CHAPTER IV.
THE PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER.
The foregoing analysis of the religious sentiment results in finding it, even in its simplest forms, a product of complicated reasoning forced into action by some of the strongest emotions, and maintaining its position indefeasibly through the limitations of the intellect. This it does, however, with a certain nobleness, for while it wraps the unknown in sacred mystery, it proclaims man one in nature with the Highest, by birthright a son of the gods, of an intelligence akin to theirs, and less than they only in degree. Through thus presenting at once his strength and his feebleness, his grandeur and his degradation, religion goes beyond philosophy or utility in suggesting motives for exertion, stimuli to labor. This phase of it will now occupy us.
The Religious Sentiment manifests itself in thought, in word and in act through the respective media of the Prayer, the Myth and the Cult. The first embraces the personal relations of the individual to the object of his worship, the second expresses the opinions current in a community about the nature and actions of that object, the last includes the symbols and ceremonies under and by which it is represented and propitiated.
The first has the logical priority. Man cares nothing for God—can care nothing for him practically—except as an aid to the fulfilment of his desires, the satisfaction of his wants, as the “ground of his hopes.” The root of the religious sentiment, I have said, is “a wish whose fruition depends upon unknown power.” An appeal for aid to this unknown power, is the first form of prayer in its religious sense. It is not merely “the soul’s sincere desire.” This may well be and well directed, and yet not religious, as the devotion of the mathematician to the solution of an important problem. With the desire must be the earnest appeal to the unknown. A theological dictionary I have at hand almost correctly defines it as “a petition for spiritual or physical benefits which [we believe] we cannot obtain without divine co-operation.” The words in brackets must be inserted to complete the definition.
It need not be expressed in language. Rousseau, in his Confessions, tells of a bishop who, in visiting his diocese, came across an old woman who was troubled because she could frame no prayer in words, but only cry, “Oh!” “Good mother,” said the wise bishop, “Pray always so. Your prayers are better than ours.”[119-1]
A petition for assistance is, as I have said, one of its first forms; but not its only one. The assistance asked in simple prayers is often nothing more than the neutrality of the gods, their non-interference; “no preventing Providence,” as the expression is in our popular religion. Prayers of fear are of this kind:
“And they say, God be merciful,
Who ne’er said, God be praised.”
Some of the Egyptian formulæ even threaten the gods if they prevent success.[119-2] The wish accomplished, the prayer may be one of gratitude, often enough of that kind described by La Rochefoucauld, of which a prominent element is “a lively sense of possible favors to come.”[119-3]
Or again, self-abasement being so natural a form of flattery that to call ourselves “obedient and humble servants” of others, has passed into one of the commonest forms of address, many prayers are made up of similar expressions of humility and contrition, the votary calling himself a “miserable sinner” and a “vile worm,” and on the other hand magnifying his Lord as greater than all other gods, mighty and helpful to those who assiduously worship him.