Nothing enters into the meaning of law which could make it in the least degree unnatural to regard law as the outcome of mind and the expression of personal will. Nay more, it is allowed that, for the vast majority of those who have entertained it, the thought of law has carried with it, avowedly or tacitly, the thought of a lawgiver. Has the case been altered by any modification which the idea of law has undergone through the influence of modern science? It is often popularly supposed that it has.
This has been largely the result of a loose and unguarded manner of speaking. We very commonly hear the expressions “governed by law,” and “reign of law”. Such expressions, vivid and picturesque as they are, cannot be defended when accurate thinking is in question. They may become seriously misleading. Years ago Dr. W. B. Carpenter challenged the propriety of the first of them, and urged that what was intended would be more satisfactorily conveyed by saying, “governed according to law”. Law is not an entity in itself, nor is it a force which we have any right to invest with the attributes of personality. It is simply a principle of arrangement, a method of procedure. “Law,” said Prof. Huxley, “means a rule which we have always found to hold good, and which we expect always will hold good.” Law of itself can have no governing power. At the most its existence can suggest, or imply, a personality behind it. Law is not a being; it is an abstraction. It is a term for expressing the uniformity of the sequences of nature. Law is another name for invariable succession. Fire, brought into contact with a certain class of material things, burns—not once or twice, but always. The conditions being the same, the same effect follows. This, we say, is a law. But Theism holds not only that law is no agent, but that agency, so far as it belongs to objects in nature, is dependent upon, and either immediately or ultimately derived from, the Creator and Preserver of nature. Law signifies His plan of acting, or the plan which the living God ordains for the action of the forces of matter.
Observe the terms on which our inner personality lives with what we call the inexorable physical laws. While recognizing them at every point, it knows itself as not of them, as more than they. They are the rules of the game, but they do not play the game. It is we who do that. When I rise to cross the room, my bones and muscles will obey all the laws of motion. But it is not the laws of motion that send me across the room; but my thought and will which use them, but are not they. We move freely in a bound universe. That is the miracle, we are the miracle. And it is to this region of the spirit, of personality, that prayer belongs. It supposes a kingdom of the spiritual stretching beyond our ken, just as does the kingdom of the physical. They both begin here, with us, and both stretch beyond us. There are millions of freely-acting spirits on this earth, clothed as we are with bodies. Why should we suppose we exhaust the spirituality of the universe? It is an inevitable inference from what goes on around us that behind the physical infinite is a spiritual infinite. [Note: J. Brierley, Life and the Ideal, 71]
1. It has to be remembered that we are all of us perpetually interfering—no weaker word can be substituted—with the physical order about us. “What is it,” asks Romanes, “that most distinguishes human intelligence in its relation to Natural Law? Most assuredly its utilizing ability—its power to direct the natural forces to the accomplishment of special ends. . . . The mind of man, considered thus as a natural cause, is certainly of all single natural causes the most influential; not, of course, in respect of the magnitude of its effects, but in respect of their number and diversity.” [Note: G. J. Romanes, Christian Prayer andGeneral Laws, 161.]
Human purpose and volition are perpetually playing into the system of law, thereby realizing a multitude of effects which the system, left to itself, would never produce, yet in such a way that no law is broken. Natural law of itself would never do any of the things which men are doing by means of it. The work of the world is done by natural forces under human guidance. It is the outcome at once of law and of purpose.
The phenomena of will are no less real than those of chemistry or mechanics, and we are no less bound to take them into account, when we are discussing such a question as the present. But whatever some may say, few things are more certain than that the phenomena of will—and especially the moral acts which depend for their character upon the responsible exercise of will—are strangely at variance with the idea of changeless law. Here, in the midst of a universe in which so much seems to tell of the resistless march of triumphant law, is a whole region of facts the very first idea of which is the idea of freedom from taw. No amount of argument will persuade a sane man that he is talking nonsense when he says, “I can take the right-hand road or the left, as I please”; “I can give this money to this cause, or I can refuse” “I can speak, or I can be silent”. You may tell him each separate act is only the necessary result of a combination of previous forces, or of the force at the moment strongest, and that his actions always follow the line of least resistance; but he is none the less sure that he is a free agent, with a mysterious power of will through which he acts. Therefore at once we find at least one class of facts over which law seems to exercise at most a very limited control.
