Chapter XVI: Part 16

For my own part, although I dislike to say aught that may grate upon tender associations, I must frankly confess that even though these attributes were faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive of its being of the smallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them should be true. Pray, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself the better to God’s simplicity? Or how does it assist me to plan my behavior, to know that his happiness is anyhow absolutely complete? In the middle of the century just past, Mayne Reid was the great writer of books of out‐of‐ door adventure. He was forever extolling the hunters and field‐observers of living animals’ habits, and keeping up a fire of invective against the “closet‐naturalists,” as he called them, the collectors and classifiers, and handlers of skeletons and skins. When I was a boy, I used to think that a closet‐naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun. But surely the systematic theologians are the closet‐naturalists of the deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid’s sense. What is their deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary‐adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word “God” by one of those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the trail of the serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians’ hands, they are only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms; verbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that of life. Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent. Did such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our knowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to flourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from this world. What keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these things are after‐effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so many instances, renewing themselves _in sæcula sæculorum_ in the lives of humble private men.

So much for the metaphysical attributes of God! From the point of view of practical religion, the metaphysical monster which they offer to our worship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind.

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What shall we now say of the attributes called moral? Pragmatically, they stand on an entirely different footing. They positively determine fear and hope and expectation, and are foundations for the saintly life. It needs but a glance at them to show how great is their significance.

God’s holiness, for example: being holy, God can will nothing but the good. Being omnipotent, he can secure its triumph. Being omniscient, he can see us in the dark. Being just, he can punish us for what he sees. Being loving, he can pardon too. Being unalterable, we can count on him securely. These qualities enter into connection with our life, it is highly important that we should be informed concerning them. That God’s purpose in creation should be the manifestation of his glory is also an attribute which has definite relations to our practical life. Among other things it has given a definite character to worship in all Christian countries. If dogmatic theology really does prove beyond dispute that a God with characters like these exists, she may well claim to give a solid basis to religious sentiment. But verily, how stands it with her arguments?

It stands with them as ill as with the arguments for his existence. Not only do post‐Kantian idealists reject them root and branch, but it is a plain historic fact that they never have converted any one who has found in the moral complexion of the world, as he experienced it, reasons for doubting that a good God can have framed it. To prove God’s goodness by the scholastic argument that there is no non‐being in his essence would sound to such a witness simply silly.

No! the book of Job went over this whole matter once for all and definitively. Ratiocination is a relatively superficial and unreal path to the deity: “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth; I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee.” An intellect perplexed and baffled, yet a trustful sense of presence—such is the situation of the man who is sincere with himself and with the facts, but who remains religious still.(296)

We must therefore, I think, bid a definitive good‐by to dogmatic theology. In all sincerity our faith must do without that warrant. Modern idealism, I repeat, has said good‐by to this theology forever. Can modern idealism give faith a better warrant, or must she still rely on her poor self for witness?

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The basis of modern idealism is Kant’s doctrine of the Transcendental Ego of Apperception. By this formidable term Kant merely meant the fact that the consciousness “I think them” must (potentially or actually) accompany all our objects. Former skeptics had said as much, but the “I” in question had remained for them identified with the personal individual. Kant abstracted and depersonalized it, and made it the most universal of all his categories, although for Kant himself the Transcendental Ego had no theological implications.

It was reserved for his successors to convert Kant’s notion of _Bewusstsein überhaupt_, or abstract consciousness, into an infinite concrete self‐consciousness which is the soul of the world, and in which our sundry personal self‐consciousnesses have their being. It would lead me into technicalities to show you even briefly how this transformation was in point of fact effected. Suffice it to say that in the Hegelian school, which to‐day so deeply influences both British and American thinking, two principles have borne the brunt of the operation.

The first of these principles is that the old logic of identity never gives us more than a post‐mortem dissection of _disjecta membra_, and that the fullness of life can be construed to thought only by recognizing that every object which our thought may propose to itself involves the notion of some other object which seems at first to negate the first one.

The second principle is that to be conscious of a negation is already virtually to be beyond it. The mere asking of a question or expression of a dissatisfaction proves that the answer or the satisfaction is already imminent; the finite, realized as such, is already the infinite _in posse_.

