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.
Now, those who admit this much argue, with no little force,
that the efficacy of prayer is limited to its reaction upon
ourselves. Prayer, as already observed, implies belief in
supernatural intervention. Such belief is competent to beget
hope, and with it courage, energy, and effort. Suppose
contrition and remorse induce the sufferer to pray for Divine
aid and mercy, suppose suffering is the natural penalty of
his or her own misdeeds, and suppose the contrition and the
prayer lead to resistance of similar temptations, and hence
to greater happiness, - can it be said that the power to
resist temptation or endure the penalty are due to
supernatural aid? Or must we not infer that the fear of the
consequences of vice or folly, together with an earnest
desire and intention to amend, were adequate in themselves to
account for the good results?
Reason compels us to the latter conclusion. But what then?
Would this prove prayer to be delusive? Not necessarily.
That the laws of Nature (as argued above) are not violated by
miracle, is a mere perversion of the accepted meaning of
'miracle,' an IGNORATIO ELENCHI. But in the case of prayer
that does not ask for the abrogation of Nature's laws, it
ceases to be a miracle that we pray for or expect: 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.
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