CHAPTER IV
THE PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER
The foregoing analysis of the religious sentiment results in finding it, even in its simplest forms, a product of complicated reasoning forced into action by some of the strongest emotions, and maintaining its position indefeasibly through the limitations of the intellect. This it does, however, with a certain nobleness, for while it wraps the unknown in sacred mystery, it proclaims man one in nature with the Highest, by birthright a son of the gods, of an intelligence akin to theirs, and less than they only in degree. Through thus presenting at once his strength and his feebleness, his grandeur and his degradation, religion goes beyond philosophy or utility in suggesting motives for exertion, stimuli to labor. This phase of it will now occupy us.
The Religious Sentiment manifests itself in thought, in word and in act through the respective media of the Prayer, the Myth and the Cult. The first embraces the personal relations of the individual to the object of his worship, the second expresses the opinions current in a community about the nature and actions of that object, the last includes the symbols and ceremonies under and by which it is represented and propitiated.
The first has the logical priority. Man cares nothing for God —can care nothing for him practically – except as an aid to the fulfilment of his desires, the satisfaction of his wants, as the “ground of his hopes.” The root of the religious sentiment, I have said, is “a wish whose fruition depends upon unknown power.” An appeal for aid to this unknown power, is the first form of prayer in its religious sense. It is not merely “the soul’s sincere desire.” This may well be and well directed, and yet not religious, as the devotion of the mathematician to the solution of an important problem. With the desire must be the earnest appeal to the unknown. A theological dictionary I have at hand almost correctly defines it as “a petition for spiritual or physical benefits which [we believe] we cannot obtain without divine co-operation.” The words in brackets must be inserted to complete the definition.
It need not be expressed in language. Rousseau, in his Confessions, tells of a bishop who, in visiting his diocese, came across an old woman who was troubled because she could frame no prayer in words, but only cry, “Oh!” “Good mother,” said the wise bishop, “Pray always so. Your prayers are better than ours.”82
A petition for assistance is, as I have said, one of its first forms; but not its only one. The assistance asked in simple prayers is often nothing more than the neutrality of the gods, their non-interference; “no preventing Providence,” as the expression is in our popular religion. Prayers of fear are of this kind:
“And they say, God be merciful,
Who ne’er said, God be praised.”
Some of the Egyptian formulæ even threaten the gods if they prevent success.83 The wish accomplished, the prayer may be one of gratitude, often enough of that kind described by La Rochefoucauld, of which a prominent element is “a lively sense of possible favors to come.”84
Or again, self-abasement being so natural a form of flattery that to call ourselves “obedient and humble servants” of others, has passed into one of the commonest forms of address, many prayers are made up of similar expressions of humility and contrition, the votary calling himself a “miserable sinner” and a “vile worm,” and on the other hand magnifying his Lord as greater than all other gods, mighty and helpful to those who assiduously worship him.
In some form or other, as of petition, gratitude or contrition, uttered in words or confined to the aspirations of the soul, prayer is a necessary factor in the religious life. It always has been, and it must be present.
The exceptions which may be taken to this in religious systems are chiefly two, those supposed to have been founded by Buddha Sakyamuni and Confucius.
It is undoubtedly correct that Buddha discouraged prayer. He permitted it at best in the inferior grades of discipleship. For himself, and all who reached his stage of culture, he pronounced it futile.
But Buddha did not set out to teach a religion, but rather the inutility of all creeds. He struck shrewdly at the root of them by placing the highest condition of man in the total extinguishment of desire. He bound the gods in fetters by establishing a theory of causal connection (the twelve Nidana) which does away with the necessity of ruling powers. He then swept both matter and spirit into unreality by establishing the canon of ignorance, that the highest knowledge is to know that nothing is; that there is neither being nor not-being, nor yet the becoming. After this wholesale iconoclasm the only possible object in life for the sage is the negative one of avoiding pain, which though as unreal as anything else, interferes with his meditations on its unreality. To this negative end the only aid he can expect is from other sages who have gone farther in self-cultivation. Self, therefore, is the first, the collective body of sages is the second, and the written instruction of Buddha is the third; and these three are the only sources to which the consistent Buddhist looks for aid.
