth, neither would any one in his senses seek to bring to pass a condition of things which is thought to be already existing. Here we see once more the unbridgeable gulf between every form of "idealistic Monism"—Eastern or Western—and Christianity; for while,e.g., "the central idea of Indian piety is meditation, the absorption of the individual in the life-spirit, the experience of identity with the universality and oneness of the Godhead," on the other hand "Christianity is the religion of prayer—prayer is its crown and its pearl." [2]
That is really the crux of the whole matter; prayer must be conceived as an active intercourse between the worshipper and a Person other than himself, who is the object of his worship. It is not a soliloquy—what the Germans expressively call aSelbstgespräch, or "self-talk"; it is not a monologue, but a dialogue; it is not a mere contemplation, but addressed to Someone who is thought of as willing to listen and able to answer. As Sabatier has well said, "Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion." Wherever men believe in a personal God, as distinct from an "all-inclusive consciousness of being" of which they are fleeting expressions—mere surface ripples on an infinite ocean—that belief will attest itself by the prayerful life. On the other hand, a prayerless religion is a contradiction in terms; it either has no needs to express or {196} it will die from lack of self-expression. The believer will pray from a sense of inner necessity, coupled with the instinctive assurance that the need of which he is conscious will thus, and thus only, meet with its satisfaction. "The genuineness of religion"—to quote Professor William James—"is thus indissolubly bound up with the question whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not deceitful. The conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this consciousness is the very core of living religion." [3]
Is there, then, or is there not, something "genuinely transacted" in the experience of prayer? A transaction,ex hypothesi, can only take place between two parties; it implies two volitional centres. And, furthermore, what is it that is transacted? Is prayer only a very noble form of auto-suggestion—are its effects merely subjective, or are they also objective? These are problems which could hardly be said to exist for an earlier age; to the modern mind they are intensely real, and press for answers. It must be recognised at once that the idea of God as immanent in nature, expressing Himself in those observed uniformities to which we give the name of natural laws, creates difficulties of its own in regard to this subject; for if these laws show forth His will, is it even thinkable that our formulated desires could move Him to depart from what we might speak of as His original {197} intention? His will is either the absolutely best or it is not; if it is, why pray that He may modify it? If it is not, is He not less than perfectly good, since His design admits of improvement? Can we conceive of Him as doing something in answer to a human petition which He would not do apart from such a petition? Can we think of Him as being prevailed upon by our assiduities and importunities to alter His decrees—is not this whole notion rather paltry and derogatory to His dignity? Everybody is familiar with these questions and arguments; let us see in what proportion truth and error are combined in them.
(1) A good deal of unnecessary difficulty arises in the first place from the habitual failure of many people to bear in mind that though God is immanent in the cosmos, He is notonlyimmanent; as soon as His transcendence is realised, it is seen that there exists noa priorireason against the possibility of what from our point of view would look like Divine interpositions in the ordinary course of nature. We have, it must be remembered, not the slightest grounds for assuming that there can be no departures from the uniformities of nature, nor are we in a position to state dogmatically that no imaginable conditions would ever furnish an adequate reason for such a departure. Admitting that the regular processes observed in the physical universe represent something of the Divine mode of action, we have no {198} warrant for maintaining that these are the only modes of such action; probability, in effect, is all the other way. "Lo, these are but the outskirts of His ways; and how small a whisper do we hear of Him!But the thunder of His power who can understand?" A transcendent God iseo ipsonot limited to such methods as we happen to have caught a glimpse or a whisper of.
(2) But when this is clearly understood, it has on the other hand to be as frankly admitted—indeed, it is stating the obvious to say—that in modern times the idea of the uniformity of nature has obtained such a hold upon the general educated mind as renders any breach of that order far more improbable to us than it could have appeared to a pre-scientific generation. All physical science rests, broadly speaking, upon the assumption that nature acts uniformly; without saying that it must be so, we are well assured that it is so, because all observation and experiment are found to bear out the truth of the principle we have assumed. All we have learned concerning nature excludes the notion that there is anything haphazard or arbitrary in her ways. We do not feel at all as though the action of natural forces might be suspended or modified for our particular benefit, and hence certain ideas of the efficacy of prayer—e.g., for rain or fine weather—have become impossible for us to entertain with the ease of our ancestors. We start with a mental attitude—hardly {199} to be called a prejudice, since it is based upon a large body of experience—of profound assurance that in matters like these the will of God finds its expression in the unbroken operation of His ordinary laws, "without variableness or shadow of turning"; most people, moreover, would acknowledge that it is better that these laws should be stable and capable of being learned and depended upon than that the Divine will should be incalculable—ondoyant et divers—a matter of moods on His side and of importunity on ours. Tennyson's familiar lines represent the typically modern outlook with the utmost accuracy and conciseness:—
God is Law, say the wise; O soul, and let us rejoice[1]For if He thunder by law, the thunder is yet His Voice.
