Arguments for its utility equally good for auricular confession.
Will the individual never be able to do without prayers conceived as a constant communication with God, as a daily confession, a faith in Him and before Him? He will probably not renounce it until he is capable of existing without it. Arguments to prove the practical utility of prayer, conceived as a direct communication with one’s living ideal, would all hold equally good in favour of Catholic confession before the priest as a realization of the moral ideal. Nevertheless, when Protestants suppressed the confession they gave a fresh development to moral austerity: the morality of Protestant peoples, which is defended only by the voice of conscience, is not inferior to that of Catholic peoples.[65] Is it any more necessary for the purpose of ascertaining one’s faults and curing them to kneel before a personified and anthropomorphic God than before a priest beneath the roof of a church? Experience alone can decide, and a number of men seem already successfully to have tried the experiment. The scrutiny of a philosophical conscience has been proved to be sufficient.
Prayer as a subjective relief.
Finally it has been said that prayer, even conceived as destitute of objective effect, nevertheless justifies itself by the comfort it affords; one has attempted to argue in its favour on purely subjective grounds, but prayer runs the risk precisely of losing its power as a consoler the instant one ceases to believe in its objective efficiency. If nobody hears us, who will continue to offer up petitions simply to ease the burden of his own heart? If the orator is uplifted by the sympathy of the assembly which listens to him, does it follow that he will experience the same effect if he deliver his oration in the void with the knowledge that his thought, his word, his emotion, are lost, and spend themselves in space?
Subjective charity the durable element in prayer.
If prayer is really to be its own reward, it must not consist of a demand addressed to some Being exterior to one’s self, it must be a subjective act of love, what Christianity calls an act of charity. Charity is the eternal element in prayer. To ask for something for one’s self is a thing difficult to justify; to ask for something for someone else is at least a beginning of disinterested conduct. “How much longer thy prayers grow, grandmama, day by day!” “The number of those for whom I pray increases day by day.” Over and above this element of charity, prayer contains a certain beauty—a beauty which will not disappear with the disappearance of the superstitions which have clustered about it. The moral beauty of prayer is intimately bound up with certain profound human sentiments: one prays for somebody whom one loves; one prays out of pity or of affection; one prays in despair, in hope, in gratitude; so that the most elevated of human sentiments sometimes ally themselves with prayer and colour it. This tension of one’s whole being at such times finds its way out upon the visage, and transfigures it with the intense expression that certain painters have loved to catch and to perpetuate.[66] What is most beautiful and probably also what is best in prayer is, more than all else, the human and moral element in it. If there is thus an essential charity in genuine prayer, charity of the lips is not enough, that of the heart and hands must be added to it, and that is to say in the last resort action must be substituted for it.
Increasing tendency for such prayer to express itself in action.
Prayer for love and charity tends increasingly to find vent in action: a verification of this fact may be found in history. Formerly, in a moment of distress, a pagan woman would have thought only of appeasing the anger of the Gods by some blood sacrifice, by the murder of some innocent member of the larger mammals; in the Middle Ages she would have made a vow or founded a chapel—things still vain and powerless to alleviate the misery of this world; in our days she would think rather, if she were a person of some elevation of spirit, of giving money in charity, of founding an establishment for the instruction of the poor or the care of the infirm. One sees in that fact the march of progress in religious ideas; the time will come when such actions will no longer be accomplished for a directly interested end but as a sort of exchange with the divinity, a traffic of kindness; they will constitute a recognized part of public worship, the essence of worship will be charity. Pascal asks, somewhere, why God has bestowed prayer upon man, why God has commanded man to pray; and he replies profoundly enough: “To give him the dignity of seeing himself as a cause”; but if he who demands benefits by prayer possessed formerly the dignity of being, in his own right, a cause, how much greater is the dignity of him who by the exercise of his own moral will procures the object of his desire? And if to be the cause of one’s own well-being be thus the essence of prayer, of that which brings man nearest to God, of that which lifts man nearest to His level—may one not say that the most disinterested, the most sacred, the most human, the most divine of prayers is moral conduct? In Pascal’s opinion, it is true, moral conduct presupposes two terms, duty and power, and man cannot always do what he should; but one must break with the antique opposition established by Christianity, between the sentiment of duty and the practical powerlessness of a man shorn of all adventitious aid—shorn of grace. In reality the sentiment of duty is, in and of itself, the first vague consciousness of a power existent in us, of a force which tends to achieve its own realization.[67] Consciousness of his power for good and of the power of the ideal unite in man, for this ideal is no more than the projection, the objectification, of the highest power within, the form that that power takes in reflective intelligence. Every volition is at bottom no more than a capability of some sort in labour, an action in the stage of germination: the will to do good, if it is conscious of its own power, has no need to await the prompting of external grace; it is itself its own grace; by the very fact of its birth it becomes efficacious; by the very fact of wishing, nature creates. Pascal conceived the moral end, which duty places before us, too much after the manner of a physical and external object, that one might be able to look upon but not to attain. “One directs one’s looks on high,” says he, in his “Pensées,” “but one rests upon the sand and the earth will slip from under one, and one shall fall with one’s eyes on heaven.” But might not one respond that the heaven of which Pascal is here speaking, the heaven we carry in our own bosoms, is something quite different from the heaven which we perceive spread out above our heads? Must it not here be said that to see is to touch and to possess; that a sight of the moral end renders possible a progress toward it; that the resting point one finds in the moral will, the most invincible of all the forms of volition, will not give way beneath one, and that one cannot fall, in one’s progress toward goodness and that in this sense to lift one’s eyes toward heaven is already to have set one’s feet on the way thither.
Ultimate claim for prayer.
There remains one more aspect under which prayer may be considered. It may be regarded as a species of spiritual elevation, a communication with the universe or with God.[68] Prayer has in all times been glorified as a means of uplifting the whole being to a plane that it otherwise would have been unable to attain. The best of us, as Amiel said not long since, find complete development and self-knowledge in prayer alone.