1. Each faculty, or endowment, or form of activity that belongs to man has, over and above a number of more indirect effects, its appropriate and characteristic action, in which its whole strength is embarked, and in which it finds its full play and impetus. To this law religion is no exception. While its influence upon human life is strong and various in proportion to its high aim and object; while it is felt, when it wields real empire, in every department of human activity and interest, as an invigorating, purifying, chastening, restraining, guiding influence, it too has a work peculiarly its own. In this work it is wont to embark its collective forces, and to become peculiarly conscious of its direction and intensity. This work is prayer. Prayer is emphatically religion in action. It is the soul of man engaging in that particular form of activity which pre-supposes the existence of a great bond between itself and God. Prayer is, therefore, nothing more or less than the noblest kind of human exertion. It is the one department of action in which man realizes the highest privilege and capacity of his being. And, in doing this, he is himself enriched and ennobled almost indefinitely: now, as of old, when he comes down from the mountain, his face bears tokens of an irradiation which is not of this world.
So, I soberly laid my last plan
To extinguish the man.
Round his creep-hole, with never a break
Ran my fires for his sake;
Over-head, did my thunder combine
With my underground mine:
Till I looked from my labour content
To enjoy the event.
When sudden . . . how think ye, the end?
Did I say “without friend”?
Say rather, from marge to blue marge
The whole sky grew his targe
With the sun’s self for visible boss,
While an Arm ran across
Which the earth heaved beneath like a breast
Where the wretch was safe prest
Do you see? just my vengeance complete,
The man sprang to his feet,
Stood erect, caught at God’s skirts, and prayed
——So, I was afraid! [Note: Browning, Instans Tyrannus.]
2. The tonic, invigorating, and enlightening influence of prayer in the life of every one who knows how to pray is one of the most unquestionable facts of empirical psychology. One may, if one likes, assert dogmatically the impossibility of any “answer” to petitional prayer, one may explain “communion” as auto-suggestion, one may deny the existence of any God and insist that this is a purely material universe, and still be forced to admit the almost unique value of prayer as a source of strength and guidance in the lives of an exceedingly large proportion of the community.
Prayer is either practical, capable of doing things, or it is absurd and even ridiculous. Either it means unspeakable blessedness, enlargement of life, release of psychic energies hitherto bound fast, a real increase in spiritual power, or it is vanity and emptiness. Prayer is thus seen, as a matter of cold scientific fact, to have an important bearing upon character. Like morality or art, it is a factor in the formation of human personality. Other things being equal, the praying man has a unity of life and a corresponding forcefulness of character to which the non-praying man can lay no claim. As William James remarks: “In few of us are functions not tied up by the exercise of other functions. Relatively few medical and scientific men can pray. Few can carry on any living commerce with ‘God’. Now many of us are well aware of how much freer and abler our lives would be were such important forms of energizing not sealed up by the critical atmosphere in which we have been reared. There are in every one potential forms of activity that actually are shunted out from use. Part of the imperfect vitality under which we labour can thus be easily explained.” It is a matter of history that men who have really prayed have also been men of unusual force of character. We cannot conceive that Martin Luther or General Gordon or Mr. Gladstone would have been the men they were, or would have left the mark they did, had they not been men of prayer. The Master of prayer seems to have been most impressed by its quality as an energizing principle in human nature. There has come down to us a great mystical saying of His which bears every mark of authenticity: “This kind goeth not out save by prayer”. In other words, something happens which would not happen without prayer.
On ourselves who thus believe in the efficacy of prayer, and, therefore, its transforming influence, an obligation, never more serious than in the present day, is laid, to take care that we give as little occasion as by Divine grace is possible to the severe reproach that there is a wide difference between devotion and goodness. To allow prayer to react on all sides of our own moral and spiritual character and life, with all its penetrating and comprehensive power, is the only real way in which we can take our stand in the long line of witnesses, by whom belief in its reality and efficacy has been handed on from generation to generation. “He,” Dr. Vaughan once said from the University pulpit at Cambridge, “who goes forth from this exercise into the world of business, into the world of society, into the world of literary, scientific, political, ecclesiastical activity, goes forth to remember God—goes forth (it is the other half of duty) to remind of God.” But such a result can be achieved only by conscientious observance, however brief for some the observance may necessarily be, of stated seasons, and times, and modes of prayer. It is through such regularity, such obedience to rule, that in prayer, as indeed in all departments of life, habits are gained, and we become truly free, although at the cost of strict discipline at first, to call this great power into such activity that it becomes the means of sustaining the supernatural life, while it is constantly reforming and transforming our natural faculties. As a beautiful flower becomes what it is by living in the sunlight, so the soul fulfils the design of its creation and re-creation by turning to God, revealed in the Person of the Incarnate Son. The reason why nothing can be a substitute for prayer is that, through its practice, this contact is maintained. When that contact becomes habitual, our spiritual nature puts forth its influence over all that is material, the body through which it finds expression, and the world which is given us to claim for God. Without that continuous contact, the spiritual nature becomes itself materialized, the bond-servant, at last, of the flesh and of the world. [Note: A. J. Worlledge, Prayer, 337.]