(3) And while the scientific temper of the present day could not fail to affect our thoughts concerning prayer in some directions, the same has surely to be said about the ethical temper of the age, as shown in our enlarged conceptions of God. To put it bluntly, much of the language about what used to be called "special providences" has become unreal and ceased to be edifying for us. On this whole subject some words of Principal Adeney's can hardly be bettered:—
Under the old theory God had His favourites who were saved by hair-breadth escapes, in accidents that were fatal to persons who were not the objects of "special providences"; this was supposed to account for the fact that one man in particular found that somebody else {200} had taken the last berth in the ship he had meant to sail by, and so escaped the fate of the crew and passengers when it went down with all on board—no "special providence" saving them. It looks like a reflection of the pagan mythological tales about heroes rescued by the timely interference of gods and goddesses in battles where thousands of common mortals perish unheeded. It is the aristocratic idea of privilege carried up to religion. The newer view is more democratic, and it seems to agree better with our Lord's assurance that not a sparrow falls to the ground without our Father's notice, that the very hairs of our heads are all numbered.[4]
All this has its direct bearing upon the subject of prayer. We may still be occasionally regaled with stories of one solitary sailor being saved—Providence looking after him in response to his mother's petitions—while every other soul on board was drowned; but these narratives, once irresistible in the impression they created, are to-day received with somewhat mixed feelings. The view of God's character which they inculcate is apt to strike us as unsatisfactory; that He should avert a great and presumedly unmerited physical calamity from one individual simply and solely because He has been asked to do so by some other individual, while allowing the same calamity to overtake numerous others no more deserving of affliction, does not fit in with our conception of Him. We are slowly learning to substitute for the notion of any kind of preferential treatment at the hand of God a belief in the unchanging goodness of His decrees, in the wisdom of His counsel, {201} and in the reality of His abiding and enfolding love; by Providence we mean something that is neither local nor personal, nor particular, but universal—the Providence of unchanging law—that living and loving Will which "knoweth altogether."
(4) But if, owing to such considerations as these, we are less inclined to-day to frame certain kinds of petition, or to expect them to be answered, it is also true that we are increasingly coming to re-discover what should never have been forgotten,viz., that petition is not the whole but only a part, and perhaps a subordinate part, of prayer. A glance at our Lord's priceless bequest to humanity, the Model Prayer, should suffice to place this beyond a doubt. If we study it clause by clause, we find that the first place is assigned simply toadoration, and the claiming of the supreme privilege of spiritual communion, with an implicit, although not explicit,thanksgivingfor that privilege; next we find two clauses expressive ofaspirationfor the achievement of the highest aims, with the implied vow to help on their realisation by our own conduct and efforts; and not until then do we come upon asupplication, which moreover prays only for the simplest of material blessings—for bare sustenance, in fact. This is followed byconfession, with a prayer for mercy, and a promise to show ourselves merciful to our brethren; and a prayer for deliverance {202} and guidance brings us to the final act ofpraise. Thus, with one most modest exception, the blessings which God is asked to bestow are spiritual blessings; for a petition asking,e.g., that the operation of some natural law may be temporarily suspended for our benefit we should look altogether in vain. In any case we ought to learn from the one prayer which our Lord expressly taught His disciples to give to mere petition a much less prominent place than it usually occupies; adoration, confession and thanksgiving should between them take the predominant share in our communion with the Most High, thus correcting the tendency to make of prayer a mere recital of wants more or less indiscriminately addressed to the Divine bounty. The supreme object to be kept in view is that we should become of God's way of thinking—not that we should attempt to make Him of ours; in Matthew Henry's shrewd comparison, prayer is like the boat-hook, which brings the boat to the land, not the land to the boat.
