WE come now to the human search for a divine fellowship and companionship. Its complete history would be the whole story of religion. In this little book I shall speak only of certain definite human ways of seeking fellowship with God, namely, of prayer.

Prayer is an extraordinary act. The eyes close, the face lights up, the body is moved with feeling, and (it may be in the presence of a multitude) the person praying talks in perfect confidence with somebody, invisible and intangible, and who articulates no single word of response. It is astonishing. And yet it is a human custom as old as marriage, as ancient as grave-making, older than any city on the globe. There is no human activity which so stubbornly resists being reduced to a bread and butter basis. Men have tried to explain the origin of prayer by the straits of physical hunger, but it will no more fit into utilitarian systems than joy over beauty will. It is an elemental and unique attitude of the soul and it will not be “explained” until we fathom the origin of the soul itself!

But is not the advance of science making prayer impossible? In unscientific ages the universe presented no rigid order. It was easy to believe that the ordinary course of material processes might be altered or reversed. The world was conceived as full of invisible beings who could affect the course of events at will, while above all, there was a Being who might interfere with things at any moment, in any way.

Our world to-day is not so conceived. Our universe is organized and linked. Every event is caused. Caprice is banished. There is no such thing in the physical world as an uncaused event. If we met a person who told us that he had seen a train of cars drawn along with no couplings and held together by the mutual affection of the passengers in the different cars we should know that he was an escaped lunatic and we should go on pinning our faith to couplings as before. Even the weather is no more capricious than the course of a planet in space. Every change of wind and the course of every flying cloud is determined by previous conditions. Complex these combinations of circumstances certainly are, but if the weather man could get data enough he could foretell the storm, the rain, the drought exactly as well as the astronomer can foretell the eclipse. There is no little demon, there is no tall, bright angel, who holds back the shower or who pushes the cloud before him; no being, good or bad, who will capriciously alter the march of molecules because it suits our fancy to ask that the chain of causes be interrupted. What is true of the weather is true in every physical realm. Our universe has no caprice in it. Every thing is linked, and the forked lightning never consults our preferences, nor do cyclones travel exclusively where bad men live. As of old the rain falls on just and unjust alike, on saint and sinner. The knowledge of this iron situation has had a desolating effect upon many minds. The heavens have become as brass and the earth bars of iron. To ask for the interruption of the march of atoms seems to the scientific thinker the absurdest of delusions and all fanes of prayer appear fruitless. Others resort to the faith that there are “gaps” in the causal system and that in these unorganized regions—the domains so far unexplored—there are realms for miracle and divine wonder. The supernatural, on this theory is to be found out beyond the region of the “natural,” and forcing itself through the “gaps.” Those of this faith are filled with dread as they see the so called “gaps” closing, somewhat as the pious Greek dreaded to see Olympus climbed.

There are still others who evade the difficulty by holding that God has made the universe, is the Author of its “laws,” is Omnipotent and therefore can change them at Will, or can admit exceptions in their operation. This view is well illustrated in the faith of George MÜller, who writes: “When I lose such a thing as a key, I ask the Lord to direct me to it, and I look for an answer; when a person with whom I have made an appointment does not come, according to the fixed time, and I begin to be inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased to hasten him to me, and I look for an answer; when I do not understand a passage of the word of God, I lift up my heart to the Lord that He would be pleased by His Holy Spirit to instruct me, and I expect to be taught.”

This view takes us back once more into a world of caprice. It introduces a world in which almost anything may happen. We can no longer calculate upon anything with assurance. Even our speed, as we walk, is regulated by the capricious wish of our friends. But that is not all, it is a low, crude view of God—a Being off above the world who makes “laws” like a modern legislator and again changes them to meet a new situation, who is after all only a bigger man in the sky busily moving and shifting the scenes of the time-drama as requests reach him.

None of these positions is tenable. The first is not, for prayer is a necessity to full life, and the other two are not, because they do not fairly face the facts which are forced upon those who accept scientific methods of search and of thought. This physical universe is a stubborn affair. It is not loose and adjustable, and worked, for our private convenience, by wires or strings at a central station. It is a world of order, a realm of discipline. It is our business to discover a possible line of march in the world as it is, to find how to triumph over obstacles and difficulty, if we meet them—not to resort to “shun pikes” or cries for “exception in our particular case.”

