WHEN I first went up to Trinity College, Dublin, Dr. Jellett, soon afterwards appointed Provost, had recently delivered his Donnellan Lectures on the efficacy of prayer. It was a subject which was then forced to the front by the contemporary confidence of the physical scientist in the invariable sequences of the natural process, or what was popularly known as the Reign of Law. Dr. Jellett's volume is one of the many which I am no longer able to consult because I have long since lost them. Yet I can still recall both the vivid interest with which I read it and my sense of troubled disappointment that its argument, in spite of much acuteness of development and clearness of statement, failed to convince me of its sufficiency. It was only many years afterwards that, as I came to know more of the great masters of Christian literature and pondered their incidental teaching about prayer and the general conception of prayer to which it pointed, it dawned on me that the doubts and hesitations with which Dr. Jellett and the theologians of his generation thought it necessary to wrestle would have seemed to them to have no bearing whatever on the real [3] efficacy of prayer. My discovery, of course, was no surprise in so far as the Fathers and the Schoolmen and even the theologians of a much later age could not have anticipated the difficulties provoked by the scientific discoveries of our own time. But what did come as a revelation to me was that there was nothing in their conception of prayer which need have felt the slightest difficulty in our modern view of the uniformity of nature of it had been then known to them. I had discovered, so gradually that it was almost unconsciously, that their conception of prayer was altogether different from that which necessarily felt the kind of difficulties against which Dr. Jellett and men of his school were contending.

      And later still, as the new study of comparative religion attracted me and enabled me to appreciate more accurately the growth of various religious ideas and practices, and among them of the idea and practice of prayer, I made a fresh discovery. It was that the conception of prayer which found itself in difficulties from modern scientific theories was highly characteristic of the more primitive types of religion, and that it was just here--in its conception of prayer--that the Christian religion as illustrated by its greatest masters was most sharply differentiated from those more primitive types. I found, for instance, that prayer, as it first emerged upon the plane of human history, seemed everywhere to be a development of the spell--i. e., of some formula having magical significance by which the invisible powers could [4] be forced to accomplish the results which men desired. When these invisible powers came to be personalised as gods, and so men began to assume distinctively personal relations with them, the spell which formerly compelled was modified into a prayer which might induce the gods to conform to the desires of men. Even in so highly a developed form of religion as was Roman religion in the time of Cicero we find this conception of prayer not only still unchallenged, but even defending itself on reasoned grounds of an ethical necessity. "We do not pray to Jupiter," says Cicero, "to make us good, but to give us material benefits." "All men acknowledge," he continues, "that every material good and all material prosperity come from the gods, but no one has ever referred to God the acquisition of virtue. For it is on account of our virtue that we are with justice praised, it is in our virtue that we legitimately glory; which would not be the case if virtue were a gift from God, and not an achievement of our own. Therefore we must pray to God for the gifts of fortune, but wisdom we must acquire for ourselves." It is evident that Cicero is there concerned to vindicate the entire freedom of the will as the sine quâ non of human virtue. If virtue were a gift of the gods, it would be in no sense a human achievement. And the quite obvious implication of that argument is that prayer is a request to God for those things, and for those things only, which man cannot provide and acquire for himself. Now, I do not deny [5] that even such a defective conception of prayer as that is capable of being highly moralised. We need not, I think, be at all surprised to find Pliny saying that "the gods delight not so much in the accurate repetition of prayer as in the innocence and holiness of those who pray, and that he who brings to their shrines a pure and chaste heart is more pleasing to them than he who offers a well-turned hymn of praise." The gods, indeed, may be more propitious to the virtuous soul; but they are no doubt well aware that what even the virtuous man requires of them is some temporal blessing which he could not by his own unaided effort procure.

