The facts or fancies cited by Mr. Galton in proof that praying is of no use are the following: 1. 'Sick people who pray or are prayed for do not on the average recover more rapidly than others.' 2. Although 'the public prayer for the sovereign of every state, Protestant or Catholic, is and has been in the spirit of our own—"Grant her in health long to live"—sovereigns are literally the shortest-lived of all persons who have the advantage of affluence.' 3. The 'clergy are a far more prayerful class' than either lawyers or medical men, it being 'their profession to pray,' and 'their practice that of offering morning and evening family prayers in addition to their private devotions,' yet 'we do not find that the clergy are in any way more long-lived in consequence;' rather, there is room for believing their class to be the 'shortest-lived of the three.' Nay, even missionaries, eminently prayerful as they are themselves, and prayed for as they are with especial earnestness by others, 'are not supernaturally endowed with health,' and 'do not live longer than other people.' 4. 'The proportion of deaths at the time of birth is identical among the children of the praying and the non-praying classes.' 5. Though 'we pray in our Liturgy that "the nobility may be endowed with grace, wisdom, and understanding,"' our 'nobility are peculiarly subject to insanity;' as are likewise, indeed, 'very religious people of all denominations,' 'religious madness being very common indeed.' 6. So far from 'religious influences' appearing to have 'clustered in any remarkable degree round the youth of those who, whether by their talents or their social position, have left a mark upon English history,' 'remarkable devotional tendencies' have been conspicuous chiefly by their absence from 'the lives either of our Lord Chancellors or of the leaders of our great political parties;' while, out of our twenty-three extant dukes, four at least, if not five, are descended from mistresses of Charles II., not a single one of them, on the other hand, being known to Mr. Galton to be of 'eminently prayerful qualities.' 7. In respect of those 'institutions, societies, commercial adventures, political meetings and combinations of all sorts' with which England so much abounds, and of which 'some are exclusively clerical, some lay, and others mixed,' Mr. Galton 'for his own part never heard a favourable opinion of the value of the preponderating clerical element in their business committees.' 'The procedure of Convocation which, like all exclusively clerical meetings, is opened with prayer, has not inspired the outer world with much respect.' Nay, 'it is a common week-day opinion of the world that praying people are not practical.' 8. In those numerous instances in which an enterprise is executed by the agency of the profane on behalf not of the profane themselves but of pious clients, 'the enterprises are not observed to prosper beyond the average.' Underwriters recognise no difference in the risks run by missionary ships and by ordinary traders, nor do life insurance companies, before they accept a life, introduce into their 'confidential enquiries into the antecedents of the applicant' any 'such question as "Does he habitually use family prayers and private devotions?"' Neither are the funds of devout shareholders and depositors at all safer than those of the profane when entrusted to the custody of untrustworthy directors, not even though the day's work of the undertaking commence, as that of the disastrous Royal British Bank used to do, with solemn prayer.[52]
Two or three minutes' attention to the grounds for, and the circumstances connected with, these statements, may assist us in appreciating Mr. Galton's notion of the difference between confusedly recollected experiences and experiences properly scrutinised and methodically selected.
For the statement first on the list, some negative evidence is considered to be afforded by the absence of any 'single instance in which papers read before Statistical Societies have recognised the agency of prayer either in disease or in anything else.' The chief authority for it, however, is the eloquent silence of medical men 'who, had prayers for the sick any notable effect, would be sure to have observed it,' seeing that they are 'always on the watch for such things.' But are they really, in every case of recovery from illness that comes under their notice, so particular and so successful in their enquiries whether any, and, if so, how much, prayer has been offered on behalf of the patient, as to be qualified to judge whether prayer has had anything to do with the cure? If not, although they may be showing their discretion by not speaking on the point, the 'eloquence of their silence' must not be too hastily interpreted. For doctors, of all men, should be the last to deny, as an abstract proposition, the efficacy of prayer in disease, knowing, as they do, how great is the curative influence of prayer when addressed to themselves. How, they may naturally ask, is it to be expected that sickness should be cured unless properly treated? and how can it be properly treated without a doctor? and how can a doctor be expected to attend unless he be asked? Upon which very natural queries others naturally follow. What would be the good of the doctor's coming unless he prescribed judiciously? and will he not more certainly prescribe judiciously if his judgment be guided by special interposition of divine grace? and if prayer to himself has plainly been one condition of his coming, why may not prayer to God have been one condition of his judgment having been rightly guided? Will it be pretended that God's proceedings are abjectly submissive to inexorable laws from which those of the doctor are exempt, and that though the latter would certainly not have attended unless he had been asked, the grace of God, if given at all, must have been given equally whether asked for or not?
