OUR experiences are little worth unless they teach us to reflect. Let us then pause to consider this hourly experience of human beings - this remarkable efficacy of prayer. There can hardly be a contemplative mind to which, with all its difficulties, the inquiry is not familiar.
To begin with, 'To pray is to expect a miracle.' 'Prayer in its very essence,' says a thoughtful writer, 'implies a belief in the possible intervention of a power which is above nature.' How was it in my case? What was the essence of my belief? Nothing less than this: that God would have permitted the laws of nature, ordained by His infinite wisdom to fulfil His omniscient designs and pursue their natural course in accordance with His will, had not my request persuaded Him to suspend those laws in my favour.
The very belief in His omniscience and omnipotence subverts the spirit of such a prayer. It is on the perfection of God that Malebranche bases his argument that 'Dieu n'agit pas par des volontes particulieres.' Yet every prayer affects to interfere with the divine purposes.
It may here be urged that the divine purposes are beyond our comprehension. God's purposes may, in spite of the inconceivability, admit the efficacy of prayer as a link in the chain of causation; or, as Dr. Mozely holds, it may be that 'a miracle is not an anomaly or irregularity, but part of the system of the universe.' We will not entangle ourselves in the abstruse metaphysical problem which such hypotheses involve, but turn for our answer to what we do know - to the history of this world, to the daily life of man. If the sun rises on the evil as well as on the good, if the wicked 'become old, yea, are mighty in power,' still, the lightning, the plague, the falling chimney-pot, smite the good as well as the evil. Even the dumb animal is not spared. 'If,' says Huxley, 'our ears were sharp enough to hear all the cries of pain that are uttered in the earth by man and beasts we should be deafened by one continuous scream.' 'If there are any marks at all of special design in creation,' writes John Stuart Mill, 'one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals. They have been lavishly fitted out with the instruments for that purpose.' Is it credible, then, that the Almighty Being who, as we assume, hears this continuous scream - animal-prayer, as we may call it - and not only pays no heed to it, but lavishly fits out animals with instruments for tormenting and devouring one another, that such a Being should suspend the laws of gravitation and physiology, should perform a miracle equal to that of arresting the sun - for all miracles are equipollent - simply to prolong the brief and useless existence of such a thing as man, of one man out of the myriads who shriek, and - shriek in vain?
To pray is to expect a miracle. Then comes the further question: Is this not to expect what never yet has happened?
The only proof of any miracle is the interpretation the witness or witnesses put upon what they have seen.
(Traditional miracles - miracles that others have been told, that others have seen - we need not trouble our heads about.)
What that proof has been worth hitherto has been commented upon too often to need attention here. Nor does the weakness of the evidence for miracles depend solely on the fact that it rests, in the first instance, on the senses, which may be deceived; or upon inference, which may be erroneous. It is not merely that the infallibility of human testimony discredits the miracles of the past. The impossibility that human knowledge, that science, can ever exhaust the possibilities of Nature, precludes the immediate reference to the Supernatural for all time. It is pure sophistry to argue, as do Canon Row and other defenders of miracles, that 'the laws of Nature are no more violated by the performance of a miracle than they are by the activities of a man.' If these arguments of the special pleaders had any force at all, it would simply amount to this: 'The activities of man' being a part of nature, we have no evidence of a supernatural being, which is the sole RAISON D'ETRE of miracle.
Yet thousands of men in these days who admit the force of these objections continue, in spite of them, to pray.
Huxley, the foremost of 'agnostics,' speaks with the utmost respect of his friend Charles Kingsley's conviction from experience of the efficacy of prayer. And Huxley himself repeatedly assures us, in some form or other, that 'the possibilities of "may be" are to me infinite.' The puzzle is, in truth, on a par with that most insolvable of all puzzles - Free Will or Determinism. Reason and the instinct of conscience are in both cases irreconcilable. We are conscious that we are always free to choose, though not to act; but reason will have it that this is a delusion. There is no logical clue to the IMPASSE. Still, reason notwithstanding, we take our freedom (within limits) for granted, and with like inconsequence we pray.
It must, I think, be admitted that the belief, delusive or warranted, is efficacious in itself. Whether generated in the brain by the nerve centres, or whatever may be its origin, a force coincident with it is diffused throughout the nervous system, which converts the subject of it, just paralysed by despair, into a vigorous agent, or, if you will, automaton.