This was Buddha’s teaching. But it is not Buddhism as professed by the hundreds of millions in Ceylon, in Thibet, China, Japan, and Siberia, who claim Sakyamuni under his names Buddha, the awakened, Tathagata, thus gone, or gone before, Siddartha, the accomplisher of the wish, and threescore and ten others of like purport, as their inspired teacher. Millions of saints, holy men, Buddhas, they believe, are ready to aid in every way the true believer, and incessant, constant prayer is, they maintain, the one efficient means to insure this aid. Repetition, dinning the divinities and wearying them into answering, is their theory. Therefore they will repeat a short formula of four words (om mani padme hum– Om! the jewel in the lotus, amen) thousands of times a day; or, as they correctly think it not a whit more mechanical, they write it a million times on strips of paper, fasten it around a cylinder, attach this to a water or a wind-wheel, and thus sleeping or waking, at home or abroad, keep up a steady fire of prayer at the gods, which finally, they sanguinely hope, will bring them to submission.
No sect has such entire confidence in the power of prayer as the Buddhists. The most pious Mahometan or Christian does not approach their faith. After all is said and done, the latter has room to doubt the efficacy of his prayer. It may be refused. Not so the Buddhists. They have a syllogism which covers the case completely, as follows: —
All things are in the power of the gods.
The gods are in the power of prayer.
Prayer is at the will of the saint.
Therefore all things are in the power of the saint.
The only reason that any prayer fails is that it is not repeated often enough – a statement difficult to refute.
The case with Confucius was different.85 No speculative dreamer, but a practical man, bent on improving his fellows by teaching them self-reliance, industry, honesty, good feeling and the attainment of material comfort, he did not see in the religious systems and doctrines of his time any assistance to these ends. Therefore, like Socrates and many other men of ancient and modern times, without actually condemning the faiths around him, or absolutely neglecting some external respect to their usages, he taught his followers to turn away from religious topics and occupy themselves with subjects of immediate utility. For questions of duty, man, he taught, has a sufficient guide within himself. “What you do not like,” he said, “when done to yourself, do not to others.” The wishes, he adds, should be limited to the attainable; thus their disappointment can be avoided by a just estimate of one’s own powers. He used to compare a wise man to an archer: “When the archer misses the target, he seeks for the cause of his failure within himself.” He did not like to talk about spiritual beings. When asked whether the dead had knowledge, he replied: “There is no present urgency about the matter. If they have, you will know it for yourself in time.” He did not deny the existence of unseen powers; on the contrary, he said: “The kwei shin (the most general term for supernatural beings) enter into all things, and there is nothing without them;” but he added, “We look for them and do not see them; we listen, but do not hear them.” In speaking of deity, he dropped the personal syllable (te) and only spoke of heaven, in the indefinite sense. Such was this extraordinary man. The utilitarian theory, what we call the common sense view of life, was never better taught. But his doctrine is not a religion. His followers erect temples, and from filial respect pay the usual honors to their ancestors, as Confucius himself did. But they ignore religious observances, strictly so-called.
These examples, therefore, do not at all conflict with the general statement that no religion can exist without prayer. On the contrary, it is the native expression of the religious sentiment, that to which we must look for its most hidden meaning. The thoughtful Novalis, whose meditations are so rich in reflections on the religious nature of man, well said: “Prayer is to religion what thought is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion. The religious sense prays with like necessity that the reason thinks.”
Whatever the form of the prayer, it has direct or indirect relation to the accomplishment of a wish. David prays to the Lord as the one who “satisfies the desire of every living thing,” who “will fulfil the desire of them that fear him,” and it is with the like faith that the heart of every votary is stirred when he approaches in prayer the divinity he adores.
Widely various are the things wished for. Their character is the test of religions. In primitive faiths and in uncultivated minds, prayers are confined to the nearest material advantages; they are directed to the attainment of food, of victory in combat, of safety in danger, of personal prosperity. They may all be summed up in a line of one which occurs in the Rig Veda: “O Lord Varuna! Grant that we may prosper in getting and keeping!”