Applying these principles, we seem to get a propulsive force into our logic which the ordinary logic of a bare, stark self‐identity in each thing never attains to. The objects of our thought now _act_ within our thought, act as objects act when given in experience. They change and develop. They introduce something other than themselves along with them; and this other, at first only ideal or potential, presently proves itself also to be actual. It supersedes the thing at first supposed, and both verifies and corrects it, in developing the fullness of its meaning.

The program is excellent; the universe _is_ a place where things are followed by other things that both correct and fulfill them; and a logic which gave us something like this movement of fact would express truth far better than the traditional school‐logic, which never gets of its own accord from anything to anything else, and registers only predictions and subsumptions, or static resemblances and differences. Nothing could be more unlike the methods of dogmatic theology than those of this new logic. Let me quote in illustration some passages from the Scottish transcendentalist whom I have already named.

“How are we to conceive,” Principal Caird writes, “of the reality
in which all intelligence rests?” He replies: “Two things may
without difficulty be proved, viz., that this reality is an
absolute Spirit, and conversely that it is only in communion with
this absolute Spirit or Intelligence that the finite Spirit can
realize itself. It is absolute; for the faintest movement of human
intelligence would be arrested, if it did not presuppose the
absolute reality of intelligence, of thought itself. Doubt or
denial themselves presuppose and indirectly affirm it. When I
pronounce anything to be true, I pronounce it, indeed, to be
relative to thought, but not to be relative to my thought, or to
the thought of any other individual mind. From the existence of
all individual minds as such I can abstract; I can think them
away. But that which I cannot think away is thought or self‐
consciousness itself, in its independence and absoluteness, or, in
other words, an Absolute Thought or Self‐Consciousness.”

Here, you see, Principal Caird makes the transition which Kant did not make: he converts the omnipresence of consciousness in general as a condition of “truth” being anywhere possible, into an omnipresent universal consciousness, which he identifies with God in his concreteness. He next proceeds to use the principle that to acknowledge your limits is in essence to be beyond them; and makes the transition to the religious experience of individuals in the following words:—

“If [Man] were only a creature of transient sensations and
impulses, of an ever coming and going succession of intuitions,
fancies, feelings, then nothing could ever have for him the
character of objective truth or reality. But it is the prerogative
of man’s spiritual nature that he can yield himself up to a
thought and will that are infinitely larger than his own. As a
thinking, self‐conscious being, indeed, he may be said, by his
very nature, to live in the atmosphere of the Universal Life. As a
thinking being, it is possible for me to suppress and quell in my
consciousness every movement of self‐assertion, every notion and
opinion that is merely mine, every desire that belongs to me as
this particular Self, and to become the pure medium of a thought
that is universal—in one word, to live no more my own life, but
let my consciousness be possessed and suffused by the Infinite and
Eternal life of spirit. And yet it is just in this renunciation of
self that I truly gain myself, or realize the highest
possibilities of my own nature. For whilst in one sense we give up
self to live the universal and absolute life of reason, yet that
to which we thus surrender ourselves is in reality our truer self.
The life of absolute reason is not a life that is foreign to us.”

Nevertheless, Principal Caird goes on to say, so far as we are able outwardly to realize this doctrine, the balm it offers remains incomplete. Whatever we may be _in posse_, the very best of us _in actu_ falls very short of being absolutely divine. Social morality, love, and self‐ sacrifice even, merge our Self only in some other finite self or selves. They do not quite identify it with the Infinite. Man’s ideal destiny, infinite in abstract logic, might thus seem in practice forever unrealizable.

“Is there, then,” our author continues, “no solution of the
contradiction between the ideal and the actual? We answer, There
is such a solution, but in order to reach it we are carried beyond
the sphere of morality into that of religion. It may be said to be
the essential characteristic of religion as contrasted with
morality, that it changes aspiration into fruition, anticipation
into realization; that instead of leaving man in the interminable
pursuit of a vanishing ideal, it makes him the actual partaker of
a divine or infinite life. Whether we view religion from the human
side or the divine—as the surrender of the soul to God, or as the
life of God in the soul—in either aspect it is of its very essence
that the Infinite has ceased to be a far‐off vision, and has
become a present reality. The very first pulsation of the
spiritual life, when we rightly apprehend its significance, is the
indication that the division between the Spirit and its object has
vanished, that the ideal has become real, that the finite has
reached its goal and become suffused with the presence and life of
the Infinite.

“Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will is not the
future hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth
in the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the
struggle. In that act which constitutes the beginning of the
religious life—call it faith, or trust, or self‐surrender, or by
whatever name you will—there is involved the identification of the
finite with a life which is eternally realized. It is true indeed
that the religious life is progressive; but understood in the
light of the foregoing idea, religious progress is not progress
_towards_, but _within_ the sphere of the Infinite. It is not the
vain attempt by endless finite additions or increments to become
possessed of infinite wealth, but it is the endeavor, by the
constant exercise of spiritual activity, to appropriate that
infinite inheritance of which we are already in possession. The
whole future of the religious life is given in its beginning, but
it is given implicitly. The position of the man who has entered on
the religious life is that evil, error, imperfection, do not
really belong to him: they are excrescences which have no organic
relation to his true nature: they are already virtually, as they
will be actually, suppressed and annulled, and in the very process
of being annulled they become the means of spiritual progress.
Though he is not exempt from temptation and conflict, [yet] in
that inner sphere in which his true life lies, the struggle is
over, the victory already achieved. It is not a finite but an
infinite life which the spirit lives. Every pulse‐beat of its
[existence] is the expression and realization of the life of
God.”(297)

You will readily admit that no description of the phenomena of the religious consciousness could be better than these words of your lamented preacher and philosopher. They reproduce the very rapture of those crises of conversion of which we have been hearing; they utter what the mystic felt but was unable to communicate; and the saint, in hearing them, recognizes his own experience. It is indeed gratifying to find the content of religion reported so unanimously. But when all is said and done, has Principal Caird—and I only use him as an example of that whole mode of thinking—transcended the sphere of feeling and of the direct experience of the individual, and laid the foundations of religion in impartial reason? Has he made religion universal by coercive reasoning, transformed it from a private faith into a public certainty? Has he rescued its affirmations from obscurity and mystery?

I believe that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he has simply reaffirmed the individual’s experiences in a more generalized vocabulary. And again, I can be excused from proving technically that the transcendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal, for I can point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing. The whole of Germany, one may say, has positively rejected the Hegelian argumentation. As for Scotland, I need only mention Professor Fraser’s and Professor Pringle‐Pattison’s memorable criticisms, with which so many of you are familiar.(298) Once more, I ask, if transcendental idealism were as objectively and absolutely rational as it pretends to be, could it possibly fail so egregiously to be persuasive?

What religion reports, you must remember, always purports to be a fact of experience: the divine is actually present, religion says, and between it and ourselves relations of give and take are actual. If definite perceptions of fact like this cannot stand upon their own feet, surely abstract reasoning cannot give them the support they are in need of. Conceptual processes can class facts, define them, interpret them; but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality. There is always a _plus_, a _thisness_, which feeling alone can answer for. Philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary function, unable to warrant faith’s veracity, and so I revert to the thesis which I announced at the beginning of this lecture.

In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.

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It would be unfair to philosophy, however, to leave her under this negative sentence. Let me close, then, by briefly enumerating what she _can_ do for religion. If she will abandon metaphysics and deduction for criticism and induction, and frankly transform herself from theology into science of religions, she can make herself enormously useful.

The spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine which it feels in ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions. Philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from these definitions. Both from dogma and from worship she can remove historic incrustations. By confronting the spontaneous religious constructions with the results of natural science, philosophy can also eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or incongruous.

Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she can leave a residuum of conceptions that at least are possible. With these she can deal as _hypotheses_, testing them in all the manners, whether negative or positive, by which hypotheses are ever tested. She can reduce their number, as some are found more open to objection. She can perhaps become the champion of one which she picks out as being the most closely verified or verifiable. She can refine upon the definition of this hypothesis, distinguishing between what is innocent over‐belief and symbolism in the expression of it, and what is to be literally taken. As a result, she can offer mediation between different believers, and help to bring about consensus of opinion. She can do this the more successfully, the better she discriminates the common and essential from the individual and local elements of the religious beliefs which she compares.

I do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort might not eventually command as general a public adhesion as is commanded by a physical science. Even the personally non‐religious might accept its conclusions on trust, much as blind persons now accept the facts of optics—it might appear as foolish to refuse them. Yet as the science of optics has to be fed in the first instance, and continually verified later, by facts experienced by seeing persons; so the science of religions would depend for its original material on facts of personal experience, and would have to square itself with personal experience through all its critical reconstructions. It could never get away from concrete life, or work in a conceptual vacuum. It would forever have to confess, as every science confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that its formulas are but approximations. Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.

