THE doctrine of prayer whose history has occupied us throughout these chapters has, it must be admitted, had much less influence in shaping the popular conception and practice of prayer within practically all the Christian Churches than its great and constant authority would have warranted us in expecting. Some enquiry into the reasons for this comparative failure seems forced upon us. Well, in the first place, there is the broad fact--sufficiently attested by the comparative study of religion--that in all the higher religions there is a tendency to retain, almost unaltered, some of the most primitive conceptions and usages. Magic itself, which nearly all competent students comparative religion now regard as distinct both in character and origin from religion, has nevertheless been converted to religious uses, and persists in some form and degree in even the most spiritual religions. And in prayer especially the most primitive and the most spiritually developed types of idea and practice may subsist side by side, even within the same soul. In prayer we are all, or ought [117] all to be, children, or at least to preserve some of the childlike simplicity of spirit. And the simplicity of the child or of the childlike means not so much an absence of complexity of motive as an absence of the feeling that motive is or can be complex. To a child symbol and reality are almost one. That is a fine touch of Goethe's where he makes the evil spirit whisper in Gretchen's ear as she kneels in the great Cathedral overborne by remorse

Halb Kinderspiele, halb Gott im herzen. In the prayer that rises from the most ignorant heart, if only that heart has kept its simplicity and childlikeness, there may be something which is hardly distinguishable from belief in magic, something of the child's confusion of values, of its wilful confidence in an unreal world shaped by its own imagination. But there is also in it some witness to God's presence in the heart. The childlike always pray better than they know. Even when some bitter need in them cries almost wilfully for its self-determined satisfaction, even when some poignant grief in them seems to dictate, as it were, the manner of its consolation, it is, after all, God that they are really seeking for and that [118] they really find. For God can, and does, inspire to genuine prayer the secret, unconscious depths even of the heart that in its surface consciousness clings most tenaciously to its own illusory sense of the satisfaction it needs. To deny all this would be the merest religious pedantry. Yet it remains that growth in prayer means an ever surer insight into what is most certainly God's will for us, an ever stronger desire for those gifts of His own nature which cost us most to receive and to utilise, an ever readier acceptance of the unavoidable hardness and sternness in the conditions of our life as the discipline we somehow need.

      But assuredly the principal reason for the perversion or degradation of the Christian conception of prayer among us is a more respectable one than the habit ingrained in all of us to import something of a magical element into our religious belief and practice. It is nothing more or less than the difficulty of realising the conception of prayer which we have been considering in the changed circumstances of our lives and with our changed outlook upon life. The same difficulty did not present itself to the inhabitants of the cloister. It was at least possible for them to lead the prayer-life. They had so arranged all the outer circumstances and conditions of their existence as to make them an intentional, and in fact most efficacious, discipline for the life of prayer. For us, on the contrary, amid all the distractions of the world, caught up in the meshes of its [119] innumerable interests and activities, it is immeasurably more difficult to make prayer the central and controlling principle of life. Almost in spite of ourselves, prayer becomes for us a discontinuous series of acts inserted as by a kind of spiritual violence into another series of acts which is practically continuous, and which is, besides, of a quite different and apparently conflicting order. The question which we are forced to ask is whether the quality of prayer must necessarily be reduced by this enlarged variety of world activities. But before attempting an answer to that question, and by way of giving more cogency to our answer, we must first put two other questions. Was the monastic simplification of life necessary to the religious life conceived of as the continuous life of prayer? And, even prior to that, was the monastic limitation of human interests and activities permanently possible?