The real difficulty is that our generation has been conceiving of prayer on too low a plane. Faith is not endangered by the advance of science. It is endangered by the stagnation of religious conceptions. If religion halts at some primitive level and science marches on to new conquests of course there will be difficulty. But let us not fetter science, let us rather promote religion. We need to rise to a truer view of God and to a loftier idea of prayer. It is another case of “leveling up.” On the higher religious plane no collision between prayer and science will be found. There will be no sealing of the lips in the presence of the discovery that all is law.

The prayer which science has affected is the spurious kind of prayer, which can be reduced to a utilitarian, “bread and butter,” basis. Most enlightened persons now are shocked to hear “patriotic” ministers asking God to direct the bullets of their country’s army so as to kill their enemies in battle, and we all hesitate to use prayer for the attainment of low, selfish ends, but we need to cleanse our sight still farther and rise above the conception of prayer as an easy means to a desired end.

It is a fact that there are valid prayer effects and there is plenty of experimental evidence to prove the energy of prayer. It is literally true that “more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.” There are no assignable bounds to the effects upon mind and body of the prayer of living faith. Some of those particular cases of George MÜller’s are quite within the range of experience. The prayer for the lost key may well produce a heightened energy of consciousness which pushes open a door into a deeper stratum of memory, and the man rises from his knees and goes to the spot where the key was put. So too with the passage of Scripture. No doubt many a man has come back from his closet where the turmoil of life was hushed and where all the inward currents set toward God, many of us I say, come back with a new energy and with cleared vision and we can grasp what before eluded us, we can see farther into the spiritual meaning of any of God’s revelations. There is perhaps never a sweep of the soul out into the wider regions of the spiritual world which does not heighten the powers of the person who experiences it. Profound changes in physical condition, almost as profound as the stigmata of St. Francis, have in our own times followed the prayer of faith and many of us in our daily problems and perplexities have seen the light break through, as we prayed, and shine out, like a search light, on some plain path of duty or of service. There is unmistakable evidence of incoming energy from beyond the margin of what we usually call “ourselves.”

We have not to do with a God who is “off there” above the sky, who can deal with us only through “the violation of physical law.” We have instead a God “in whom we live and move and are,” whose Being opens into ours, and ours into His, who is the very Life of our lives, the matrix of our personality; and there is no separation between us unless we make it ourselves. No man, scientist or layman, knows where the curve is to be drawn about the personal “self.” No man can say with authority that the circulation of Divine currents into the soul’s inward life is impossible. On the contrary, Energy does come in. In our highest moments we find ourselves in contact with wider spiritual Life than belongs to our normal me.

But true prayer is something higher. It is immediate spiritual fellowship. Even if science could demonstrate that prayer could never effect any kind of utilitarian results, still prayer on its loftier side would remain untouched, and persons of spiritual reach would go on praying as before. If we could say nothing more we could at least affirm that prayer, like faith, is itself the victory. The seeking is the finding. The wrestling is the blessing. It is no more a means to something else than love is. It is an end in itself. It is its own excuse for being. It is a kind of first fruit of the mystical nature of personality. The edge of the self is always touching a circle of life beyond itself to which it responds. The human heart is sensitive to God as the retina is to light waves. The soul possesses a native yearning for intercourse and companionship which takes it to God as naturally as the home instinct of the pigeon takes it to the place of its birth. There is in every normal soul a spontaneous outreach, a free play of spirit which gives it onward yearning of unstilled desire.

It is no mere subjective instinct—no blind outreach. If it met no response, no answer, it would soon be weeded out of the race. It would shrivel like the functionless organ. We could not long continue to pray in faith if we lost the assurance that there is a Person who cares, and who actually corresponds with us. Prayer has stood the test of experience. In fact the very desire to pray is in itself prophetic of a heavenly Friend. A subjective need always carries an implication of an objective stimulus which has provoked the need. There is no hunger, as Fiske has well shown, for anything not tasted, there is no search for anything which is not in the environment, for the environment has always produced the appetite. So this native need of the soul rose out of the divine origin of the soul, and it has steadily verified itself as a safe guide to reality.

What is at first a vague life-activity and spontaneous outreach of inward energy—a feeling after companionship—remains in many persons vague to the end. But in others it frequently rises to a definite consciousness of a personal Presence and there comes back into the soul a compelling evidence of a real Other Self who meets all the Soul’s need. For such persons prayer is the way to fullness of life. It is as natural as breathing. It is as normal an operation as appreciation of beauty, or the pursuit of truth. The soul is made that way, and as long as men are made with mystical deeps within, unsatisfied with the finite and incomplete, they will pray and be refreshed.