In my next lecture I will try to complete my rough description of religious experience; and in the lecture after that, which is the last one, I will try my own hand at formulating conceptually the truth to which it is a witness.

LECTURE XIX. OTHER CHARACTERISTICS.

We have wound our way back, after our excursion through mysticism and philosophy, to where we were before: the uses of religion, its uses to the individual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to the world, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to the empirical philosophy: the true is what works well, even though the qualification “on the whole” may always have to be added. In this lecture we must revert to description again, and finish our picture of the religious consciousness by a word about some of its other characteristic elements. Then, in a final lecture, we shall be free to make a general review and draw our independent conclusions.

The first point I will speak of is the part which the æsthetic life plays in determining one’s choice of a religion. Men, I said awhile ago, involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need formulas, just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke, therefore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to consider. The eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them(299) puts us on the track of it. Intoning them as he would intone a cathedral service, he shows how high is their æsthetic value. It enriches our bare piety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as it enriches a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes and stained windows. Epithets lend an atmosphere and overtones to our devotion. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. Minds like Newman’s(300) grow as jealous of their credit as heathen priests are of that of the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon their idols.

Among the buildings‐out of religion which the mind spontaneously indulges in, the æsthetic motive must never be forgotten. I promised to say nothing of ecclesiastical systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, however, to put in a word at this point on the way in which their satisfaction of certain æsthetic needs contributes to their hold on human nature. Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for others _richness_ is the supreme imaginative requirement.(301) When one’s mind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will hardly serve the purpose. The inner need is rather of something institutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with authority descending from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for adjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the Godhead who is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels then as if in presence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architecture; one hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal; one gets the honorific vibration coming from every quarter. Compared with such a noble complexity, in which ascending and descending movements seem in no way to jar upon stability, in which no single item, however humble, is insignificant, because so many august institutions hold it in its place, how flat does evangelical Protestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere of those isolated religious lives whose boast it is that “man in the bush with God may meet.”(302) What a pulverization and leveling of what a gloriously piled‐up structure! To an imagination used to the perspectives of dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme seems to offer an almshouse for a palace.

It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient empires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their object, when one gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, it may be, from a “home” upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting‐room and a Bible on its centre‐table. It pauperizes the monarchical imagination!

The strength of these æsthetic sentiments makes it rigorously impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in making many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is to the Catholic mind incomprehensible. To intellectual Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they are childish in the pleasing sense of “childlike”—innocent and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition of the dear people’s intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at his literalness. He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some hard‐eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile. The two will never understand each other—their centres of emotional energy are too different. Rigorous truth and human nature’s intricacies are always in need of a mutual interpreter.(303) So much for the æsthetic diversities in the religious consciousness.

In most books on religion, three things are represented as its most essential elements. These are Sacrifice, Confession, and Prayer. I must say a word in turn of each of these elements, though briefly. First of Sacrifice.

Sacrifices to gods are omnipresent in primeval worship; but, as cults have grown refined, burnt offerings and the blood of he‐goats have been superseded by sacrifices more spiritual in their nature. Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism get along without ritual sacrifice; so does Christianity, save in so far as the notion is preserved in transfigured form in the mystery of Christ’s atonement. These religions substitute offerings of the heart, renunciations of the inner self, for all those vain oblations. In the ascetic practices which Islam, Buddhism, and the older Christianity encourage we see how indestructible is the idea that sacrifice of some sort is a religious exercise. In lecturing on asceticism I spoke of its significance as symbolic of the sacrifices which life, whenever it is taken strenuously, calls for.(304) But, as I said my say about those, and as these lectures expressly avoid earlier religious usages and questions of derivation, I will pass from the subject of Sacrifice altogether and turn to that of Confession.