Beyond this point of “getting and keeping,” few primitive prayers take us. Those of the American Indians, as I have elsewhere shown, remained in this stage among the savage tribes, and rose above it only in the civilized states of Mexico and Peru. Prayers for health, for plenteous harvests, for safe voyages and the like are of this nature, though from their familiarity to us they seem less crude than the simple-hearted petition of the old Aryan, which I have quoted. They mean the same.
The more thoughtful votaries of the higher forms of religion have, however, frequently drawn the distinction between the direct and indirect fulfilment of the wish. An abundant harvest, restoration to health, or a victory in battle is the object of our hopes, not in itself, but for its results upon ourselves. These, in their final expression, can mean nothing else than agreeable sensations and pleasurable emotions. These, therefore, are the real though indirect objects of such prayers; often unconsciously so, because the ordinary devotee has little capacity and less inclination to analyze the nature of his religious feelings.
A recent writer, Mr. Hodgson, has said: “The real answer to prayer is the increase of the joyful emotions, the decrease of the painful ones.”86 It would seem a simpler plan to make this directly the purport of our petitions; but to the modern mind this naked simplicity would be distasteful.
Nor is the ordinary supplicant willing to look so far. The direct, not the indirect object of the wish, is what he wants. The lazzarone of Naples prays to his patron saint to favor his choice of a lottery ticket; if it turn out an unlucky number he will take the little leaden image of the saint from his pocket, revile it, spit on it, and trample it in the mud. Another man, when his prayer for success is not followed by victory, sends gifts to the church, flogs himself in public and fasts. Xenophon gives us in his Economics the prayer of a pious Athenian of his time, in the person of Ischomachus. “I seek to obtain,” says the latter, “from the gods by just prayers, strength and health, the respect of the community, the love of my friends, an honorable termination to my combats, and riches, the fruit of honest industry.” Xenophon evidently considered these appropriate objects for prayer, and from the petitions in many recent manuals of devotion, I should suppose most Christians of to-day would not see in them anything inappropriate.
In spite of the effort that has been made by Professor Creuzer87 to show that the classical nations rose to a higher use of prayer, one which made spiritual growth in the better sense of the phrase its main end; I think such instances were confined to single philosophers and poets. They do not represent the prayers of the average votary. Then and now he, as a rule, has little or no idea of any other answer to his prayer than the attainment of his wish.
As such petitions, however, more frequently fail than succeed in their direct object, and as the alternative of considering them impotent is not open to the votary, some other explanation of their failure was taught in very early day. At first, it was that the god was angered, and refused the petition out of revenge. Later, the indirect purpose of such a prayer asserted itself more clearly, and aided by a nobler conception of Divinity, suggested that the refusal of the lower is a preparation for a higher reward. Children, in well-ordered households, are frequently refused by parents who love them well; this present analogy was early seized to explain the failure of prayer. Unquestioning submission to the divine will was inculcated. Some even went so far as to think it improper to define any wish at all, and subsumed all prayer under the one formula, “Thy will be done.” Such was the teaching of St. Augustine, whose favorite prayer was Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis, a phrase much criticized by Pelagius and others of his time as too quietistic.88 The usual Christian doctrine of resignation proceeds in theory to this extent. Such a notion of the purpose of prayer leads to a cheerful acceptance of the effects of physical laws, effects which an enlightened religious mind never asks to be altered in its favor, for the promises and aims of religion should be wholly outside the arena of their operation. The ideal prayer has quite other objects than to work material changes.
To say, as does Mr. Hodgson, that its aim is the increase of the joyful emotions is far from sufficient. The same may be said of most human effort, the effort to make money, for instance. The indirect object of money-making is also the increase of the agreeable feelings. The similarity of purpose might lead to a belief that the aims of religion and business are identical.
