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 volontÉs particuliÈres.’ 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’Être 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. 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.

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 pensÉe 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 rÉvÈle le vrai Dieu, c’est le sentiment moral. Si l’humanitÉ n’Était qu’intelligente, elle serait athÉe. Le devoir, le dÉvouement, le sacrifice, toutes choses dont l’histoire est pleine, sont inexplicables sans Dieu.’ For all these we need help. Is it foolishness to pray for it? Perhaps so. Yet, perhaps not; for ‘Tout est possible, mÊme Dieu.’

Whether possible, or impossible, this much is absolutely certain: man must and will have a religion as long as this world lasts. Let us not fear truth. Criticism will change men’s dogmas, but it will not change man’s nature.