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In regard to Confession I will also be most brief, saying my word about it psychologically, not historically. Not nearly as widespread as sacrifice, it corresponds to a more inward and moral stage of sentiment. It is part of the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one’s self in need of, in order to be in right relations to one’s deity. For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has exteriorized his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue—he lives at least upon a basis of veracity. The complete decay of the practice of confession in Anglo‐Saxon communities is a little hard to account for. Reaction against popery is of course the historic explanation, for in popery confession went with penances and absolution, and other inadmissible practices. But on the side of the sinner himself it seems as if the need ought to have been too great to accept so summary a refusal of its satisfaction. One would think that in more men the shell of secrecy would have had to open, the pent‐in abscess to burst and gain relief, even though the ear that heard the confession were unworthy. The Catholic church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted auricular confession to one priest for the more radical act of public confession. We English‐speaking Protestants, in the general self‐reliance and unsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough if we take God alone into our confidence.(305)

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The next topic on which I must comment is Prayer,—and this time it must be less briefly. We have heard much talk of late against prayer, especially against prayers for better weather and for the recovery of sick people. As regards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered to stand firm, it is that in certain environments prayer may contribute to recovery, and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure. Being a normal factor of moral health in the person, its omission would be deleterious. The case of the weather is different. Notwithstanding the recency of the opposite belief,(306) every one now knows that droughts and storms follow from physical antecedents, and that moral appeals cannot avert them. But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched.

Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion. “Religion,” says a liberal French theologian, “is an intercourse, a conscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in distress with the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which its fate is contingent. This intercourse with God is realized by prayer. Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer that distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar or neighboring phenomena as purely moral or æsthetic sentiment. Religion is nothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life. This act is prayer, by which term I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain sacred formulæ, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence,—it may be even before it has a name by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we have living religion. One sees from this why ‘natural religion,’ so‐called, is not properly a religion. It cuts man off from prayer. It leaves him and God in mutual remoteness, with no intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no interchange, no action of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom this pretended religion is only a philosophy. Born at epochs of rationalism, of critical investigations, it never was anything but an abstraction. An artificial and dead creation, it reveals to its examiner hardly one of the characters proper to religion.”(307)

It seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth of M. Sabatier’s contention. The religious phenomenon, studied as an inner fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications, has shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related. This intercourse is realized at the time as being both active and mutual. If it be not effective; if it be not a give and take relation; if nothing be really transacted while it lasts; if the world is in no whit different for its having taken place; then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense that _something is transacting_, is of course a feeling of what is illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as containing elements of delusion,—these undoubtedly everywhere exist,—but as being rooted in delusion altogether, just as materialists and atheists have always said it was. At most there might remain, when the direct experiences of prayer were ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential belief that the whole order of existence must have a divine cause. But this way of contemplating nature, pleasing as it would doubtless be to persons of a pious taste, would leave to them but the spectators’ part at a play, whereas in experimental religion and the prayerful life, we seem ourselves to be actors, and not in a play, but in a very serious reality.

The genuineness of religion is thus indissolubly bound up with the question whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not deceitful. The conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this consciousness is the very core of living religion. As to what is transacted, great differences of opinion have prevailed. The unseen powers have been supposed, and are yet supposed, to do things which no enlightened man can nowadays believe in. It may well prove that the sphere of influence in prayer is subjective exclusively, and that what is immediately changed is only the mind of the praying person. But however our opinion of prayer’s effects may come to be limited by criticism, religion, in the vital sense in which these lectures study it, must stand or fall by the persuasion that effects of some sort genuinely do occur. Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about: energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts.

This postulate is strikingly expressed in a letter written by the late Frederic W. H. Myers to a friend, who allows me to quote from it. It shows how independent the prayer‐instinct is of usual doctrinal complications. Mr. Myers writes:—

“I am glad that you have asked me about prayer, because I have
rather strong ideas on the subject. First consider what are the
facts. There exists around us a spiritual universe, and that
universe is in actual relation with the material. From the
spiritual universe comes the energy which maintains the material;
the energy which makes the life of each individual spirit. Our
spirits are supported by a perpetual indrawal of this energy, and
the vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing, much as the
vigor of our absorption of material nutriment changes from hour to
hour.