      Now, in considering this last question first, I will assume that man's life is governed not only by instinct, but by reason also. For if man were governed by instinct only, and in so far as he yields only to instinct, there can be no doubt that any and every artificial limitation of his interests is impossible. His expanding capacities will always demand free room for their exercise. It is only our reason that, condemning some exercise of our instinctive capacities as hurtful or prejudicial to interests which we hold to be supreme, can and will restrain the lower capacities and interests. Now, in the immense widening of human interest [120] and effort which has marked especially the later Christian centuries and has been most evident in Christian countries, we must see, I think, not merely the blind impulse of instinct, but the considered verdict of approval by the Christian reason. We do not hesitate, indeed, to speak of Christian civilisation, which is only another name for this enlargement of human interests and activities during the Christian era and among the Christian peoples, as proof positive and sufficient of the religious supremacy of Christianity. Somewhat summarily, as I think, we adjudge secular progress to have been the accompaniment and result of religious superiority. Personally, I am far from attributing to that more or less accidental coincidence of the two in history the religious significance which many Christian apologists so unhesitatingly assign to it. But it does at least prove that the Christian reason has affirmed its belief that the permanent limitation of human interests is not only actually, but morally impossible, that it would involve necessarily some diminution and curtailment of man's full spiritual life. And if here the Christian reason has answered correctly, it is clear that the other question which I put is answered also. If the possibilities of richness, depth and fulness in the spiritual life are enlarged by the widening of our interests and activities, then the artificially simplified economy of the monastic life is not permanently necessary to the prayer-life even as Christianity conceives it. For that prayer-life is [121] just the spiritual life at its richest, deepest, fullest.

      We are free, then, to consider our original question, which was: Must prayer be reduced from a permanent spiritual state to a discontinuous series of acts by our immersion in world-affairs? Clearly our answer must be an unhesitating "No." Otherwise the widening of our interests will not prove to be that spiritual gain which we just now claimed that it could become. And at first sight it certainly seems difficult to find that promise of spiritual gain in widened interests with the multiform activities which they entail. It is in concentration, intensity, and the limitation which they ordinarily involve, that we usually and rightly look for strength. But, after all, concentration does not always involve limitation of interest. However wide the circle of interests, if they are all being compelled towards the common centre, there is concentration. And the wider the circle, the more difficult certainly, but also the more enriching, is the work of concentration. The discipline involved in subjecting all our varied interests in the open field of our modern world-life to the one central interest of making God's will prevail is infinitely sterner than was the ancient discipline of the cloister. It is, of course, easier to evade it. The temptations to refuse it are infinitely greater. But for him who would take the service of God seriously, it is the discipline imposed by the conditions of our modern life. Let us take a concrete instance, and to [122] make it as typical as possible let it be that of a man, as we say, "in business." The very phrase--with its passive preposition--is significant, for it indicates from the beginning the very limited measure of control which the man has over his own activities. He may or he may not have founded his own particular business, but whichever be the case, he finds that that business of his is related to a vast business world, that it is part of a huge world-organisation which is quite independent of him, which existed before and will exist after him, and yet within which his own personal success or failure must be decided. Now, it is clear that his success as a business man will depend upon something more than concentration on his own special and limited sphere of labour. Mere hard work will not be sufficient. His work must be also intelligent. He must try to understand how his business affects, and is affected by, the general world of business. And in proportion to the breadth and suppleness of his intelligence, he will then come to see his own special business in its relation to an ever-widening series of business interests with which indeed he has no immediate concern, but whose success on the whole means his success and whose failure his failure. His work, therefore, cannot afford to be a mere blindly exclusive concentration on his own immediate business interest. It must include also an intelligent harmonisation of that interest with all the larger and wider business interests beyond it with which it is connected. [123] It is, of course, always possible for the clever rogue or for the deliberately self-centred person to turn this larger intelligence of his entirely to his own personal account. He can choose some specially favourable moment to promote his own particular interest by sacrificing and defrauding the known claims of the general interest. But suppose he is a man of conscience. Then he will seek more and more to place his own interest in its due relation to all the other interests with which it is normally related, and ultimately to the general and inclusive interest of a humanity founded on righteousness and increasingly seeking righteousness. He will not need to sacrifice wholly any one interest, even the smallest, even that of his own immediate material success. But he will seek to give each interest its due measure, and he will find that that involves a supreme and always primary concentration upon the highest and most general interest. He will have discovered, almost unconsciously, the secret of the ancient wisdom: "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."

