The great modern argument from physical science against prayer is this: We everywhere find the reign of law, i.e. God, if there be a God, rules the universe and the affairs of men in certain fixed and invariable modes: how then can we hope, or wish, that He should violate these laws, which ensure the general welfare, in order to show special favour to this man or that, to supply his want, or to gratify his desire? Time was when it was pardonable that men should pray for rain or for fair weather, for health or abundant harvests; but it is no longer rational of them, now that the scientific idea of law has been proclaimed. We know that rain is the product of atmospheric laws which, under certain conditions, render it inevitable. We know that health or disease is the result of physiological laws, which absolutely determine that one man shall live and another die. The idea that rain and death are dependent on the will of a Being who can avert or precipitate them at His pleasure is therefore utterly unscientific and irrational; it belongs to the days when broad margins of human life and thought lay in a gross darkness, peopled by the popular imagination with the caprices of an omnipotent Will; just as in the ancient maps large unknown tracts of the earth were depicted as the haunts of chimeras dire and monstrous forms of life. But now, darkness has given place to light, the monstrous to the natural, caprice to law, confusion to order; and we can no longer believe that, by our prayers, we change that perfect Will which works out the welfare of the universe by methods as fixed and invariable as itself.
That nature is governed by fixed laws; that effects flow from causes, that the order of the Divine work is visible, not only, as the ancients might have supposed, in the movements of the heavenly bodies, but also in the least things and the things which appear to be the most capricious (“even the very hairs of your head are all numbered”)—this is a very great lesson which is being taught us daily and hourly by the commonest observation, as well as by the latest results of science. Everywhere, as far as we can see or observe or decompose the world around us, the pressure of law is discernible. And even if there are some things which we cannot see, which are too subtle to be reached by the eye of man or the use of instruments, still we are right in supposing that the empire of law does not cease with them, but that, in the invisible corners of nature, as they may be termed, the same powers rule, giving order and arrangement to the least things as well as the greatest. [Note: Benjamin Jowett, Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, 267.]
1. The three men in the nineteenth century who have written most profoundly upon the subject of prayer—Schleiermacher, F. W. Robertson, and Martineau—were never able to overcome absolutely the scientific hindrance to an adequate treatment of their theme. They divided the world of reality into two great departments or realms—the realm of external, physical nature, in which inviolable necessity rules, and the realm of the soul, the home of freedom and spontaneity. As Martineau puts it “The physical is governed from without; the spiritual can govern itself. The former is subject to the same fixed laws that prevail in other parts of the organized world. The latter is a centre of individual power which issues its own determinations. No act of will can protect the body amidst present pestilence, but holy resolution will fortify the soul against temptation.”
The assumption is that spiritual forces and mind constitute one realm, and mechanical forces and matter another, the deduction being that prayer, as belonging to the former sphere, is altogether out of touch with the domain of physical causation. But does the division thus postulated really exist? The hand, as it writes, is performing certain physical movements, but they are the consequent of a spiritual antecedent, and the hand is but serving as the instrument of the mind. Indeed, the connexion there is so immediate to consciousness, and the subservience of matter to mind so direct and instantaneous, that from it there has been derived the very notion of cause which science applies with such fruitfulness in its explanation of natural phenomena.
Of all the idle distinctions that ever have been drawn in any controversy, the idlest of all is this which tells us we may ask for things spiritual because they may and can be given, but we must not ask for things in the natural world because they cannot be given; that we may pray for good dispositions, but that it is a folly to ask for good weather; that God may interfere in the one but not in the other. Surely this is utterly illogical; surely if there be law anywhere there is law everywhere. [Note: Archbishop W. C. Magee, Christ the Light of all Scripture, 196.]
2. The exclusion of the operation of prayer from the physical world is based on the idea that, in asking God to grant us a physical benefit, we ask Him to perform a miracle. But this is equally true if the benefit asked for be spiritual. There, as here, we ask for the exertion of a power transcending, not only in degree but in kind, the power of man. There, as here, we ask for an action possessing the distinctive character of a miracle, namely, a volition followed by an immediate external result. The truth is, that to ask God to act at all and to ask Him to perform a miracle are one and the same thing. Every real answer to prayer is miraculous. Every such answer disturbs the normal operation of existing laws, whether by procuring the intervention of a higher law, or otherwise. Or, to speak more accurately, every such answer involves a certain departure from what, as we presume, would otherwise have been God’s mode of working, who works everywhere in the physical as in the moral world. The difference between a resurrection from the dead at a prophet’s prayer and the increase of clear-sightedness or of love through an infusion of grace in the soul of a cottager is a difference of degree. It is not a difference of kind. Each result is the product of a Divine interference with the normal course of things. And if this is the case, the distinction between what we think great and striking answers to prayer, because they impress our human imaginations so powerfully, and ordinary answers does not exist for Him to whose intelligence the least among created things are as the greatest, before whom all that He has made is in the aggregate so infinitely little.
I noticed a lengthy discussion in the newspapers a month or two ago, on the propriety of praying for or against rain. It had suddenly, it seems, occurred to the public mind, and to that of the gentlemen who write the theology of the breakfast table, that rain was owing to natural causes; and that it must be unreasonable to expect God to supply on our immediate demand what could not be provided but by previous evaporation. I noticed further that this alarming difficulty was at least softened to some of our Metropolitan congregations by the assurances of their ministers that, although, since the last lecture by Professor Tyndall at the Royal Institution, it had become impossible to think of asking God for any temporal blessing, they might still hope their applications for spiritual advantages would occasionally be successful—thus implying that though material processes were necessarily slow, and the laws of Heaven respecting matter inviolable, mental processes might be instantaneous, and mental laws at any moment disregarded by their Institutor: so that the spirit of a man might be brought to maturity in a moment, though the resources of Omnipotence would be overtaxed, or its consistency abandoned, in the endeavour to produce the same result on a greengage. [Note: Ruskin, The Nature and Authority of Miracle (Works, xxxiv. 115).]
The position we have been led to take up is not that the Spiritual Laws are analogous to the Natural Laws, but that they are the same Laws. It is not a question of analogy but of Identity. The Natural Laws are not the shadows or images of the Spiritual in the same sense as autumn is emblematical of Decay, or the falling leaf of Death. The Natural Laws, as the Law of Continuity might well warn us, do not stop with the visible and then give place to a new set of Laws bearing a strong similitude to them. The Laws of the invisible are the same Laws, projections of the natural not supernatural. Analogous Phenomena are not the fruit of parallel Laws, but of the same Laws—Laws which at one end, as it were, may be dealing with Matter, at the other end with Spirit. [Note: H. Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World.]