But when we have clarified our ideas on the subject to this extent, we must once more face the question suggested by Professor James—What is it that is transacted? The effect of prayer upon those who offer it is too well-attested to be called into doubt; what we have to ask ourselves, however, is whether those effects are, in the strict sense of the term, purely "subjective,"i.e., as we {203} previously expressed it, in the nature of a noble auto-suggestion. The answer to that query must in the last resort be determined by our thought concerning God and our relation to Him. Let it be said once more: if, with the pantheist, we assume that we are essentially and inalienably one with the All—part of It, as the bay is of the ocean—prayer, as the theist understands it, is a self-contradiction; if offered at all, it will be, not the establishment of a relation which isex hypothesialways in being, but at most a clearer realisation by the particle of its fundamental identity with the Whole. Prayer is founded upon the belief that the Deity is at least interested in His worshipper—or else, why speak to the Unheeding? But Spinozism distinctly denies the possibility of God's entertaining any feelings towards individuals—indeed, Spinoza condemns the individual's desire for God's personal love; at most he will admit that "'God, inasmuch as He loves Himself, loves men,' because men are parts and proportions of God. . . The complacency of the Universe in its self-awareness, the love of God towards Himself, as Spinoza has it, includes us in its embrace, and that is enough." [5] We reply that this "complacency of the Universe in its self-awareness" may be enough for Spinozists; but it is not enough to move men to prayer—and this is borne out by Mr. Picton's total silence on this {204} topic in his exposition of his Master's doctrine. Mr. Chesterton, with his usual felicity of phrase, hits the nail on the head when he says that upon this principle "the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person;" certainly it should be clear that on this assumption, as there can be no return of affection from a God whose love is only self-love, so the effect of prayer can only be that which is produced upon the soul by its consciousness—supposed to be elevating—of being an infinitesimal fraction of an infinite totality. We say that this consciousness is supposed to be elevating, though why it should be so is not quite apparent; for whatever this heterogeneous sum-total of existences may be, it is not, in our sense of the term,good, as the God of Christianity is good.
But if, instead of losing ourselves in the fog-land of Pantheism, Theosophy and their unavowed congeners, we take our stand upon the firm belief in the otherness of God, the case alters altogether. Prayer at once becomes rational instead of being a contradiction in terms; it is the accomplishment of something which is not already accomplished; it springs from the consciousness of a spiritual need, it is born of the instinct of spiritual self-preservation. It sets up a connection between two centres—man and God—which can only be connected because of a fundamental likeness subsisting between them; but thelikenessis notoneness—indeed, the latter would exclude {205} the former, for only separates can be like each other. On this theory prayer is no mere meditation, but an intense and strenuous endeavour to make actual something that is only potential; to use the simile we previously employed, it is a digging of channels along which the sea may pour of its fulness into an inland reservoir. That this is what really takes place in prayer—that there is such a real response from Him to whom it is directed—we have no hesitation whatever in affirming; and this notwithstanding the fact that such an experience cannot be proved to one who has not shared it, any more than we can convey a sense of the grandeur of Mont Blanc to one whose eye has never beheld its majestic proportions. Evidently, in this as in every corresponding case the testimony of those who say that they have had a certain experience must be preferred to that of others who can only say that they have not had it; and the witness to spiritual renewal, reinforcement, replenishing received in prayer—to the entering in of a Presence when the doors were thrown open; to a peace and blessedness which were not of the world's giving—this witness is so strong and so uniform that we have no choice but to pronounce it decisive. In every such case something had been "genuinely transacted"; not only had man spoken, but God had answered—the worshipper had not merely invoked, but in a very real sense he had evoked, the Divine Presence.
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But can we go any further than this? Can we, that is to say, maintain that God answers prayer, not only by flooding the adoring soul with fresh strength, gladness, confidence, but by bringing to pass events which otherwise would not have come about? This "objective efficacy" of prayer, in the narrower sense, is frequently doubted to-day; but, as we shall attempt to show, upon grounds which, when examined, prove untenable. The difficulty, as it is most generally stated, arises from a misunderstanding; answers to prayer are regarded as interferences with the uniformities of nature, as arbitrary—and therefore unthinkable—interruptions of the chain of cause and effect, for which there can be no room in an orderly universe. This, no doubt, was what Turgenev meant when he asked, "Does not all prayer meanau fonda wish that in a given case two and two may not make four?" That Turgenev's aphorism quite illegitimately narrows down the meaning of prayer to petition, may pass; it is more important for us to investigate his implied challenge—the grounds upon which he expresses his absolute disbelief in the fulfilment of such petitions.[6]
A simple preliminary reflection should come to our aid. God is surely always bringing things to pass on condition that we first do certain other things, and on no other conditions {207} whatsoever. The seeking has to go before the finding, the knocking to precede the opening of the doors. He will give us waving corn, providing the ground is ploughed and sown; that is to say, He answers our request, if we will make it in the right manner—He lays down certain rules on compliance with which we may secure certain blessings. Is it objected that ploughing and sowing, unlike prayer, are physical exertions made for the purpose of bringing about physical results? That would be a very superficial view; it is certainly truer to say that they are acts of will, and even acts of faith; and in the ultimate analysis the power which has produced the harvest is not the power of matter, but of mind—the mind of man acting in accordance with the Mind of God. Man has asked, God has answered; and would not have answered in that particular manner but for the particular manner of that request.