We cannot alter a law of nature. The law is not that which acts or produces any result. The law is only the expression of the method in which the various forces around us operate. We cannot alter a law, but we can alter the operation of the force which is regulated by law. Thus it is a law of nature that by the force of gravitation a stone should lie motionless on the ground. By my will I take up the stone, I throw it up, bringing to bear on it other forces sufficient to overcome for the time the action of the force of gravitation. I catch the stone as it descends, again by my will applying another force to correct the action of the force of gravitation. We can all think of a thousand examples. Why, all our wonderful inventions, the steam-engine, the hydraulic press, the electric telegraph, are nothing else but the Will of man restraining, combining, directing, and utilizing the law-observing forces of nature. Thus we have not only a vast group of facts apparently ungoverned by general laws, but a constant interference with the operation of those general laws by that force which originates this group of facts, namely, the will.
Mankind was never meant to be the slave of laws, but their master; human spirit was destined to rule over the rest of God’s creation, with nature as its servant, laws and ordinances as its willing and able instruments. To turn these into the warders of its prison is an anomaly. The religiously scientific mind, while doing full justice to the all-pervading presence and power of law, is coming, increasingly, to realize that law was not meant to limit and fetter personality, but was made subject to it; that God made human personality in the likeness of His own, and therefore so constituted it that it is able to manipulate and administer laws like Himself, with this infinite difference that He is omnipotent and omniscient, and it is but a babe in these attributes—a learner, at the first stages of acquiring knowledge. Taught by God, man learns how one law can counteract, supersede, or modify another without confusion or collision. The laws of God, natural and spiritual, when rightly understood, are the friends and not the foes of personality. So diverse are they in their working, so wondrously adapted to further every beneficial purpose, that in the execution of any scheme that is good and wise, far from desiring to set them aside, we would call them to our aid if we had but eyes to see. Man need never be baffled by the operation of God’s laws. [Note: L. Swetenham, Conquering Prayer, 148.]
2. As a matter of fact, then, we can and do interfere with the forces of nature; and by our interference we achieve results which, before experience, might have seemed improbable enough. What we can do, with our limited knowledge and power, could, we must suppose, be done on a much vaster scale by one who was vastly superior in these respects. Indeed it would be the height of rashness to attempt to set any bounds to what would be possible in such a case. The key to the solution of the mystery of answer to prayer lies thus in our own possession of moral freedom. The all but universal experience of humanity is that within limitations we have some power of self-direction, some power of control, over our own destinies. We praise and blame ourselves or other people according to the way in which that power is exercised. But this moral freedom introduces into the universe a certain element of uncertainty. Within the illimitable scope of God’s almighty purposes there is room for man’s personal initiative. But if the reality of moral freedom is conceded, the possibility of answer to prayer must be conceded too.
Our consciousness is essentially a self-directing creative consciousness. Under its directivity, our existence is an unbroken process of self-adaptation to an equally unbroken process of change in a surrounding environment with which our own existence is continuous as a part is akin to its whole. In this process of conscious self-change, each moment swallows up and yet retains all the preceding moments in a fuller form of existence by a veritable act of creation. This creation, or invention, is not caused by the sum-total of preceding acts, though it rests on them and re-fashions them. Our existence, directed by consciousness, is a sort of self-rolling snowball determining its own direction according to the new exigencies of each moment. . . . No two moments of our real life can ever be perfectly alike. However conditioned by preceding results, each fresh moment of that life imports a new element of creative invention which gives to the whole moment a character of originality which no human knowledge of the antecedents, however infinite, could possibly foresee. [Note: H. Bergson, Creative Evolution.]
