1. A more serious difficulty has now to be dealt with. If God knows all, and does all for the best, may we not trust to His guidance at least as much as we do to the guidance of men? And if “prayer moves the hand that guides the world,” what are we that we should grasp at the rein in the hand of the skilful driver? But it may be said in answer, first of all, that prayer changes the conditions; God causes the grain in the field to grow and ripen, but man plants the field and chooses what kind of grain it shall bear. Petition is of three kinds: the prayer for spiritual blessings for ourselves, the prayer for spiritual blessings for others, and the prayer for material blessings, for ourselves or others.
(1) The first kind of petition, the prayer for spiritual blessings for ourselves, we may recognize as distinctly a condition to the end desired; it is the opening of the heart, the natural method by which the gift may be received. From the point of view of the understanding, prayer must inevitably be its own answer, for when the heart is ready for good, good must enter as it were by a certain Divine necessity. But if we grant the truth of religion, this sort of petition and its fulfilment appear in a higher aspect. The response of spirit to spirit may indeed be as inevitable as any action and reaction in the natural world, but the method is different. Because the response is regular, it is not therefore mechanical. The spiritual acts voluntarily.
(2) The question is somewhat harder when we turn to the petition for spiritual blessings for others. God must know their needs; it is the human spirit, not the Divine, that requires to be prompted; and such petition is not obviously a condition of the fulfilment of that which is desired. Our truest spiritual life leads us to pray for others. We may explain this as justified simply by the effect which the intense thought and feeling of one person has upon another. But is there not more? Is it not true that as the mother gives utterance in prayer to her longing for her child’s good, her heart is opened, so that the influence which she exerts upon the child becomes not merely that of her own desire and will, but also that of the Divine Presence itself? The bit of steel that is charged by a magnet becomes powerful to charge other bits of steel. In such petition what we have is not the human will making the Divine will follow its desire, but the Divine will making the human will its instrument.
Certainly no one prays for anything unless he believes that it exists, and hopes to obtain it. But God wills that what He has promised should be asked of Him in prayer. And perhaps therefore He in the first place promises many things which He has resolved to give us, that our devotion may be excited by the promise: and that thus our earnest prayer may merit what He had been disposed to bestow upon us freely). [Note: St. Bernard, Works (ed. Eales), iii. 345.]
(3) In the prayer for material blessings, whether for ourselves or for others, the connexion between the petition and the fulfilment is far less obvious. All the tests that have been suggested are very superficial. Thus Tyndall proposed, as a prayer-gauge by which the petition for material blessing should be submitted to scientific test, that two wards should be set apart in a hospital, in one of which the patients should be treated by physicians in the usual way, while in the other ward they should simply be prayed for. But Tyndall here fell into an error common with scientists when dealing with questions of religion or metaphysics. He did not recognize the spiritual nature of prayer, and failed to see that in this experiment that he proposed the conditions would be such that the prayer offered would not be prayer at all. It would not be the expression of personal desire, but the demand that God should display His power. The fact is that there is no test that can be applied. The question is not whether prayer is a good irrigator or fertilizer, but whether it is a real power. If a man believes that it is, then let him pray as he wishes, spontaneously and freely.
Oft I think my prayers
Are foolish, feeble things; for Christ is good
Whether I pray or not . . . and then I stop
And feel I can do nought towards helping men,
Till out it comes, like tears that will not hold,
And I must pray again for all the world.
2. No doubt it is the judgment of reason, as it is again the assurance of our Lord, that our Father knoweth what things we have need of, before we ask Him, and knows them a great deal better than we do. The object of prayer is not to inform God or to correct His methods—to drag down His wisdom to the level of our folly; the object of prayer is to educate us in intercourse with God. We are sons of God, capable of something better than mechanical obedience; capable of intelligent correspondence with our Father, capable of fellowship and communion with Him in one Spirit. There is to be what the New Testament calls “freedom of speech,” and an open avenue of “inquiry towards God”. That is our highest function; and that is the glory of our eternal occupation. To train us for it now, in the childhood of our immortal life, even though we babble with half-inarticulate sounds, we are to be practised to pray. We are to ask persistently and regularly, and according to the loving wisdom of God, to receive in response to our prayers, and so to be educated into personal relations with God.
