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.
Then too, is not gratitude to Heaven the best of prayers?
Unhappy he who has never felt it! Unhappier still, who has
never had cause to feel it!
It may be deemed unwarrantable thus to draw the lines between
what, for want of better terms, we call Material and
Spiritual. Still, reason is but the faculty of a very finite
being; and, as in the enigma of the will, utterly incapable
of solving any problems beyond those whose data are furnished
by the senses. Reason is essentially realistic. Science is
its domain. But science demonstratively proves that things
are not what they seem; their phenomenal existence is nothing
else than their relation to our special intelligence. We
speak and think as if the discoveries of science were
absolutely true, true in themselves, not relatively so for us
only. Yet, beings with senses entirely different from ours
would have an entirely different science. For them, our best
established axioms would be inconceivable, would have no more
meaning than that 'Abracadabra is a second intention.'
Science, supported by reason, assures us that the laws of
nature - the laws of realistic phenomena - are never
suspended at the prayers of man. To this conclusion the
educated world is now rapidly coming. If, nevertheless, men
thoroughly convinced of this still choose to believe in the
efficacy of prayer, reason and science are incompetent to
confute them. The belief must be tried elsewhere, - it must
be transferred to the tribunal of conscience, or to a
metaphysical court, in which reason has no jurisdiction.
This by no means implies that reason, in its own province, is
to yield to the 'feeling' which so many cite as the
infallible authority for their 'convictions.'
We must not be asked to assent to contradictory propositions.
We must not be asked to believe that injustice, cruelty, and
implacable revenge, are not execrable because the Bible tells
us they were habitually manifested by the tribal god of the
Israelites. The fables of man's fall and of the redemption
are fraught with the grossest violation of our moral
conscience, and will, in time, be repudiated accordingly. It
is idle to say, as the Church says, 'these are mysteries
above our human reason.' They are fictions, fabrications
which modern research has traced to their sources, and which
no unperverted mind would entertain for a moment. Fanatical
belief in the truth of such dogmas based upon 'feeling' have
confronted all who have gone through the severe ordeal of
doubt. A couple of centuries ago, those who held them would
have burnt alive those who did not. Now, they have to
console themselves with the comforting thought of the fire
that shall never be quenched. But even Job's patience could
not stand the self-sufficiency of his pious reprovers. The
sceptic too may retort: 'No doubt but ye are the people, and
wisdom shall die with you.'
Conviction of this kind is but the convenient substitute for
knowledge laboriously won, for the patient pursuit of truth
at all costs - a plea in short, for ignorance, indolence,
incapacity, and the rancorous bigotry begotten of them.
The distinction is not a purely sentimental one - not a
belief founded simply on emotion. There is a physical world
- the world as known to our senses, and there is a psychical
world - the world of feeling, consciousness, thought, and
moral life.
Granting, if it pleases you, that material phenomena may be
the causes of mental phenomena, that 'la pensee est le
produit du corps entier,' still the two cannot be thought of
as one. Until it can be proved that 'there is nothing in the
world but matter, force, and necessity,' - which will never
be, till we know how we lift our hands to our mouths, - there
remains for us a world of mystery, which reason never can
invade.
It is a pregnant thought of John Mill's, apropos of material
and mental interdependence or identity, 'that the uniform
coexistence of one fact with another does not make the one
fact a part of the other, or the same with it.'
A few words of Renan's may help to support the argument. 'Ce
qui revele le vrai Dieu, c'est le sentiment moral. Si
l'humanite n'etait qu'intelligente, elle serait athee. Le
devoir, le devouement, le sacrifice, toutes choses dont
l'histoire est pleine, sont inexplicables sans Dieu.' For
all these we need help.