      Now, it is by analysing carefully the various implications of this conception of prayer that we shall most easily establish, point by point, what prayer, according to the uniform testimony of Christian theologians, is not. The conception of which I have been speaking implies that the freedom of the will on which human virtue depends is absolute, and that any Divine interference with it must rob it of its virtuous quality and results. The Christian conception is the exact opposite of that. It holds that the will achieves and maintains its freedom only through the operation of Divine grace; that is to say, that our original and deepest nature, though it bears upon itself the native impress of divinity, is yet so much in bondage to a heritage of evil tendency and habit that it needs the Divine co-operation and assistance at every stage of its struggle against this [6] heritage and of its upward ascent towards full self-mastery. Human virtue, therefore, is always and everywhere dependent on, not independent Divine assistance. Again, the Ciceronian conception implies throughout that prayer is a means of persuading the gods to satisfy our desires, to provide for our necessities, and especially for the necessities of the physical substructure of our life. It finds the objects of prayer in the universal needs of man on the physical plane. And by constituting these needs, however universal and legitimate, the sole object of prayer, it inevitably suggests to the individual that he, too, may without offence present his own supposed needs, the most occasional and the most illegitimate, to the gods and pray for their satisfaction. The uniform Christian tradition, on the other hand condemns as of the nature of blasphemy every attempt or desire to bend the Divine will to our own. It conceives of prayer as the costing and difficult uplifting of our wills towards God's. It therefore requires as an indispensable antecedent of all acts of prayer an anxious desire to learn with the highest possible degree of certitude what is the will of God. It enjoins the most confident and fervent prayer for all those things which are beyond all doubt or question according to His will. And those for the Christian are just the things for which, according to Cicero, no one would think of praying to God. And as to those things for which alone the Roman prayed, and prayed with a simple and unthinking [7] confidence, the most careful Christian teaching has always insisted upon our necessary ignorance as to whether they are according to the Divine will or not, and has therefore impressed upon us the necessity of praying for them, if at all, with that reservation. And, above all, it has most consistently taught that the true attitude of prayer always includes a simple and even joyful acceptance of all the unavoidable pains and disabilities of our lives as, if so accepted, richly ministrant and contributory to our spiritual growth. In other words, it has planted the cross at the heart and centre of the prayer-life.

      But there are two further points of contrast between these two conceptions of prayer which, though less apparent, are perhaps more fundamental still. The first is that in such prayer as Cicero refers to, it is mere man that prays. Man presents himself before God in and from the midst of his natural desires and necessities. The consistently characteristic Christian view has been that mere man cannot pray at all, that no movement of desire on the part of the natural man can constitute real prayer. It is God in us that prays. It is our nature penetrated by the Divine Spirit and assisted by the Divine grace that is alone capable of prayer in the full Christian sense. Prayer on this view is an essentially supernatural act. The natural man, man remaining within the circle of natural desire and appetite, is incapable of true prayer. The second distinction to which I have referred is a corollary of this. For the [8] less spiritually developed religions prayer is a natural act, or rather a series of discontinuous acts, of the natural man. For Christianity it is a continuous spiritual state within which separate acts, indeed, find their place, and to the support and even the gradual formation of which they can contribute. But the simplest act of prayer of the Christian type is already an effect of Divine inspiration, and it is not their mere repetition, however frequent, but their separate and varied representation of a continuously inspired state of soul that constitutes them authentic instances of prayer.

      The history of prayer has, so far as I know, not as yet been even attempted.^* But the data furnished by anthropology and the allied sciences are being so rapidly accumulated that it ought soon to be possible to attempt it with some fulness. And when it comes to be written, it will be found that at no point is Christianity more clearly and sharply distinguished from all earlier forms of religion, including the earlier Israelitish religion as we know it from the more primitive elements of the Old Testament record, than in its doctrine of prayer. Indeed, to the mere historian of religion, concerned only with the gradual development of the various elements which are common to all religions and provided with abundant data for the study of such development, nothing can be more surprising than the width and depth of the chasm which separates [9] the Christian conception of prayer from all more primitive conceptions. He may well wonder even at the sureness of spiritual instinct with which the great Christian theologians selected amongst and interpreted the materials of revelation. It would have been easy for them, for instance, to interpret much of the figurative language used even by our Lord Himself in enforcing the need of earnestness and importunacy in asking, so as to support quite primitive and degraded conceptions of prayer. And, as a matter of fact, popular Christianity has very often yielded to this temptation, and with unconscious blasphemy has literalised the hyperbole of some of our Lord's parables into an advocacy and defence of practices which are hardly distinguishable from such magical perversions as the prayer-wheel of the Buddhists. Yet it would be impossible, I think, to find a single instance of such an aberration in any of the great teachers who have shaped the Christian doctrine of prayer. That doctrine of itself distinguishes Christianity as the crown an summit of religious attainment among men. I do not, indeed, mean to affirm that such a doctrine is altogether unknown to other religions. Most of the more advanced religions, and especially Judaism and Mohammedanism, have produced individual mystics and even large mystical coteries among whom much the same conception of prayer has prevailed. But Christianity alone has taught it as its approved and uniform doctrine. [10]

[PCT 1-10]