What if God knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in His idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need—the need of Himself? What if the good of all our smaller and lower needs lies in this, that they help to drive us to God? Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other needs; prayer is the beginning of that communion and some need is the motive of that prayer. Our wants are for the sake of our coming into communion with God, our eternal need. If gratitude and love immediately followed the supply of our needs, if God our Saviour were the one thought of our hearts, then it might be unnecessary that we should ask for anything we need. But seeing we take our supplies as a matter of course, feeling as if they came out of nothing, or from the earth, or our own thoughts, instead of out of a heart of love and a will which alone is force, it is needful that we should be made to feel some at least of our wants, that we may seek Him who alone supplies all of them, and find His every gift a window to His heart of truth. So begins a communion, a talking with God, a coming-to-one with Him, which is the sole end of prayer, and even of existence itself in its infinite phases. We must ask that we may receive; but that we should receive what we ask in respect of our lower needs is not God’s end in making us pray, for He could give us everything without that. To bring His child to his knee, God withholds that man may ask.
There are times in the life of every Christian when some great truth is clearly revealed to him, some long-locked door of promise left with the key hanging in the wards, only waiting to be turned by a prayer. At these times God is waiting to be gracious, and what He appears in many cases to wait for is tho full consent and submission of the human will. Often, at such times, the Holy Spirit, instructed in the mind and will of God, will allure the soul into the direction where God intends to meet and bless it. The life will be drawn towards the attainment of some specific object, the heart will be enticed to covet earnestly some peculiar grace; God will appear to invite the soul to pray for the especial gift He intends to bestow. “Yet for this thing,” He says, speaking of some boon which He kept in store for His ancient Church, “will I be inquired of by them.” God sometimes seems in His dealings with the world to wait till He has secured the co-operation of man’s wish and will. “Pray,” says our Lord Himself, “to the Lord of the harvest, that he may send forth labourers into his harvest.” The harvest is God’s, and it is He who must send the labourers; still man must pray. His great Father worketh not alone; He has need of man’s voice, man’s heart, man’s energy, man’s prayer. [Note: Dora Greenwell, Essays, 143.]
3. Experience and reason contradict the assertion that God’s best gifts can be, and are, given to us apart from prayer. This is the inveterate fallacy in which man is regarded as a mechanism and not as a free moral and spiritual being. To the creation, in so far as it is mechanical, God gives its complete store of mechanical energy, as a matter of course. But to the human spirit God gives freedom, and in that freedom the power of appropriating more or less of the Divine benediction. God wills to give His best gifts to every man, but He is able to do so only in so far as man responds with the capacity of receiving them. Man’s moral and spiritual relations with God are relations of freedom. The will of man in seeking must meet the will of God in giving. They that seek shall find. The Father who is in heaven gives “good things to them that ask him”. It is both beautiful and true that God’s best gifts come to man in answer to the prayer of faith.
I believe all successful prayer to be a prompting from the Father. My prayer does not change His mind; it is His mind that dictates my prayer. Efficacious prayer is not so much a petition as a prophecy; it is my Father saying to me, “This is My will; ask this”. [Note: George Matheson, Rests by the River, 68.]
I cannot think but God must know
About the thing I long for so;
I know He is so good, so kind,
I cannot think but He will find
Some way to help, some way to show
Me to the thing I long for so.
I stretch my hand,—it lies so near:
It looks so sweet, it looks so dear.
“Dear Lord,” I pray, “oh, let me know
If it is wrong to want it so”.
He only smiles,—He does not speak;
My heart grows weaker and more weak,
With looking at the thing so dear.
Which lies so far and yet so near.
