“IN one shape or another,” says Bishop Phillips Brooks, [Note: The Mystery of Iniquity, 296.] “the religious question which gives thoughtful religious people the most trouble is probably the question of prayer. We cannot doubt that it has always been so. We feel sure that in every condition of religion, down to the lowest, in which men are moved to supplicate God at all, the struggle between the two feelings, between the instinct that God must hear and answer and the doubt whether God can hear and answer, has been always going on. It is not a struggle of our days alone; it is not a question which certain peculiar tendencies of our time have brought out. It is as old as David; nay, as old as Job, as old as all religion.”
Here we have at once the two great primary facts about prayer. There is an instinct in men to seek fellowship with God in prayer, and yet it demands an effort of the will to pray. Round these two facts all difficulties of prayer as well as all its advantages may be said to gather. Let us glance at them separately before we begin the proper subject of this Introduction, which is the Proof and the Practice of Prayer.
1. The instinct of prayer is to us like the wing of a bird to a bird and the fin of a fish to a fish. The wing of the bird demands the air, the fin of the fish demands the water, the instinct of prayer demands God. Therefore the only monstrosity of nature, just as much a monstrosity as a wingless bird or a finless fish, is the prayerless man or woman, because the deepest and most real instinct they have is not satisfied.
Strong as may be my admiration for the beautiful, deeply as I may be stirred by the strains of melody, there is yet another emotion more powerful and more lasting than either of these, and that is my desire for communion with God in the form of prayer. The love of the beautiful may lessen with the decrease of my powers, the desire for music may wane as I grow decrepit, but the wish to pray grows stronger as the years are added to my life. [Note: J. McCann, The Autobiography of a Soul, 109.]
(1) This instinct is far older than Christianity itself, for it is the expression of a dependence upon God which in every age has been prominent in the consciousness and conduct of men. Jesus Christ did not create it. He found it already highly developed; and, by His revelation of the Fatherhood of God, He directed and guided it towards Him. This, indeed, was the entire aim of His redeeming life and death—so to capture and control this common instinct of dependence in men that they should become worshipping children and so partake of all the soul-renewing results of that worship.
Dr. Knox, Bishop of Manchester, preaching on the sands at Blackpool, told a story of a miner who called himself an infidel.
One day in the mine some coal began to fall, and the man cried out, “Lord, save me”. Then a fellow-miner turned to him and said, “Ay, there’s nowt like cobs o’ coal to knock th’ infidelity out o’ a man”. Yes, men may try to keep down the instinct of prayer, but there are times in every life when it will be heard. [Note: G. C. Leader, Wanted—a Boy, 74.]
(2) Therefore let us recognize the fact that we are never so natural as when we pray. Over and over again we find that people in the workshops and in the great houses of business in cities will almost flout the man or woman who goes regularly to church or who says his or her prayers. They point out, as they imagine, that it is an unnatural thing to do—an unnatural thing on a beautiful Sunday afternoon to spend an hour in a house of prayer. What we must recognize, in the first place, is this: that we are most natural when we pray, for if there is one thing certain about human nature, it is that man is a praying animal, and is born to pray.
In our present order, there is no voice so sweet, so powerful, so essentially human, as that of prayer, none other so natural to a being like man, at once rational, fallen, and redeemed. It is possible, without any great strain upon imagination, to conceive of inanimate creation as filled with praise. It is easy to think of the winds and waves in their restless movement, the birds in their song, the stars in their silence, the very grass and flowers, as worshipping God in their beauty and their gladness. Often the air around us seems full of thanksgiving, breathless with adoration; but who, even in poetry, ever dreamt that nature prayed? Prayer is the voice of one who errs and loves; of one who sins, and suffers, and aspires; it is the voice of a child to its father, the voice of man to his God. [Note: Dora Greenwell, Essays, 140.]
2. But the instinct to pray no more indicates the prayerful life than the musical ear denotes the accomplished musician. Both are but the foundations on which unremitting endeavour erects mastery. As the pianist day after day sounds forth upon his instrument the changes of his scales and finger exercises, so the master Christian breathes his daily petitions and thanksgivings, not as constituting in themselves the prayer which God enjoins, but as the ceaseless exercise which enables the soul to sound celestial harmonies.
Why should we pray? And, as we ask ourselves the question, I suppose that the first answer must be, “Because of a deep inherited instinct which has been trained and fostered from our childhood by those we love”. Notice, we must have the whole answer. Whether a child would pray if it was never taught may fairly be questioned; but certainly there would always be in it that deep instinct for prayer—a deep instinct which still remains, too, in the minds and hearts of men who have ceased to believe in a God; for a man once told me most pathetically that, though all his faith had gone, every morning regularly he practised what he called self-reflection to satisfy that instinct of prayer which he could satisfy in no other way. [Note: A. F. Winnington Ingram, The Gospel in Action, 245.]
