Tracks of a Rolling Stone

by Henry J. Coke

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.