3. What is true of man is no less true of God. Put it the other way. What is true of prayer in relation to God is equally true of it in relation to man. If the Divine will cannot be affected by prayer, no more can the human. If it is wrong to ask a boon of the Most High God, so is it to ask a boon of a father or a brother, of a mother or a sister, or of a friend. Human nature, as philosophy conceives it, no less than the Divine nature, is fast locked in the vice of necessity; there is not, nor can there ever be, any escape from it. If, then, you deny to human souls the infinite privilege of praying to their Father in Heaven for help in their sore need, you must logically refrain yourself from asking help in any form or under any condition from any son of earth. The prayer of a child to his father on earth is precisely as reasonable or unreasonable as the prayer of a man to God. But who will own that such a prayer can lack the element of reason or right? Who will admit that, when he tries to prevail by his petition upon the heart of a kinsman or friend in whose love he confides, such an act is immoral or illogical? No; it is impossible; human nature is too strong for philosophy. And as Dr. Johnson said of the freedom of the will, “We know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t,” so we may say, “We know that human hearts are moved by prayer, and no argument will convince us that they are not”. But from human hearts the ascent is natural to the Divine heart. For our Lord Himself drew the parallel between Divine and human parentage, saying: “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? . . . If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children; how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?”
The uniformity of nature, so far as we have discerned it, is nothing but the expression of the stability of God’s good pleasure. The sun rises every morning, and we shall not be warm without it. It is the signal of the sure mercies of God, sure in their recurrence, but merciful in their freedom. . . The very work of man in this world is to answer to the signal; to know the Father and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. It is to know the reality of God’s controlling power and the clearness of His manifestations within our own flesh, and man ought to come to know this by what he knows of his own limited self-determination. He ought to look up with joy and reverence to God and adore in Him a great reality, which answers to that small but real spark of freedom which He has planted in us, and which makes the possibility of virtue and of honour.
You remember the old image of the mice in the piano. It is an image invented by Dr. W. G. Ward, “Ideal” Ward, one of the men of the Oxford Movement. The image is this:
We begin, then, with imagining two mice, endowed, however, with quasi-human or semi-human intelligence, enclosed within a grand pianoforte, but prevented in some way or other from interfering with the free play of its machinery. From time to time they are delighted with the strains of choice music. One of the two considers these to result from some agency external to the instrument; but the other, having a more philosophical mind, rises to the conception of fixed laws and phenomenal uniformity. “Science as yet,” he says, “is but in its infancy, but I have already made one or two important discoveries. Every sound which reaches us is preceded by a certain vibration of these strings. The same string invariably produces the same sound, and that louder or more gentle according as the vibration may be more or less intense. Sounds of a more composite character result when two or more of the strings vibrate together; and here, again, the sound produced, as far as I am able to discover, is precisely a compound of those sounds which have resulted from the various component strings vibrating separately. Then there is a further sequence which I have observed; for each vibration is preceded by a stroke from a corresponding hammer, and the string vibrates more intensely in proportion as the hammer’s stroke is more forcible. Thus far I have already prosecuted my researches. And so much at least is evident even now, viz. that the sounds proceed not from any external and arbitrary agency—from the intervention, e.g., of any higher will—but from the uniform operation of fixed laws. These laws may be explored by intelligent mice, and to their exploration I shall devote my life. [Note: William George Ward and the Catholic Revival, 289.]
Can the humble request of believing lips restrain, accelerate, change the settled order of events? Can prayer make things that are not to be as though they were? Are events, in short, brought about through prayer that would not otherwise take place? Yes, a thousand times yes! To believe anything short of this is to take the soul out of every text that refers to prayer, is to do away with the force of every scriptural illustration that bears upon it—to believe anything short of this is to believe that God has placed a mighty engine in the hands of His creature, but one that will not work, useful only as a scientific toy might be that helps to bring out a child’s faculties, valuable only as a means of training the soul to commune with God. Yet what so easy for the unbeliever as to cavil at prayer; what so easy even for the Christian as to fail and falter in this region, and to stop short of the fulness of this, God’s own Land of Promise, through unbelief? The commonplace objection to prayer, founded upon the supposed immutability of the laws by which God governs the world, is easily met and answered by the fact that prayer is itself one of these laws, upon whose working God has determined that a certain result shall follow:
An element
That comes and goes unseen, yet doth effect
Rare issues by its operance. [Note: Dora Greenwell, Essays, 135.]