Let us go a step further, still keeping to the obvious. Most visitors to Geneva have made the short excursion to theForces matrices, the great power-station where the swift waters of the Rhone are pressed into the service of man and made to light the streets, propel the tramways and drive all the machinery of the {208} city. Now these vast powers were always there—no law of nature was broken, nor any new one introduced, when they were utilised to lighten man's labours and multiply his energies; all that has happened is that man has discovered existing laws and harnessed them to his use, and once more the realforce motriceresides not in those silently-revolving engines that generate the electric current, but in the mind that devised and controls them.
Thought, then—unseen, impalpable—is energy in its essence, the master force which directs, subdues and uses matter; and in prayer we have already seen that we place ourselves in communication with the Central Force of the universe, acquiring power we should not otherwise possess, and replenishing our emptiness from an inexhaustible store. But if thought, mind, will, are that which lies behind all physical accomplishment, from the simplest to the most wonderful; and if by an exercise of the same faculty we may actually secure results of a spiritual order, direct answering messages, from God: why should it bea prioriunthinkable that we may by the same agency of prayer obtain more "objective" responses,viz., the fulfilment of our petitions? Frankly, we can discover no theoretical grounds on which such a possibility could be merely waved on one side as not worth consideration. Shall we be told that we cannot think that God would grant a certain wish only on condition that we {209} expressed it to Him? But we have already found that in the regular experience of life the Divine bounty seems to come in response to human efforts which are ultimately efforts of the will. Once more, everything depends upon our thought of God; if He is such as Jesus taught us to regard Him, may it not well be that His Fatherly love goes out to us in fullest measure when we call upon it with fullest and most childlike trust? If it is urged that God would surely under all circumstances grant His children whatever may contribute to their happiness, we need only observe that every parent has had occasion to say to a much-loved child, "You shall have this when you know how to ask for it." The truth has been stated with characteristic simplicity and insight by Dr. James Drummond, in the words, "If God has left certain things dependent on the action of the human will, He may also have left certain things dependent on human petition." [7]
So much is sure, that in all true prayer we set spiritual forces in motion, to whose effects upon ourselves we can bear witness; and if their action in one direction is an ascertained fact, however mysterious and inexplicable, with what warrant shall we deny the possibility of their acting in another? Certainly we shall not argue that such action involves an "interference" with natural law; and if we have to admit our ignorance as to {210}howsuch a force would operate and bring results to pass, let us remind ourselves that the ultimate "how?"—the bridge between antecedent and consequent, and why the former should be followed by the latter—always and inevitably escapes us. Why in the thousand and more observed forms of snow-crystals the filaments of ice should always be arranged at angles of 60 degrees or 120 degrees; why sulphate of potash and sulphate of alumina should crystallise in octahedrons or in cubes, but in no other forms; what is the real connection between molecular changes in the brain-substance and states of consciousness—all these, and a myriad more, are unsolved mysteries: we can only say that we are dealing with facts of experience. And as in these and countless other cases, so here also, in this matter of answers to prayer, the final and only test is that of experience. That a vessel in distress should be able to send a message to another vessel a hundred miles out of sight, and summon it to its aid, would have struck an earlier generation as a piece of wild romancing—but we know it is actually done; that a soul's earnest prayer may avail to enlist mighty energies in its help and so to bring about results which otherwise would not have come to pass, ought hardly to strike the present age as an inherently incredible proposition.