Before we can fully decide on what, in the specifically religious sense of the word, is the answer to prayer, we should inquire as a matter of fact what effect it actually exerts, and to do this we should understand what it is as a psychological process. The reply to this is that prayer, in its psychological definition, is a form of Expectant Attention. It is always urged by religious teachers that it must be very earnest and continuous to be successful. “Importunity is of the essence of successful prayer,” says Canon Liddon in a recent sermon. In the New Testament it is likened to a constant knocking at a door; and by a curious parity of thought the Chinese character for prayer is composed of the signs for a spirit and an axe or hammer.89 We must “keep hammering” as a colloquial phrase has it. Strong belief is also required. To pray with faith we must expect with confidence.
Now that such a condition of expectant attention, prolonged and earnest, will have a very powerful subjective effect, no one acquainted with the functions of the human economy can doubt. “Any state of the body,” observes the physiologist Müller, “expected with certain confidence is very prone to ensue.” A pill of bread-crumbs, which the patient supposes to contain a powerful cathartic, will often produce copious evacuations. No one who studies the history of medicine can question that scrofulous swellings and ulcerations were cured by the royal touch, that paralytics have regained the use of their limbs by touching the relics of the saints, and that in many countries beside Judea the laying on of hands and the words of a holy man have made issues to heal and the lame to walk.90
Such effects are not disputed by physicians as probable results of prayer or faith considered as expectant attention. The stigmata of St. Francis d’Assisi are more than paralleled by those of Louise Lateau, now living at Bois d’Haine in Belgium, whose hands, feet and side bleed every Friday like those of Christ on the cross. A commission of medical men after the most careful precautions against deception attributed these hemorrhages to the effect of expectation (prayer) vastly increased in force by repetition.91 If human testimony is worth anything, the cures of Porte Royale are not open to dispute.92
The mental consequences of a prayerful condition of mind are to inspire patience under afflictions, hope in adversity, courage in the presence of danger and a calm confidence in the face of death itself. How mightily such influences have worked in history is shown in every religious war, and in the lives of the martyrs of all faiths. It matters not what they believed, so only that they believed it thoroughly, and the gates of Hades could not prevail against them.
No one will question that these various and momentous results are the legitimate effects or answers to prayers. But whether prayer can influence the working of the material forces external to the individual is a disputed point. If it cannot in some way do this, prayers for rain, for harvests, for safety at sea, for restoration to health, for delivery from grasshoppers93 and pestilence, whether for our own benefit or others, are hardly worth reciting. A physicist expresses the one opinion in these words: “Science asserts that without a disturbance of natural law, quite as serious as the stoppage of an eclipse or the rolling of the St. Lawrence up the Falls of Niagara, no act of humiliation, individual or national, could call one shower from heaven or deflect toward us a single beam of the sun.” “Assuming the efficacy of free prayer to produce changes in external nature, it necessarily follows that natural laws are more or less at the mercy of man’s volition.”94
This authoritative statement, much discussed at the time it was published, does not in fact express the assertion of science. To the scientific apprehension, man’s volitions and his prayers are states of emotion, inseparably connected in their manifestations with changes in his cerebral structure, with relative elevation of temperature, and with the elimination of oxygen and phosphorus, in other words with chemico-vital phenomena and the transformation of force. Science also adds that there is a constant interaction of all force, and it is not prepared to deny that the force expended by a national or individual prayer may become a co-operating cause in the material change asked for, even if the latter be a rain shower. This would not affect a natural law but only its operation, and that much every act of our life does. The fact that persistency and earnestness in prayer —i. e., the increased development of force – add to its efficacy, would accord with such a scientific view. It would further be very materially corroborated by the accepted doctrine of the orders of force. A unit of electrical or magnetic force equals many of the force of gravity; a number of electrical units are required to make one of chemical force; and chemico-vital or “metabolic” force is still higher; whereas thought regarded as a form of force must be vastly beyond this again.
To render a loadstone, which lifts filings of iron by its magnetic force, capable of doing the same by the force of gravity, its density would have to be increased more than a thousand million times. All forces differ in like degree. Professor Faraday calculated that the force latent in the chemical composition of one drop of water, equals that manifested in an average thunderstorm. In our limited knowledge of the relation of forces therefore, a scientific man is rash to deny that the chemico-vital forces set loose by an earnest prayer may affect the operation of natural laws outside the body as they confessedly do in it.