Now, Lord, I leave at Thy loved feet
This thing which looks so near, so sweet,
I will not seek, I will not long,—
I almost fear I have been wrong.
I’ll go and work the harder, Lord,
And wait till by some loud, clear word
Thou callest me to Thy loved feet,
To take this thing, so dear, so sweet. [Note: Saxe Holm.]
4. The more we approximate to the prayer of faith, the more precise the answer which may be expected. And we may say that it is the prayer, or rather the spiritual state behind the prayer, that makes the answer possible. Take, for instance, the case of eager Christian men and women who pray for a revival of religion. After a season of earnest waiting upon God, a revival of religion comes. Apart from their prayer, it never could have come. For God works through right human media. They, by their prayer, were bringing themselves into that spiritual condition, which could form an avenue for the operations of the Holy Ghost. So they, praying, received from God, acting through themselves, that for which they prayed. Thus prayer benefits him who prays. It also, experience teaches us, benefits him who is prayed for. Very strangely sometimes, the prayer of a mother protects a lad that is far away. Men may remember occasions when they have felt themselves wondrously guarded from evil. It was as if some hand unseen was laid upon them to hold them back. That hand was the hand of God. Maybe, at the other end of the chain of causes was the silent prayer of a tender heart that loved much. It is reasonable to hold that prayer is answered, alongside of a belief in a changelessly wise and loving God. For earnest prayer is an indication of a changed situation in ourselves which demands a changed experience from Him, who, with His wisdom and power, continually adjusts the universe to His own great ends.
Jesus was convinced that abundant life, volitional, mental, and physical, proceeded from the Father’s will always, toward all human creatures; that this flood of life, falling like sunshine, needed but the opening of the window in man’s understanding, the will to estimate God aright, the will to pray, the will to believe. Man can only shut God out; when man’s heart is open the influx of Divine life is sure according to the ever-active purpose of God. [Note: Christus Futurus, 60.]
“It’s a strange thing,” said Dinah Morris, “sometimes when I’m quite alone, sitting in my room with my eyes closed, or walking over the hills, the people I’ve seen and known, if it’s only been for a few days, are brought before me, and I hear their voices and see them look and move almost plainer than I ever did when they were really with me so as I could touch them. And then my heart is drawn out towards them, and I feel their lot as if it was my own, and I take comfort in spreading it before the Lord and resting in His Love, on their behalf as well as my own.” [Note: George Eliot, Adam Bede.]
When rector of Kilmoylan and Cummer, William Plunket was moved to devote himself to the cause of Irish Church Missions; and in a pamphlet that he wrote describing the work in West Connaught, he gives the following striking instance of the effect of continued intercessory prayer:—
“The owner of Clifden five-and-twenty years ago lived in a beautiful place adjoining the town, in a castle which overlooked the inlet of the Atlantic beside which Clifden is situated. He was a strictly upright, fearless, and amiable man, much beloved and respected by the people; but he was more: he was a pious and consistent Christian, and it grieved his soul, day by day, to see the fearful state of spiritual destitution in the midst of which he lived. At last he and his brother, a man of like spirit, adopted the only alternative which at the time seemed open to them; they resolved to pray. Five-and-twenty years ago, upon a Friday evening, they with three or four friends established a weekly prayer-meeting. That weekly prayer-meeting has never been discontinued. For ten or twelve years the prayers of those few suppliants went up to God, entreating Him to pour down a blessing upon the surrounding neighbourhood; and yet no answer seemed to come. In God’s good time, however, the little cloud was seen; by degrees the heavens became full of impending blessings, and at last the shower descended. And now in that same district of West Galway, where five-and-twenty years ago there was but this one small church, with its twenty or thirty worshippers, there are now no less than twenty-five congregations, ten of which meet in churches; and one of these is the large new church of Clifden, in which every Sunday there is a congregation of about three hundred worshippers”. [Note: F. D. How, Archbishop Plunket: A Memoir, 45.]