Vague and formless, in some degree, communion would always be, I think, apart from the personal manifestation of God in Jesus Christ. As soon as God is known as Father, as soon as we turn to Him as identical in being with our own humanity, as suffering with us and loving us even in our imperfection, this communion grows defined and becomes actual social fellowship which is prayer at its best. Paul’s great prayers of fellowship rise to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God whom we know, because He has been humanly revealed in a way that fits our life. We turn to Him as the completeness and reality of all we want to be, the other Self whom we have always sought. The vague impulse to reach beyond our isolated and solitary self gives place to an actual experience of relationship with a personal Friend and Companion and this experience may become, and often does become, the loftiest and most joyous activity of life. The soul is never at its best until it enjoys God, and prays out of sheer love. Nobody who has learned to pray in this deeper way and whose prayer is a prayer of communion and fellowship, wants logical argument for the existence of God. Such a want implies a fall from a higher to a lower level. It is like a demand for a proof of the beauty one feels, or an evidence of love other than the evidence of its experience.

Prayer will always rise or fall with the quality of one’s faith, like the mercury in the tube which feels at once the change of pressure in the atmosphere. It is only out of live faith that a living prayer springs. When a man’s praying sinks into words, words, words, it means that he is trying to get along with a dead conception of God. The circuit no longer closes. He cannot heighten his prayer by raising his voice. What he needs is a new revelation of the reality of God. He needs to have the fresh sap of living faith in God push off the dead leaves of an outgrown belief, so that once more prayer shall break forth as naturally as buds in spring.

The conception of God as a lonely Sovereign, complete in Himself and infinitely separated from us “poor worms of the dust,” grasshoppers chirping our brief hour in the sun, is in the main a dead notion. Prayer to such a God would not be easy with our modern ideas of the universe. It would be as difficult to believe in its efficiency as it would be to believe in the miracle of transubstantiation in bread and wine. But that whole conception is being supplanted by a live faith in an Infinite Person who is corporate with our lives, from whom we have sprung, in whom we live, as far as we spiritually do live, who needs us as we need him, and who is sharing with us the travail and the tragedy as well as the glory and the joy of bringing forth sons of God.

In such a kingdom—an organic fellowship of interrelated persons—prayer is as normal an activity as gravitation is in a world of matter. Personal spirits experience spiritual gravitation, soul reaches after soul, hearts draw toward each other. We are no longer in the net of blind fate, in the realm of impersonal force, we are in a love-system where the aspiration of one member heightens the entire group, and the need of one—even the least—draws upon the resources of the whole—even the Infinite. We are in actual Divine-human fellowship.

The only obstacle to effectual praying, in this world of spiritual fellowship, would be individual selfishness. To want to get just for one’s own self, to ask for something which brings loss and injury to others, would be to sever one’s self from the source of blessings, and to lose not only the thing sought but to lose, as well, one’s very self.

This principle is true anywhere, even in ordinary human friendship. It is true too, in art and in music. The artist may not force some personal caprice into his creation. He must make himself the organ of a universal reality which is beautiful not simply for this man or that, but for man as man. If there is, as I believe, an inner kingdom of spirit, a kingdom of love and fellowship, then it is a fact that a tiny being like one of us can impress and influence the Divine Heart, and we can make our personal contribution to the Will of the universe, but we can do it only by wanting what everybody can share and by seeking blessings which have a universal implication.

So far as prayer is real fellowship, it gives as well as receives. The person who wants to receive God must first bring himself. If He misses us, we miss Him. He is Spirit, and consequently He is found only through true and genuine spiritual activity. In this correspondence of fellowship there is no more “violation of natural law” than there is in love wherever it appears. Love is itself the principle of the spiritual universe, as gravitation is of the physical; and as in the gravitate system the earth rises to meet the ball of the child, without breaking any law, so God comes to meet and to heighten the life of anyone who stretches up toward Him in appreciation, and there is joy above as well as below.

All that I have said, and much more, gets vivid illustration in the “Lord’s prayer,” which Christians have taken as a model form, though they have not always penetrated its spirit. It is in every line a prayer of fellowship and co-operation. It is a perfect illustration of the social nature of prayer. The co-operation and fellowship are not here confined, and they never are except in the lower stages, to the inward communion of an individual and his God. There is no I or me or mine in the whole prayer. The person who prays spiritually is enmeshed in a living group and the reality of his vital union with persons like himself clarifies his vision of that deeper Reality to whom he prays. Divine Fatherhood and human brotherhood are born together. To say Father to God involves saying “brother” to one’s fellows, and the ground swell of either relationship naturally carries the other with it, for no one can largely realize the significance of brotherly love without going to Him in whom love is completed.