“I call these ‘facts’ because I think that some scheme of this
kind is the only one consistent with our actual evidence; too
complex to summarize here. How, then, should we _act_ on these
facts? Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much spiritual life
as possible, and we must place our minds in any attitude which
experience shows to be favorable to such indrawal. _Prayer_ is the
general name for that attitude of open and earnest expectancy. If
we then ask to _whom_ to pray, the answer (strangely enough) must
be that _that_ does not much matter. The prayer is not indeed a
purely subjective thing;—it means a real increase in intensity of
absorption of spiritual power or grace;—but we do not know enough
of what takes place in the spiritual world to know how the prayer
operates;—_who_ is cognizant of it, or through what channel the
grace is given. Better let children pray to Christ, who is at any
rate the highest individual spirit of whom we have any knowledge.
But it would be rash to say that Christ himself _hears us_; while
to say that _God_ hears us is merely to restate the first
principle,—that grace flows in from the infinite spiritual world.”

Let us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the belief that power is absorbed until the next lecture, when our dogmatic conclusions, if we have any, must be reached. Let this lecture still confine itself to the description of phenomena; and as a concrete example of an extreme sort, of the way in which the prayerful life may still be led, let me take a case with which most of you must be acquainted, that of George Müller of Bristol, who died in 1898. Müller’s prayers were of the crassest petitional order. Early in life he resolved on taking certain Bible promises in literal sincerity, and on letting himself be fed, not by his own worldly foresight, but by the Lord’s hand. He had an extraordinarily active and successful career, among the fruits of which were the distribution of over two million copies of the Scripture text, in different languages; the equipment of several hundred missionaries; the circulation of more than a hundred and eleven million of scriptural books, pamphlets, and tracts; the building of five large orphanages, and the keeping and educating of thousands of orphans; finally, the establishment of schools in which over a hundred and twenty‐one thousand youthful and adult pupils were taught. In the course of this work Mr. Müller received and administered nearly a million and a half of pounds sterling, and traveled over two hundred thousand miles of sea and land.(308) During the sixty‐eight years of his ministry, he never owned any property except his clothes and furniture, and cash in hand; and he left, at the age of eighty‐six, an estate worth only a hundred and sixty pounds.

His method was to let his general wants be publicly known, but not
to acquaint other people with the details of his temporary
necessities. For the relief of the latter, he prayed directly to
the Lord, believing that sooner or later prayers are always
answered if one have trust enough. “When I lose such a thing as a
key,” he writes, “I ask the Lord to direct me to it, and I look
for an answer to my prayer; when a person with whom I have made an
appointment does not come, according to the fixed time, and I
begin to be inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased to
hasten him to me, and I look for an answer; when I do not
understand a passage of the word of God, I lift up my heart to the
Lord that he would be pleased by his Holy Spirit to instruct me,
and I expect to be taught, though I do not fix the time when, and
the manner how it should be; when I am going to minister in the
Word, I seek help from the Lord, and ... am not cast down, but of
good cheer because I look for his assistance.”

Müller’s custom was to never run up bills, not even for a week.
“As the Lord deals out to us by the day, ... the week’s payment
might become due and we have no money to meet it; and thus those
with whom we deal might be inconvenienced by us, and we be found
acting against the commandment of the Lord: ‘Owe no man anything.’
From this day and henceforward whilst the Lord gives to us our
supplies by the day, we purpose to pay at once for every article
as it is purchased, and never to buy anything except we can pay
for it at once, however much it may seem to be needed, and however
much those with whom we deal may wish to be paid only by the
week.”

The articles needed of which Müller speaks were the food, fuel,
etc., of his orphanages. Somehow, near as they often come to going
without a meal, they hardly ever seem actually to have done so.
“Greater and more manifest nearness of the Lord’s presence I have
never had than when after breakfast there were no means for dinner
for more than a hundred persons; or when after dinner there were
no means for the tea, and yet the Lord provided the tea; and all
this without one single human being having been informed about our
need.... Through Grace my mind is so fully assured of the
faithfulness of the Lord, that in the midst of the greatest need,
I am enabled in peace to go about my other work. Indeed, did not
the Lord give me this, which is the result of trusting in him, I
should scarcely be able to work at all; for it is now
comparatively a rare thing that a day comes when I am not in need
for one or another part of the work.”(309)

