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.