“Hallowed be thy name” is often taken in a very feeble sense to mean “keep us from using thy name in vain,” or it is thought of as synonymous with the easy and meaningless platitude, “Let thy name be holy.” It is in reality a heart-cry for a full appreciation of the meaning of the Divine name, i. e., the Divine character. It is an uprising of the soul to an apprehension of the holiness of God and the fullness of His life that the soul may return to its tasks with a sense of infinite resources and under the sway of a vision of the true ideal. This Lord’s prayer begins with a word of intimate relationship and social union—“Our Father.” It then goes out beyond the familiar boundaries of experience to feel the infinite sweep of God’s completeness and perfectness and to become penetrated with solemn awe and reverence which fit such companionship,—“Our Father of the holy name.”

This is the prelude. The true melody of prayer, if I may say so, begins with the positive facing of the task of life:—“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Here again we have the loftiest Fellowship. The person who prays this way is linked with God in one mighty spiritual whole. The last vestige of atomic selfishness is washed out. There are those who say these words of prayer with folded hands and closed eyes, and then expect the desired kingdom to come by miracle; they suppose that if the request is made often enough a millennium age will drop out of the skies. Ah, no! If God is Spirit and man is meant to be spiritual, such a millennium is a sheer impossibility. This prayer involves the most strenuous life that ever was lived. To pray seriously for the coming of the kingdom of heaven means to contribute to its coming. It has come in any life which is completely under the sway of the holy Will and which is consecrated to the task of making that holy Will prevail in society. It is no “far off Divine event.” It is always coming.

In a plain word, it is the total task of humanity through the ages. It is the embodiment in a temporal order of the eternal purpose. It is the weaving in concrete figure and color of the Divine pattern. It is the slow and somewhat painful work of making an actual Divine society out of this rather stubborn and unpromising potential material. But it is our main business, and this prayer is the girding of the loins for the sublime task of helping God make His world.

Fellow laborers with God in truth we are. Prayer ends in labor and labor ends in prayer. But it is not a cry for miracle. It is an inward effort at co-operation.

There is a beautiful mingling of the great and the little, the cosmic and the personal. The universal sweep of Divine ends does not swallow up, or miss, the needs of the concrete individual. While the spiritual universe is building, men must have daily bread and they must constantly face the actual present with its routine and monotony. Here again prayer is no miraculous method of turning stones into bread. It is no easy substitute for toil. It is the joyous insight that in the avenues of daily toil, God and man are co-operating and that in very truth the bread for the day is as much God given as it is won by the sweat of brow. The recently discovered “saying of Jesus” best interprets this prayer. “Wherever any man raises a stone or splits wood, there am I.” He consecrates honest toil.

Next we come to the profound word which shows how completely our lives are bound together in organic union, above and below: “Forgive us as we forgive.” What a solemn thing to say. Dare we pray it! And yet few words have ever so truly revealed the nature of prayer. It is, one sees, no easy, lazy way to blessings. Once more, it is co-operation. Forgiveness is not a gift which can fall upon us from the skies, in return for a capricious request. The blessing depends on us as much as it does on God. A cold, hard, unforgiving heart can no more be forgiven than a lazy, slipshod student can have knowledge given to him. Like all spiritual things, forgiveness can come only when there is a person who appreciates its worth and meaning. The deep cry for forgiveness must rise out of a forgiving spirit. It is always more than a transaction, an event. It is an inward condition of the personal life, and the soul that feels what it means to love and forgive is so bound into the whole divine order that love and forgiveness come in as naturally as light goes through the open casement, or the tide into an inlet.

The next word is surely to be thought of as a human cry: “Take us not into testing.” It is the natural shrinking of the tender, sensitive soul, and it is the right attitude. Most of us know by hard experience that trial, proving, testing, yes, even actual temptation, have a marvelous ministry. No saint is made in the level plain, where the waters are still and the pastures green.