3. The power of prayer does not belong to the same order of energy as the forces of nature—gravitation, electricity, magnetism and the like; and there is no force resident. in the universe but upon that particular force prayer can lay its hand and call its might into service. This becomes possible because, in distinction from natural forces, prayer is a personal power. It has personal intelligence to guide it, personal will to apply it, personal life to give it character and energy, and tenderness and love, and, finally, personal control on the higher side to prevent it from working awry from the purpose of God. Prayers in line with God’s will move in the realm of moral certainty, because they are moral; in the realm of natural certainty, because they obey law; and in the realm of Divine certainty, because backed by the promises of God. And these three are stages in one certainty. The energies of the universe are arranged in hierarchical order, God Himself being supreme—material forces, vital forces, mental forces, spiritual forces—the lower subject to the higher, and all controlled by a Person for the benefit of persons. For He who ruleth all things after the counsel of His own will maketh all things work together for good to them that love God. And more, the Creator of all things has delegated man with power akin to His own, and Divinely charged him to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over all the earth”.
Along with the crude and mechanical conceptions which have so often dominated in theology and religion, we have popular conceptions of prayer which do not seem to grasp its ethical significance and spiritual value. Much of the language concerning prayer as a “power” seems to rest upon the idea that its operation is something like that of a physical force. In nature physical forces produce certain definite and invariable results. Similar uniformity of sequences has sometimes been claimed for prayer; and some have been willing to lower the whole subject to the physical sphere, and put the efficacy of prayer to the test of experiment by means of a “prayer-gauge”. Such an idea derives all its force from prevalent misconceptions concerning the power of prayer. Our idea of prayer should be elevated above the physical sphere, and ennobled by our associating with it the thought of the moral and spiritual relations with which prayer is primarily concerned. The true power of our prayers with God lies in the faith which they utter. It was just in this connexion of ideas that Jesus employed His strongest words concerning the power of prayer, throwing His thought into a parabolic form: “If ye have faith, and doubt not . . . if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done” (Mat_21:21). Or, if Luke has preserved the more exact setting of this saying (Luk_17:6), it was in response to the prayer of the Apostles, “Increase our faith,” that Jesus gave them this assurance of how great things are possible to faith.
This is the meaning of prayer. This is the one secret of power. We simply become that through which He manifests Himself. And this is the whole meaning of that much-talked-about, little-understood thing called “power”. Our Lord Jesus thorn-torn, nail-pierced, now glory-crowned, manifesting Himself —this is power, and only this. All power has been given unto Him. All power is in Him. All power comes out from Him as He is allowed free play in our lives; from Him, through us, out to His world. [Note: S. D. Gordon The Quiet Time, 28.]
To talk to nominal believers on the subject of prayer is generally to find that they have little confidence in prayer as a power. Do they believe that prayer effects, alters anything? No, for nominal Christianity is but a refined naturalism; it wears the cross, seeing that it cannot be got out of either the Bible or the Church, as an ornament, but it never presses it to its heart, it never roots its life beneath its shadow; it is to it a thing extrinsic, adventitious, out of harmony with all that it really believes and grows to. Nominalism contains within it no deep-seated sense of sin, of need, or of dependence; how then can it lay its grasp upon the great co-related truths of sacrifice, expiation, mediation? But far otherwise is it with him who has learnt to look upon himself as a mortal and corruptible being with immortal and perfect ends; far otherwise with him who feels himself urged towards communion with the Divine through the instinct and necessity of the renewed nature, yet unable from a felt deficiency in that nature to attain to such a communion without help from the Divine itself! Such a spirit is prepared to look beyond itself for deliverance and for aid! “How,” asks Chateaubriand, “is man in his state of actual imperfection to attain to that ideal to which he continually tends? Some will say, through the exertion of his own energy. But there is a manifest disproportion between the given amount of force and the weight it has to remove.”Hence the demand for auxiliary aids to human weakness; hence the need of Christ, of faith, of prayer, “the dynamic agency of heaven”. [Note: Dora Greenwell, Essays, 125.]