      And what is that concentration upon the supreme and general human interest but what the ancient masters of the spiritual life meant by prayer? They conceived of the constant spiritual state which they called prayer as consisting of two stages, which they named meditation and contemplation. And though they sometimes spoke of those stages as if they were successive, as if it were necessary [124] to pass through the one in order to reach the other, and as if when the higher had been reached the lower was definitely left behind, yet they more generally and more wisely recognised that the two stages might be simultaneous, and that for their due contribution to the life of prayer they ought to be so. Now, what they meant by these two stages in the life of prayer may be very simply defined as the anxious and constant effort to know God's will and the loving recognition of, and delight in, that will. That is what all men need to-day, as always, for the right living of their life in the world. Behind and right throughout all their activities they need the beneficent action of the life of prayer as the salt which will keep those activities pure and life-giving to humanity. And there alone, within their activities will prayer become real. There alone will it be first meditation, an anxious and constant effort to learn what God's will is. We can never learn God's will in abstracto, in some spiritual void exhausted of the authentic effort of our human will. It is only inside our work that we can learn it truly and realise all the cost that that learning involves. And there too, alone, within our work can we find the spontaneous delight and satisfaction there is for man in doing the will of God, in serving that higher ideal good which is the very stuff of man's eternal life, which gives him the sure earnest of it here and prepares him for the more abundant entrance into it hereafter. We may perhaps feel that this doing of [125] God's will as it must be done in our modern world looks strangely different from what the old Christian monks meant by the doing of His will. But in substance there is no difference. They, too, felt strongly and earnestly insisted that only within work inspired by the spontaneously unselfish will could prayer, the uplifting of the heart to the Divine service, subsist. Let me quote some wise and profound words of a modern Roman Catholic theologian: "It is well never to forget that nothing, and least of all God, the deepest of all the realities, is known to us at all, except in and by means of its relation to our own self or to our fellow-creatures. Hence, if love were pure only in proportion as it could be based upon our apprehension of God as independent of all relation to ourselves, pure love would be simply impossible for us. But in truth such a conception would be false in itself; it would imply that the whole great Incarnation fact and doctrine was taking us, not towards, but away from, our true goal." There is the root of the matter. God is not to be found in some dehumanised void of the soul's wilful making. He is to be found where He has deigned to place Himself in order that we might know Him at all--in the midst of our human relations. There alone is it possible for us men to serve Him, and there He condescends to ask for our service. It is only through our fellow-men that we can serve God. And it is only the God in them that we can love and serve immediately. And even when that love [126] and service carry us on to some further vision of God which seems beyond our human sphere, that vision is still but an ideal of what humanity might be and ought to be. That is what the Incarnation, both as fact and doctrine, means. God has ordained that all our knowledge of Him and His will should be mediated to us through the relations inherent in our human state.

      So, then, our question is answered. The quality of prayer has not been necessarily reduced by the immense increase in the interests and activities of our modern world. More than ever is prayer, as a constant spiritual state, needed as the leaven of those activities. The supreme need of our complex modern life is not the suppression of a single legitimate interest which it has evolved, but the subordination of all its other interests to, and their due co-operation in, the supreme interest of the making of the Kingdom of God, the extension and deepening of the Divine justice in human relations--not arbitrary simplification of interests, but their unification as a single instrument of the Divine will. Each of us who would have his share in life so conceived and lived must recover and make his own the old Christian conception of prayer. The reduced conception of prayer which has become so widely current among us is not sufficient for our needs. Let me, as conclusion to what I have written, quote some words of a contemporary master of the spiritual life, Bishop Gore: "Prayer is not to be an attempt to persuade God to do what He had not [127] intended to do. If we could succeed in doing that, it would be to our loss. Prayer is a method of liberating the hand of God to do what He would do, but cannot do unless we correspond with His will. Intelligent correspondence with the purpose of God--that is the spirit of effective work, and the spirit of all science; and that is the spirit of effective prayer. It is marvellous how many of the objections urged against the reasonableness of praying fall to the ground at once when this principle is really grasped. . . . The true liberation of human faculties lies in the abandonment of all wilfulness, all foolish imperiousness; it lies in perfect submission of will to the Divine order; and this perfect submission, so far from leading to quietism or apathy, is to stimulate to vigorous correspondence the man who now knows himself to be a fellow-worker with God." [128]

[PCT 115-128]