But we shall be told that our parallel does not hold good: if the Marconi apparatus failed seven times out of ten, we should hardly {211} think it worth while to provide our ships with so unreliable an instrument; yet who would say that even three out of ten prayers for stated objects met with fulfilment? The objection, however, is not unanswerable; indeed, the very comparison employed in stating it may enable us to supply at least a partial answer. For we understand that the success of wireless messages being transmitted and received depends upon absolutely perfect "tuning"; the electric waves set up,i.e., will only act upon a receiver most delicately attuned to a particular rate of oscillations, and when the difference between the rate of oscillation of the waves and the receiver exceeds one per cent., resonance ceases altogether, so that the message may be sent, but will not be received. It strikes us as hardly a fanciful supposition that many prayers fail to obtain an answer for a precisely analogous reason,i.e., for lack of attuning. The mere uttering of devotional phraseology, or even the sending forth of anguished appeals, does not of necessity constitute true prayer at all, and hence remains ineffective, because the soul is not reallyen rapportwith God. We suggest that the supplication which "availeth much in its working" will be the outcome of a whole spiritual discipline, whereby the individual spirit has become attuned to the Spirit whom it seeks; if the majority of prayers go unanswered, it is because they are mere recitals of a tale of wants, without even an attempt upon the {212} part of those who utter them to put themselves into the attitude upon which an answer depends. On the other hand, where the adjustment of which we speak has reached a high state of perfection, the soul not only transmits its message to God with the perfect assurance of being heard, but it is also continually sensitive to the messages which incessantly flash through the spiritual ether from God, but which only those can hear who have learned the secret of listening for His word.
In dealing with this question of unanswered prayer, we have given the first place to what seems to us the most important as well as the least frequently regarded reason—the lack of spiritual discipline, which is ultimately the lack of faith, with which we pray. When we remember, moreover, that many of our petitions are framed in very natural and inevitable ignorance of what is for our truest good, we realise another and very obvious reason for the non-fulfilment of a large proportion of the wishes we lay before the throne of God, whose goodness is as much attested by what He denies to our foolishness as by what He grants to our entreaties. And how numerous are the prayers which reflection and an awakened moral sense rule out of court: prayers which ask God to do for us by special intervention what we ought to do for ourselves by our own effort and industry; prayer for success in dealings and enterprises which in themselves are ethically {213} unjustifiable, and to which the only answer could be, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself"; prayers which carry the spirit of egoism, of competition, of bargaining even into our relations with the Most High; prayers of an imprecatory character such as meet and shock us in some of the psalms. How could these and their like possibly be granted by a just and merciful Creator?
But apart from such presumptuous, foolish, or impious supplications as are at once repulsed and rebuked by the Divine silence, what are the objects we may lawfully pray for, asking for a response? It must be confessed that with the exception of petitions for spiritual blessings—for a deeper faith, for a more complete obedience, for a humbler heart, for a wider sympathy—such as can never be out of place, it is impossible to draw a hard-and-fast line; there is, indeed, a whole vast category of possible objects of prayer which one cannota prioripronounce legitimate or otherwise. We can only humbly confess that "we know not how to pray as we ought," nor what things it is in our best interest to have granted or withheld from us; but with this proviso, and with the clause, "Nevertheless, not my will but Thine," added to our petitions, there can be no wrong in making our requests to God for every manner of blessing, material or otherwise, and whether on our own behalf or on behalf of others. Here we may surely with {214} all confidence and with all reverence invoke the analogy of human parenthood. No true earthly parent is offended or moved to impatience by his children expressing to him all their wants and wishes with perfect unreserve, even though his loving wisdom has anticipated their real needs, and will decide which of their desires may be granted; indeed, as we already hinted, the granting of those desires may depend to some extent upon the children's attitude, upon the filial, trustful, affectionate disposition they exhibit. So in regard to the supplications we address to our Father in Heaven: we cannot think of His being moved by our mere importunity, or by the mechanical repetition of set phrases; but that the fulfilment of some wish of ours may be conditioned by our humility and confidence in expressing it, presents no improbability. In any case, what is necessary on our part is that we should have faith, not only in God'spowerto grant our petitions, but in Hiswisdomin granting or refusing them as may be most expedient for us. We ourselves can, within limits, fulfil most of our children's requests; but a wise and loving parent will many a time say "no," when his child may marvel at what to him must seem a mere arbitrary or even unkind refusal of an innocent desire. That hapless man of genius, the late John Davidson, condensed the truth into one illuminating phrase when he spoke of prayer rightly uttered as {215} "submissive aspiration"; it would be difficult to devise another form of words equally brief yet containing so much of the essence of the matter. Even short of actual fulfilment, it is an immeasurable privilege simply to speak to God about all the things that weigh on our minds, assured of His hearing, nor should the fact that He knows all about our troubles before we open our lips concerning them restrain our utterance; for our object is not to give Him information, but to place ourselves in conscious communion with Him, and by viewing our affairs in His light to see light.