Experience alone can decide such a question, and I for one, from theory and from observation, believe in the material efficacy of prayer. In a certain percentage of the cases where the wished-for material result followed, the physical force of the active cerebral action has seemed to me a co-operating cause. A physician can observe this to best advantage in the sickness of children, as they are free from subjective bias, their constitutions are delicately susceptible, and the prayers for them are in their immediate vicinity and very earnest.
But this admission after all is a barren one to the truly devout mind. The effect gained does not depend on the God to whom the prayer is offered. Blind physical laws bring it about, and any event that comes through their compulsive force is gelded of its power to fecundate the germs of the better religious life. The knowledge of this would paralyze faith.
Further to attenuate the value of my admission, another consideration arises, this time prompted not by speculative criticism, but by reverence itself. A scholar whom I have already quoted justly observes: “Whenever we prefer a request as a means of obtaining what we wish for, we are not praying in the religious sense of the term.”95 Or, as a recent theologian puts the same idea: “Every true prayer prays to be refused, if the granting of it would be hurtful to us or subversive of God’s glory.”96 The real answer to prayer can never be an event or occurrence. Only in moments of spiritual weakness and obscured vision, when governed by his emotions or sensations, will the reverent soul ask a definite transaction, a modification in the operation of natural laws, still less such vulgar objects as victory, wealth or health.
The prayer of faith finds its only true objective answer in itself, in accepting whatever befalls as the revelation of the will of God as to what is best. This temper of mind as the real meaning of prayer was beautifully set forth by St. John: “If we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.”97
But this solution of the problem does not go far enough. Prayer is claimed to have a positive effect on the mind other than resignation. Joyful emotions are its fruits, spiritual enlightenment its reward. These are more than cheerful acquiescence, nor can the latter come from objects of sense.
The most eminent teachers agree in banishing material pleasure and prosperity from holy desires. They are of one mind in warning against what the world and the flesh can offer, against the pursuit of riches, power and lust. Many counsel poverty and deliberate renunciation of all such things. Nor is the happiness they talk of that which the pursuit of intellectual truth brings. This, indeed, confers joy, of which whoever has tasted will not hastily return to the fleshpots of the senses, but it is easy to see that it is not religious. Prayer and veneration have not a part in it. Great joy is likewise given by the exercise of the imagination when stirred by art in some of its varied forms, and a joy more nearly allied to religion than is that of scientific investigation. But the esthetic emotions are well defined, and are distinctly apart from those concerned with the religious sentiment. Their most complete satisfaction rather excludes than encourages pious meditations. That which prayer ought to seek outside of itself is different from all of these, its dower must be divine.
We need not look long for it. Though hidden from the wise, it has ever been familiar to the unlearned. Man has never been in doubt as to what it is. He has been only too willing to believe he has received it.
In barbarism and civilization, in the old and new worlds, the final answer to prayer has ever been acknowledged to be inspiration, revelation, the thought of God made clear to the mind of man, the mystical hypostasis through which the ideas of the human coincide with those of universal Intelligence. This is what the Pythian priestess, the Siberian shaman, the Roman sibyl, the Voluspan prophetess, the Indian medicine-man, all claimed in various degrees along with the Hebrew seers and the Mahometan teacher.98
The TRUTH, the last and absolute truth, is what is everywhere recognized as, if not the only, at least the completest, the highest answer to prayer. “Where I found the truth, there I found my God, himself the truth,” says St. Augustine; and in a prayer by St. Chrysostom, the “Golden Mouth,” unsurpassed in its grand simplicity, it is said: “Almighty Father, * * grant us in this world knowledge of Thy truth, and in the world to come, life everlasting.” Never has the loftiest purpose of prayer been more completely stated. This it was that had been promised them by Him, to whom they looked as an Intercessor for their petitions, who had said: “I will send unto you the Comforter. * * When he, the Spirit of Truth, is come, he will guide you unto all truth.”