All this we know. We know that the stem battle makes the veteran. But this prayer is the childlike cry, the shrinking fear, which are always safer than the bold dash, the impetuous plunge. It is the utterance of an instinctive wish to keep where safety lies, and, humanly speaking, it is right, though, in a world whose highest fruit is character, we may expect that bitter cups and hard baptisms will be a part of our experience. Like all that has gone before, it is an effort at co-operation. It is a sincere aspiration for green pastures and still waters joined with a readiness to be fed at the table in presence of the enemy, if need be, readiness for the perilous edge of conflict, for “high strife and glorious hazard.”

Last of all there rises the cry for deliverance from the power of evil. Once more we realize that this is not an occasion for magical interference, no call for a fiery dart out of the sky to pierce a black demon who is pushing us into sin. The drama is an inward one and the enemy, called of many names, is a part of our own self. Each soul has its own struggle with the immemorial tug of brute inheritance—the sag of lower nature.

But here supremely appears our principle of co-operation. Prayer for deliverance from evil cannot end on the lips. There is no conquest of the flesh, no killing out of ape and tiger, until we ourselves catch at God’s skirts and rise to live for the Spirit and by the Spirit. There is no deliverance till the soul says, “I will be free” and God and man tug on the same side. Wherever any citadel of evil is battered God and man are there together. God finds a human organ and man draws on the inexhaustible resources of God.

Prayer, whether it be the lisp of a little child, or the wrestling of some great soul in desperate contest with the coils of habit or the evil customs of his generation is a testimony to a divine-human fellowship. In hours of crisis the soul feels for its Companion, by a natural gravitation, as the brook feels for the ocean. In times of joy and strength, it reaches out to its source of Life, as the plant does to the sun. And when it has learned the language of spiritual communion and knows its Father, praying refreshes it as the greeting of a friend refreshes one in a foreign land. We ought not to expect that prayer, of the true and lofty sort, could be attained by easy steps. It involves appreciation of God and co-operation with Him. One comes not to it in a day. Even human friendship is a great attainment. It calls for sacrifice of private wishes and for adjustment to the purposes of another life. One cannot be an artist or a musician without patient labor to make oneself an organ of the reality which he fain would express. He must bring himself by slow stages to a height of appreciation. Prayer is the highest human function. It is the utterance of an infinite friendship, the expression of our appreciation of that complete and perfect Person whom our soul has found. “Lord, teach us how to pray.”

The United States a Christian Nation.

BY
HON. DAVID J. BREWER,
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court United States.

Haverford College Library Lectures, 1905.

In this book the Distinguished Christian Jurist has discussed three important topics:

First. “THE UNITED STATES A CHRISTIAN NATION,” in which he shows why our Republic should be so classified, basing his argument upon the Decisions of the Supreme Court, Colonial Charters, Constitution of the United States, and National and State Legislation.

Second. “OUR DUTY AS CITIZENS.” A strong plea for Business Honesty and Integrity, for Liberty and the Rights of Man, for Education, for Peace and Temperance.

Third. “THE PROMISE AND POSSIBILITIES OF THE FUTURE.” An earnest and eloquent exhortation to the young men of America to temper their devotion to country with fidelity to the teachings of the Gospel.

Issued October 1, 1905.

12mo. 100 pp. Price, postpaid, $1.00.

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SOCIAL LAW IN THE
SPIRITUAL WORLD

Studies In Human and Divine Inter-Relationship

BY
Rufus M. Jones, A.M., Litt. D.
Professor of Philosophy in Haverford College, Pa.

This is a fresh interpretation of the deepest problems of life. It discusses the most interesting phases of recent psychological investigation into spiritual subjects.

“Professor Jones offers here a series of studies on the nature and meaning of Personality. He is at home in modern psychology and tells it effectively for his purpose in freedom from technicalities.”—The Outlook.

“The author has written the twelve chapters of this book dealing with such subjects as The Meaning of Personality, The Realization of Persons, The Sub-Conscious Life, The Inner Light, etc., etc., with an aim to show through Psychology, as Drummond showed through Biology, that life can be unified from top to bottom.”—Christian Work and the Evangelist.

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A History
OF
The Society of Friends
in America

BY
ALLEN C. THOMAS, A.M.
HAVERFORD COLLEGE
AND
RICHARD H. THOMAS, M.D.
BALTIMORE, MD.

NEW AND REVISED EDITION, 1905

Brought down to date and including valuable statistics and information in regard to the Society of Friends in America.

“A work on ‘The History of the Society of Friends in America,’ which is likely for many days to be a standard text-book on the subject.”—The London Friend.

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