‘“You will see me by daylight in the morning. When I start, you will take my mare, my clothes, and some food; make for that place and wait till I come. I will cross there.”
‘“All right.”
‘“Keep me in sight as long as you can. Don’t forget the food.”
‘It will be gathered from my words that definite instructions were deemed necessary; and the inference—at least it was mine—will follow, that if a mistake were possible Samson would avail himself of it. The night was before me. The river had yet to be crossed. But, strange as it now seems to me, I had no misgivings! My heart never failed me. My prayer had been heard. I had been saved. How, I knew not. But this I knew, my trust was complete. I record this as a curious psychological occurrence; for it supported me with unfailing energy through the severe trial which I had yet to undergo.’
CHAPTER XXVI
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.