In building his orphanages simply by prayer and faith, Müller
affirms that his prime motive was “to have something to point to
as a visible proof that our God and Father is the same faithful
God that he ever was,—as willing as ever to prove himself the
living God, in our day as formerly, to all that put their trust in
him.”(310) For this reason he refused to borrow money for any of
his enterprises. “How does it work when we thus anticipate God by
going our own way? We certainly weaken faith instead of increasing
it; and each time we work thus a deliverance of our own we find it
more and more difficult to trust in God, till at last we give way
entirely to our natural fallen reason and unbelief prevails. How
different if one is enabled to wait God’s own time, and to look
alone to him for help and deliverance! When at last help comes,
after many seasons of prayer it may be, how sweet it is, and what
a present recompense! Dear Christian reader, if you have never
walked in this path of obedience before, do so now, and you will
then know experimentally the sweetness of the joy which results
from it.”(311)

When the supplies came in but slowly, Müller always considered
that this was for the trial of his faith and patience. When his
faith and patience had been sufficiently tried, the Lord would
send more means. “And thus it has proved,”—I quote from his
diary,—“for to‐day was given me the sum of 2050 pounds, of which
2000 are for the building fund [of a certain house], and 50 for
present necessities. It is impossible to describe my joy in God
when I received this donation. I was neither excited nor
surprised; for I _look out_ for answers to my prayers. _I believe
that God hears me._ Yet my heart was so full of joy that I could
only _sit_ before God, and admire him, like David in 2 Samuel vii.
At last I cast myself flat down upon my face and burst forth in
thanksgiving to God and in surrendering my heart afresh to him for
his blessed service.”(312)

George Müller’s is a case extreme in every respect, and in no respect more so than in the extraordinary narrowness of the man’s intellectual horizon. His God was, as he often said, his business partner. He seems to have been for Müller little more than a sort of supernatural clergyman interested in the congregation of tradesmen and others in Bristol who were his saints, and in the orphanages and other enterprises, but unpossessed of any of those vaster and wilder and more ideal attributes with which the human imagination elsewhere has invested him. Müller, in short, was absolutely unphilosophical. His intensely private and practical conception of his relations with the Deity continued the traditions of the most primitive human thought.(313) When we compare a mind like his with such a mind as, for example, Emerson’s or Phillips Brooks’s, we see the range which the religions consciousness covers.

There is an immense literature relating to answers to petitional prayer. The evangelical journals are filled with such answers, and books are devoted to the subject,(314) but for us Müller’s case will suffice.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

A less sturdy beggar‐like fashion of leading the prayerful life is followed by innumerable other Christians. Persistence in leaning on the Almighty for support and guidance will, such persons say, bring with it proofs, palpable but much more subtle, of his presence and active influence. The following description of a “led” life, by a German writer whom I have already quoted, would no doubt appear to countless Christians in every country as if transcribed from their own personal experience. One finds in this guided sort of life, says Dr. Hilty,—

“That books and words (and sometimes people) come to one’s
cognizance just at the very moment in which one needs them; that
one glides over great dangers as if with shut eyes, remaining
ignorant of what would have terrified one or led one astray, until
the peril is past—this being especially the case with temptations
to vanity and sensuality; that paths on which one ought not to
wander are, as it were, hedged off with thorns; but that on the
other side great obstacles are suddenly removed; that when the
time has come for something, one suddenly receives a courage that
formerly failed, or perceives the root of a matter that until then
was concealed, or discovers thoughts, talents, yea, even pieces of
knowledge and insight, in one’s self, of which it is impossible to
say whence they come; finally, that persons help us or decline to
help us, favor us or refuse us, as if they had to do so against
their will, so that often those indifferent or even unfriendly to
us yield us the greatest service and furtherance. (God takes often
their worldly goods, from those whom he leads, at just the right
moment, when they threaten to impede the effort after higher
interests.)

“Besides all this, other noteworthy things come to pass, of which
it is not easy to give account. There is no doubt whatever that
now one walks continually through ‘open doors’ and on the easiest
roads, with as little care and trouble as it is possible to
imagine.

“Furthermore one finds one’s self settling one’s affairs neither
too early nor too late, whereas they were wont to be spoiled by
untimeliness, even when the preparations had been well laid. In
addition to this, one does them with perfect tranquillity of mind,
almost as if they were matters of no consequence, like errands
done by us for another person, in which case we usually act more
calmly than when we act in our own concerns. Again, one finds that
one can _wait_ for everything patiently, and that is one of life’s
great arts. One finds also that each thing comes duly, one thing
after the other, so that one gains time to make one’s footing sure
before advancing farther. And then everything occurs to us at the
right moment, just what we ought to do, etc., and often in a very
striking way, just as if a third person were keeping watch over
those things which we are in easy danger of forgetting.