This applies to all our petitions, and perhaps in an especial measure to intercessory prayer, those touching requests which we send up for our dear ones in sickness, peril, sorrow, need, or any other adversity. Of course, all such intercessions ought to be mentally qualified by the assurance that God will do what is best, even though we may be unable to understand His decrees; but there is nothing unreasonable in the belief that our prayers for others may be, and frequently are, directly effective, setting energies in motion which might otherwise have remained latent and inoperative. How these energies operate may be quite beyond our power to ascertain or even to guess; but if—to say it once more—the action of matter on matter, the "how" of chemical combinations, eludes us, shall we complain because the action of mind on mind, spirit on spirit, is no {216} less elusive? The final test—whether,e.g., a mother's prayer that her absent son may be preserved from the snare of some great temptation, is able to work a change in his mind—is, as we said above, the test of experience; and unless we are dogmatically determined to reject all testimony which bears on this subject, there seems no escaping the conclusion that specific prayers have been specifically, directly, and unmistakeably answered in instances too numerous to admit of explanation by coincidence.[8] The volume of human testimony bearing on this subject is too great to be swept aside by a simple refusal to consider it; if there is no insurmountable logical obstacle to the possibility of prayer proving objectively effective—and we have tried to show that there are no such obstacles—we must examine the alleged instances of such answers without prejudice; and if we do so, then, after making all legitimate deductions, we shall still find a body of residual fact which is not to be explained away.
By all means, then, we conclude, let us obey the instincts which urge us to turn to God in {217} prayer; they lie deeper and are less fallible—embodying as they do the experience of the race—than our individual reasonings. We may tell our Father in all simplicity of whatever desires we may cherish with an approving conscience, leaving the fulfilment to His wise and steadfast love; it is not the ignorance of our requests but the faithlessness of our spirits that we most stand in need of guarding against. Let us here, as elsewhere, follow the example of the Son of God, whose unique intimacy with the Father made Him only the more earnest in communing with Him, least lonely when alone with God. Above all, let us bear in mind that the best prayer is that which has least of self-seeking in it, but is answered in the making, and so sends us back to our tasks—perhaps to our trials—refreshed as by a draught from some hidden and precious spring, renewed in manhood and nearer to God. In the oft-quoted aphorism of George Meredith, "He who rises from his prayer a better man, his prayer is answered." As a Greater than Meredith said, "Your Heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things; but seek ye first His Kingdom, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." The ideal prayer is that which will ask little, aspire much, submit altogether; it is the soul's complete surrender to and rest in God.
[1] The Rev. E. W. Lewis, M.A., B.D., in a paper on "The Divine Immanence, its Meaning and its Implications." Compare alsoThe New Theology, p. 34. As Dr. William Adamson observes, "The illustration is unfortunate. The supposed ocean is to be thought of as infinite, and the bay is finite, but in their essence and existence they are essentially one. There can be no bay where there is no boundary, and where in this case could the boundary be found, for there can be nothing outside the infinite?"
[2] Bousset,Faith of a Modern Protestant, p. 59.
[3]The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 466.
[4]A Century's Progress, p. 105-6.
[5]Spinoza, by J. Allanson Picton, p. 213.
[6] So far, of course, as such an attitude may be the outcome of an antecedent disbelief in God, it is perfectly logical; only we have no common ground with those who take that view. It is otherwise, however, where an avowed acceptance of Theism is nevertheless accompanied by doubts as regards any objective effects flowing from supplications addressed to God; it is with such doubts as these that we are concerned.
[7]Studies in Christian Doctrine, p. 197.
[8] Precisely such an instance was brought under the notice of the present writer by a correspondent, whose prayers that an absent one in distant lands might be able to resist the power of strong temptation was "heard" past all doubting—and that without the object of these petitions being aware of the cause, as let a remark of his own attest: "I don't know why, but sometimes I feel myself in some way held back from doing certain things—how, I cannot explain; I only know that I should do as others do, were it not for this compelling feeling."
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