The belief that this answer is at all times attainable has always been recognized by the Christian Church, Apostolic, Catholic, and Protestant. Baptism was called by the Greek fathers, “enlightenment” (Φωτισμος), as by it the believer received the spirit of truth. The Romanist, in the dogma of infallibility, proclaims the perpetual inspiration of a living man; the Protestant Churches in many creeds and doctrinal works extend a substantial infallibility to all true believers, at least to the extent that they can be inspired to recognize, if not to receive divine verity.
The Gallican Confession of Faith, adopted in 1561, rests the principal evidence of the truth of the Scriptures on “le témoignage et l’intérieure persuasion du Saint Esprit,” and the Westminster Confession on “the inward work of the holy spirit.” The Society of Friends maintain it as “a leading principle, that the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul is not only immediate and direct, but perceptible;” that it imparts truth “without any mixture of error;” and thus is something quite distinct from conscience, which is common to the race, while this “inward light” is given only to the favored of God.99
The non-juror, William Law, emphatically says: “The Christian that rejects the necessity of immediate divine inspiration, pleads the whole cause of infidelity; he has nothing to prove the goodness of his own Christianity, but that which equally proves to the Deist the goodness of his infidelity.”100 That by prayer the path of duty will be made clear, is a universal doctrine.
The extent to which the gift of inspiration is supposed to be granted is largely a matter of church government. Where authority prevails, it is apt to be confined to those in power. Where religion is regarded as chiefly subjective and individual, it is conceded that any pious votary may become the receptacle of such special light.
Experience, however, has too often shown that inspiration teaches such contradictory doctrines that they are incompatible with any standard. The indefinite splitting of Protestant sects has convinced all clear thinkers that the claim of the early Confessions to a divinely given power of distinguishing the true from the false has been a mistaken supposition. As a proof to an unbeliever, such a gift could avail nothing; and as evidence to one’s own mind, it can only be accepted by those who deliberately shut their eyes to the innumerable contradictions it offers.101
While, therefore, in this, if anywhere, we perceive the only at once fit and definite answer to prayer, and find that this is acknowledged by all faiths, from the savage to the Christian, it would seem that this answer is a fallacious and futile one. The teachings of inspiration are infinitely discrepant and contradictory, and often plainly world-wide from the truth they pretend to embody. The case seems hopeless; yet, as religion of any kind without prayer is empty, there has been a proper unwillingness to adopt the conclusion just stated.
The distinction has been made that “the inspiration of the Christian is altogether subjective, and directed to the moral improvement of the individual,”102 not to facts of history or questions of science, even exegetic science. The term illumination has been preferred for it, and while it is still defined as “a spiritual intelligence which brings truth within the range of mental apprehension by a kind of intuition,”103 this truth has reference only to immediate matters of individual faith and practice. The Roman church allows more latitude than this, as it sanctions revelations concerning events, but not concerning doctrines.104
Looked at narrowly, the advantage which inspiration has been to religions has not so much depended on what it taught, as on its strength as a psychological motive power. As a general mental phenomenon it does not so much concern knowledge as belief; its province is to teach faith rather than facts. No conviction can equal that which arises from an assertion of God directly to ourselves. The force of the argument lies not in the question whether he did address us, but whether we believe he did. As a stimulus to action, prayer thus rises to a prime power.
Belief is considered by Professor Bain and his school to be the ultimate postulate, the final ground of intellection. It is of the utmost importance, however, – and this Professor Bain fails to do – to distinguish between two kinds of belief. There are men who believe and others who disbelieve the Koran or the Bible; I can accept or reject the historical existence of King Arthur or Napoleon; but, if I understand them, I cannot disbelieve the demonstrations of Euclid, nor the relations of subject and object, nor the formal laws of thought. No sane man, acquainted with the properties of numbers, can believe that twice three are ten, or that a thing can be thought as other than itself. These truths that “we cannot help believing,” I have defined in the first chapter as absolute truths. They do not come to us through testimony and induction, but through a process variously called “immediate perception,” “apprehension,” or “intuition,” a process long known but never satisfactorily explained.