Statements 2 and 3 are founded on a memoir by Dr. Guy, purporting to show the 'Mean Age attained by males of various classes who had survived their 30th year from 1758 to 1843,' and whose deaths were not caused by violence or accident. According to this table, the average age of 97 members of royal houses was only 64·04, while that of 1,179 members of the English aristocracy was 67·31, and that of 1,632 gentlemen commoners 70·22; the proportion between the total number of royal, and that of noble and gentle, personages who died within the period specified, being apparently supposed to be as 97 to 2811, or as 1 to about 29. Except upon this supposition, Mr. Galton could not with any consistency have appealed to these figures, for he had previously announced his intention to be 'guided solely by broad averages and not to deal with isolated instances.' He seems, however, to forget this judicious rule when he comes to treat of the clergy, of whom 945 are compared in the table with 294 lawyers and 244 medical men. Here, he says, 'the clergy as a whole show a life value of 69·49 against 68·14 for lawyers, and 67·31 for medical men;' but then, he adds 'this difference is reversed' when the comparison is made between members of the three classes sufficiently distinguished to have had their lives recorded in Chalmers' Biographical Dictionary or the Annual Register, the value of life among clergy, lawyers, and medical men then appearing as 66·42, 66·51 and 67·34 respectively. Whether, of the distinguished professional men concerned in this second comparison, the parsons were distinguished for their prayerfulness and the lawyers and doctors for their prayerlessness, Mr. Galton omits to state; and still more serious omissions on his part are those of not mentioning in what part of our Liturgy we are accustomed to pray that it may be granted to the Queen, not simply long to live, but also to live longer than other people; likewise in which of 'the numerous published collections of family prayers' that have undergone his scrutiny, is to be found a petition that parsons may live longer than lawyers or doctors; and, yet again, since an average, falling short of threescore years and ten by little more than three and a half, is so contemptuously rejected by him, what is the precise number of years that would be accepted by him as a liberal compliance with prayer for long life?
While deducing his argument from clergymen, Mr. Galton makes repeated and particular reference to the clerical sub-genus, missionaries, treating it as the more remarkable that these should not enjoy comparative immunity from disease, because, as he suggests, it would have been so easy for God to have made them a favoured class in respect of health: to wit, by the notable expedient of dissuading them from exposing themselves to any of the risks peculiarly attendant on missionary enterprise. 'Tropical fever, for example, is due to many subtle causes which are partly under man's control. A single hour's exposure to sun, or wet, or fatigue, or mental agitation will determine an attack.' What more simple than for God so to 'act on the minds of the missionaries as to disincline them to take those courses which might result in mischance, such as the forced march, the wetting, the abstinence from food, or the night exposure?' What more simple, either, it may be added, than for God to save prayerful soldiers from ever being killed in battle by merely putting it into their minds to desert whenever they are ordered upon active service?
That 'the distribution of still-births is wholly unaffected by piety' Mr. Galton has satisfied himself by finding, 'on examination of a particular period, that the proportion of such births published in the 'Record' newspaper and in the 'Times' bore an identical relation to the total number of deaths.' He had previously, we must suppose, satisfied himself that advertisers in the 'Times' never say their prayers.
For the asserted commonness of religious madness Mr. Galton cites no evidence whatever, and, to judge from the sympathies and antipathies of which one of his avowed opinions may be supposed to be the subject and the object, speaks probably on this point solely from hearsay. Very possibly, however, his assurance of the extraordinary prevalence of insanity among British noblemen may be based on personal observation, as, of course, is that regarding the prayerlessness of his own ducal acquaintances. Birds of a feather, proverbially, flock together, and the same touch of irreligion may quite possibly suffice to make certain dukes and certain commoners kin.
Against the inefficiency, however notorious, of the clerical element in business committees, ought in fairness to be set the equally notorious efficiency of Jesuits in whatever they undertake, the signal statecraft displayed by the Wolseys, the Richelieus, and the Ximenes's of the days in which cardinals and archbishops were permitted to take a leading part in executive politics, and the very respectable figure still presented by the lords spiritual, beside the lords temporal of the British House of Peers. As for 'the common week-day opinion that praying people are not practical,' those by whom it is entertained, of course, mentally except praying Quakers.
The fact that insurance offices do not attempt to distinguish between the prayerful and the prayerless, but, treating both classes as liable to the same risks, exact from both the same premiums, proves, I submit, nothing against the efficacy of prayer, not even that the managers of insurance offices do not believe in it. The statement that prayerful and prayerless, when placing their money in the same dishonest keeping, or engaging in the same bad speculations, suffer losses, bearing exactly the same proportion to their respective ventures, although most probably quite true, is also one which Mr. Galton has neglected to verify by the application to it of any test, scientific or other. Finally, if the disasters of the Royal British Bank are to be ascribed to its custom of opening business with prayer, not only ought the cackle of Convocation to be attributed to a similar cause, but also all the legislative botchery of the House of Commons, and the abolition of prayer before debate should be treated as the most urgently needed of those further parliamentary reforms with which the fertile brains of certain eminent statesmen are suspected to be teeming.
Thus much by way of intimation that there would be no excessive temerity in encountering Mr. Galton even on the ground of his own choosing, were that ground really worth contending for. But baseless and exorbitant as all Mr. Galton's postulates are, there is not one of them to which he might not be made heartily welcome, for any effect its surrender could have upon the real issue, the true nature whereof both Mr. Galton and his principal coadjutor have, with marvellous sleight of eye, contrived completely to overlook. Such Pharisees in science, such sticklers for rigorously scientific method, might have been expected to begin by authenticating the materials they proposed to operate upon, and, when professing to experiment upon pure metal, at least to see that it was not mere dross they were casting into the crucible. Plainly, however, they despise any such nice distinctions. The most earnest prayer and the emptiest ceremonial prate are both alike to them. What sort of a process they imagine prayer to be may be at once perceived from the sort of trials to which they desire to subject it.