It follows then that there is prayer wherever there is service, service of any kind that makes for life-betterment. The chemist
who learns a new control has received an answer to his year-long prayer; the physician who finds the saving serum has prayed long and fervently and has been heard of his God. The business man who finds a way of juster coöperation with his men need never have named the word God or joined in holy adoration. But he has prayed—to his ideal of human brotherhood; and has prayed so vigorously that his God has heard and answered.
But in each case the God that has heard and answered has been the deeper possibilities of these men’s own life—their ideal life—which they, by their loyal devotion, have wrought out of mere possibility into some manner of actuality.
II
This in part is what prayer must mean when the old devotion to the personal God has vanished. The last shred of its supernatural, semi-magical connotation will have disappeared. If things worth while are to be done; if life values are to be accomplished and preserved, it must be by a knowledge and control of the conditions of their accomplishment. The devotion to the ideal in us presupposes therefore the most strenuous and persistent effort to learn these modes of control, to understand the deep and intricate ways of life, and to bend every power—of mind and body, of science and art—to bring life into harmony with their fundamental demands.
The situation may be illustrated by the contrast between the older and the newer ways of offering thanks to God for great benefits received. In the older days a man would pray, “O God, if thou wilt save the life of my child, there shall be so many candles burning before thine altar”; or “There shall be a new chapel added to thy house of prayer.” The burning candles and the new chapel may have served human purposes,—certainly the candle-makers had their small benefit of it; but the essential thought was not service to mankind, but tribute to God. When, however, the personal God has vanished and there is no divine life but our own deeper and more ideal existence, how shall a man give thanks for deliverance? Any man who has helped
wife and nurse and doctors to fight with all the power that human knowledge and skill can command for the life of his child, knows that out of the deep thanksgiving of his heart the thing that he would most wish to do thereafter would be to bend every effort to make such saving knowledge and skill accessible to fathers and mothers of other children, or to extend that knowledge and develop that skill to the saving of lives from still deeper distresses. He will build a hospital or endow a chair in medical research, or he will send his small contribution to some agency that makes for the amelioration of life conditions. And he will do this not as a tribute to a God who delights in adoration, but in simple devotion to the ideal of a more adequate human life.
Or, indeed, he might found a church or endow a minister. For are we to suppose that church and minister are to disappear when God the Perfect Person no longer lives to hear the old supplications? But it will be a very different church from the churches with which we are familiar. The church of to-day still lingers in its animistic and magical memories. The church services are supposed to have vital efficacy for the saving of men’s souls, not simply in the ordinary way of stimulating them by precept and example to better living, but by performing for them and with them certain rites pleasing to God. There is still in the minds of most churchmen something efficacious about the very attendance upon divine worship. It is an act which God enjoins and which he rewards when it is faithfully performed. It is like the pagan custom of bringing gifts to the altar: the god demands the gifts and rewards the bringer of gifts for his lowly obedience. It is true that the more enlightened churches are rapidly outgrowing this belief in the ceremonial efficacy of church service; but it would not be difficult to show that it still persists in so great measure as very definitely to color the word “religious” with the meaning “that which pertains to divine ceremonial.” The sharp line of demarcation between “religious” and “secular” is but the expression of this animistic and supernatural survival in religion.
But even churches that have largely outgrown belief in the saving efficacy of supernatural ceremonial, who believe that attendance
upon church service is wholly for the sake of inspiration to better living, seek to secure that inspiration by pointing the worshipper to the perfect God, or to his beloved Son. One may doubtless get inspiration from the tireless work of a Burbank, or a Curie, or a Florence Nightingale. If the church, however, uses such sources of inspiration, it is only by the way. Its fundamental source is the Perfect Person, the Eternal God. The church has the special function of calling men from their secular activities, of pointing upward to that great Guide and Friend and Provider in whose name and through whose power they are to live.