For Are
Not The Laws Of The Mind Also Laws Of Nature?
And can we
explain them any more than we can explain physical laws?
A
psychologist can formulate the mental law of association, but
he can no more explain it than Newton could explain the laws
of attraction and repulsion which pervade the world of
matter. We do not know, we cannot know, what the conditions
of our spiritual being are. The state of mind induced by
prayer may, in accordance with some mental law, be essential
to certain modes of spiritual energy, specially conducive to
the highest of all moral or spiritual results: taken in this
sense, prayer may ask, not the suspension, but the enactment,
of some natural law.
Let it, however, be granted, for argument's sake, that the
belief in the efficacy of prayer is delusive, and that the
beneficial effects of the belief - the exalted state of mind,
the enhanced power to endure suffering and resist temptation,
the happiness inseparable from the assurance that God hears,
and can and will befriend us - let it be granted that all
this is due to sheer hallucination, is this an argument
against prayer? Surely not. For, in the first place, the
incontestable fact that belief does produce these effects is
for us an ultimate fact as little capable of explanation as
any physical law whatever; and may, therefore, for aught we
know, or ever can know, be ordained by a Supreme Being.
Secondly, all the beneficial effects, including happiness,
are as real in themselves as if the belief were no delusion.
It may be said that a 'fool's paradise' is liable to be
turned into a hell of disappointment; and that we pay the
penalty of building happiness on false foundations. This is
true in a great measure; but it is absolutely without truth
as regards our belief in prayer, for the simple reason that
if death dispel the delusion, it at the same time dispels the
deluded. However great the mistake, it can never be found
out. But they who make it will have been the better and the
happier while they lived.
For my part, though immeasurably preferring the pantheism of
Goethe, or of Renan (without his pessimism), to the
anthropomorphic God of the Israelites, or of their theosophic
legatees, the Christians, however inconsistent, I still
believe in prayer. I should not pray that I may not die 'for
want of breath'; nor for rain, while 'the wind was in the
wrong quarter.' My prayers would not be like those
overheard, on his visit to Heaven, by Lucian's Menippus: 'O
Jupiter, let me become a king!' 'O Jupiter, let my onions
and my garlic thrive!' 'O Jupiter, let my father soon depart
from hence!' But when the workings of my moral nature were
concerned, when I needed strength to bear the ills which
could not be averted, or do what conscience said was right,
then I should pray. And, if I had done my best in the same
direction, I should trust in the Unknowable for help.
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