“Often, too, persons are sent to us at the right time, to offer or
ask for what is needed, and what we should never have had the
courage or resolution to undertake of our own accord.

“Through all these experiences one finds that one is kindly and
tolerant of other people, even of such as are repulsive,
negligent, or ill‐willed, for they also are instruments of good in
God’s hand, and often most efficient ones. Without these thoughts
it would be hard for even the best of us always to keep our
equanimity. But with the consciousness of divine guidance, one
sees many a thing in life quite differently from what would
otherwise be possible.

“All these are things that every human being _knows_, who has had
experience of them; and of which the most speaking examples could
be brought forward. The highest resources of worldly wisdom are
unable to attain that which, under divine leading, comes to us of
its own accord.”(315)

Such accounts as this shade away into others where the belief is, not that particular events are tempered more towardly to us by a superintending providence, as a reward for our reliance, but that by cultivating the continuous sense of our connection with the power that made things as they are, we are tempered more towardly for their reception. The outward face of nature need not alter, but the expressions of meaning in it alter. It was dead and is alive again. It is like the difference between looking on a person without love, or upon the same person with love. In the latter case intercourse springs into new vitality. So when one’s affections keep in touch with the divinity of the world’s authorship, fear and egotism fall away; and in the equanimity that follows, one finds in the hours, as they succeed each other, a series of purely benignant opportunities. It is as if all doors were opened, and all paths freshly smoothed. We meet a new world when we meet the old world in the spirit which this kind of prayer infuses.

Such a spirit was that of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.(316) It is that of mind‐curers, of the transcendentalists, and of the so‐called “liberal” Christians. As an expression of it, I will quote a page from one of Martineau’s sermons:—

“The universe, open to the eye to‐day, looks as it did a thousand
years ago: and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the beauty
with which our own familiar sun dressed the earliest fields and
gardens of the world. We see what all our fathers saw. And if we
cannot find God in your house or in mine, upon the roadside or the
margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the
day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret
grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and
solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think we should
discern him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the
moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of
greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed
us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far
spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God’s hand
is, _there_ is miracle: and it is simply an indevoutness which
imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of
God. The customs of Heaven ought surely to be more sacred in our
eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High
is never tired, than the strange things which he does not love
well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath
the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the
Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which
Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise. It is no outward change,
no shifting in time or place; but only the loving meditation of
the pure in heart, that can reawaken the Eternal from the sleep
within our souls: that can render him a reality again, and
reassert for him once more his ancient name of ‘the Living
God.’ ”(317)

When we see all things in God, and refer all things to him, we read in common matters superior expressions of meaning. The deadness with which custom invests the familiar vanishes, and existence as a whole appears transfigured. The state of a mind thus awakened from torpor is well expressed in these words, which I take from a friend’s letter:—

“If we occupy ourselves in summing up all the mercies and bounties
we are privileged to have, we are overwhelmed by their number (so
great that we can imagine ourselves unable to give ourselves time
even to begin to review the things we may imagine _we have not_).
We sum them and realize that _we are actually killed with God’s
kindness_; that we are surrounded by bounties upon bounties,
without which all would fall. Should we not love it; should we not
feel buoyed up by the Eternal Arms?”

Sometimes this realization that facts are of divine sending, instead of being habitual, is casual, like a mystical experience. Father Gratry gives this instance from his youthful melancholy period:—

“One day I had a moment of consolation, because I met with
something which seemed to me ideally perfect. It was a poor
drummer beating the tattoo in the streets of Paris. I walked
behind him in returning to the school on the evening of a holiday.
His drum gave out the tattoo in such a way that, at that moment at
least, however peevish I were, I could find no pretext for fault‐
finding. It was impossible to conceive more nerve or spirit,
better time or measure, more clearness or richness, than were in
this drumming. Ideal desire could go no farther in that direction.
I was enchanted and consoled; the perfection of this wretched act
did me good. Good is at least possible, I said, since the ideal
can thus sometimes get embodied.”(318)

In Sénancour’s novel of Obermann a similar transient lifting of the veil is recorded. In Paris streets, on a March day, he comes across a flower in bloom, a jonquil: