CONCERNING PRAYER

ITS NATURE, ITS DIFFICULTIES AND ITS VALUE

BY

THE AUTHOR OF 'PRO CHRISTO ET ECCLESIA'

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

COPYRIGHT 1916 (Expired)

First Edition May 1916 Reprinted June 1916

Digital Version 1.00

by www.arfalpha.com

Created March 2003

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

TORONTO

I

II

III

INTRODUCTION

In all the Churches of late there has resounded a call to Prayer. It has met with singularly little response. The reason is not far to seek. The present generation is ready to respond to a call for high service - that has been demonstrated by the War - but the times do not allow men to put thought and effort into anything unless they are convinced that it is well worth while. And at the back of most men's minds there is the belief, more or less clearly defined, that Prayer is an activity the value of which is so open to question, that for the men and women who have to carry on the world's work it decidedly is not worth while; it may safely be left to ministers and monks and to pious ladies who have nothing else to do.

By many even of the more religiously-minded today the whole conception of Prayer is felt to be full of perplexing questions. Can we believe in Providence at all; or in what spirit can we pray to the Creator of a world so full of misery? Has Prayer any meaning in a Universe governed by universal Law? If God wills our good and knows our needs, why tell Him of them in Prayer? What practical results ought we to expect from Prayer ?

IV

CONCERNING PRAYER

 What ought we to think of God's relation to human sin and to the Power of Evil in the world? The Mystics - have they anything to teach us ? What are we to say of the Old Testament and its teaching in regard to God and man? What bearing on actual life have the rites and practices of Christian Worship?

The conclusion of Peace will leave Europe for many years face to face with economic, political and social problems of unexampled difficulty; and a solution of these will have to be attempted by nations financially exhausted, vitally weakened and depressed by the acute moral and psychological reaction which, humanly speaking, must necessarily follow an epoch of intense strain. Nothing but the sober determination, the quickened insight and the disinterested devotion, due to the permeation of society by some great and creative spiritual force, can avail to meet the situation. Veni Creator Spiritus. In those who really believe in God the urgency of the need begets a presumption that it will be met - but not necessarily in the way in which any of us expect. "The wind bloweth where it listeth," and "in an hour that ye think not the Son of Man cometh."

The possibility of Moral and Religious Revival is being talked of and worked for in all the Churches. The danger is that when it comes they will ignore, or even strive to quench, the Spirit, because it appears first in some unexpected quarter or expresses itself in some unfamiliar forms. It is probable, indeed, that a genuine Religious Revival would confound the cherished theories of many of those who have most to say about it. 

V

INTRODUCTION

"Woe unto you that desire the Day of the Lord." It will mean the disappearance of much that is prominent in conventional religion, along with the emergence of much that is new and the revivification of much that seems now dead. And it will demand that men bring to the solution of the problems of life not only good intentions and exalted emotions, but enterprise and courage, steady resolution and disciplined intelligence.

At such an epoch the duty of the Churches is not to attempt to call down fire from Heaven or to prescribe to the Holy Ghost what should be His next effort. It is to "prepare the way of the Lord," to help men to an attitude of mind that will enable them to recognize the Spirit when He comes, and to be themselves receptive and responsive to His influence. And in the main this means recalling men to the contemplation of things eternal and to the realization of God's love and power which is the essence of true Prayer. On a clear recognition of this more than on anything else depends the question whether organized efforts like a National Mission will do good or harm.

But if this be true it entails upon the Churches another duty, that of clear thinking about the perplexities men feel as to the nature and value of Prayer. Unless along with the summons to Prayer it is made evident to men why and in what way it is reasonable to pray, the exhortation to do so is likely too often to fall on deaf ears. Doubtless the clarification of ideas and the removal of intellectual difficulties in itself will do no more than the elaboration of machinery to produce a revival in Religion, but the failure to face this task may well make a revival impossible within the Churches.

VI

CONCERNING PRAYER

Yet nothing is more obvious than the fact that the majority even of keen Christians have no very clear ideas of the answers to be given to the questions which are most frequently being asked today. Nor is it certain that all those who possess clear ideas are in possession of ideas which are also true.

In this volume a lady, three laymen, two parish clergymen, two clerical dons - all Anglicans - a Wesleyan theological tutor, a Congregational minister, and an American professor belonging to the Society of Friends, put forward some thoughts which are the result of a sustained corporate effort to clear up their own ideas on this important matter. Most of them have been able to meet regularly at a series of conferences in which subjects were discussed, and essays previously drafted were frankly criticized, to be rewritten and again discussed at later meetings. Besides the actual writers of the essays, the conferences were regularly attended by Miss M. E. Campbell, by whom the Indices have been compiled, by Miss M. S. Earp and occasionally by other friends, whose presence contributed a valuable element to the discussions.

That so many fellow workers in such a field, approaching from so many different points of view, should have reached unanimity on all these subjects was not to be expected. All through they have endeavoured neither to establish nor to defend positions

VII

INTRODUCTION

but simply to follow truth, and in seeking truth together each has learnt much from others. But differences of opinion, even on important points, have not entirely disappeared. Each writer is therefore finally responsible only for what occurs in his own contribution.

The writers are under no illusion as to their personal competency to plumb to the depths the great matters which they have essayed to treat. But frank discussion between men and women inheriting different religious traditions, and mutual criticism in an atmosphere of corporate devotion and spiritual fellowship, seem to help the individual to a wider and deeper vision than he would be capable of attaining alone. Believing therefore that they have themselves learnt much, they hope that they may be found to have something to offer to others who in these days are feeling the perplexities of existence, to help them to lift up their hearts with a greater confidence towards the Source of all light, of all power and of all consolation.

CUTTs END, CUMNOR, February 1916.

B. H. S. L. D.

VIII

I

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN

BY

BURNETT H. STREETER

CANON RESIDENTIARY OF HEREFORD

FELLOW AND THEOLOGICAL LECTURER OF QUEEN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD

EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE BISHOP OF HEREFORD

EDITOR OF ^"FOUNDATIONS,^" AUTHOR OF ^"RESTATEMENT AND REUNION

SYNOPSIS

I

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN

FAITH, PRAYER AND SUFFERING

"All things are possible to him that believeth." But in Europe today, as thousands of the best and noblest are being daily added to a casualty list which already exceeds ten millions, and when the fate of Belgium seems fortunate beside that of Serbia and Armenia, it seems to many that all things indeed are possible except belief in a God of Love.

At the beginning of the War there was in all countries, most of all, I am told, in Germany, a sudden rush to the Churches for prayer - to the God of Battles. That rush has long ago ceased, and of those who persevere, how many are really deprecating on behalf of some loved one the vengeance of a God of Wrath? How many still pray to a God of Love, but do so in doubt rather than in trust? Yet, to our Lord, prayer is less petition than uttered trust. "Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him." To Him the efficacy and value of prayer was proportionate to the completeness of the trust it implies. "When ye pray, believe that ye receive and ye shall have." With uncompromising audacity He teaches that if we have faith as a grain of mustard seed we can root up mountains. Believe and accomplish the incredible. Is this raving lunacy or is it true ? The question is vital. For if it is true it is the most important of all truths.

Page 3

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 4

There was, it would seem, a moment when, in face of the evident triumph of the power of evil in the world, the Master Himself hesitated. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The twentysecond Psalm, from the opening verse of which the words are taken, ends on a very different note - the note of triumph and exultation. Hence some scholars have supposed that to our Lord's mind those words according to our earliest Gospel the last articulated utterance of the dying Christ - recalled to His mind, as it were in epitome, the whole Psalm with its movement through despair to the joy of victory. I prefer myself a simpler interpretation. I believe that to Him as to so many of His followers it was given to drink to the very dregs the cup of desolation, and that the consciousness of triumph was not enjoyed by Him on this side of the grave. In any case, the passage tells that the Master Himself had passed in heart and mind, as well as in body, through the valley of the shadow of death "the iron entered into his soul."

He had taught that not one sparrow falls to the ground without our Father, and that the very hairs of our head are all numbered. Was not such confidence completely disproved by the final event of His own life ? We might indeed be tempted to dismiss offhand our Lord's whole conception of an overruling Providence as the kind of view which could only be entertained by one who had lived an idyllic life in quasi-cloisteral seclusion removed from all real contact with the evil of the world. But there is no reason to believe that Palestine under the Herods offered conspicuous opportunities for such an idyllic life. Moreover, the perception of the reality of evil is at least as conspicuous in our Lord's teaching as is the emphasis on the Providence of God. If Christ taught the goodness of God and the love of God with more persistence and clearness than any who preceded Him, He did so with the explicit recognition that there is constantly operating in the world a Power or powers of evil hostile to, and always endeavoring to thwart, the Divine Goodness.

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN      PAGE 5

In traditional popular theology the spiritual principle of evil has come to be represented in a mythological form. The Devil of popular theology and religious art - a grotesque and absurd figure - has been laughed out of existence by the ordinary educated man. Moreover, the age which is passing away has been an age of long peace, characterized by an immense increase of material prosperity, and in addition by very real, if somewhat over-advertised, political reform and humanitarian advance. It has been possible, at least among the more comfortable classes, to underestimate the reality and importance of the forces of evil in the world. That mistake is no longer possible. We are being forced to recognize that, like many other ancient institutions, the conception of the Power of Darkness in the world needed not to be abolished but reformed. It was never very plausible, it is now quite impossible, to speak of the Divine Providence as an overruling influence which guarantees that, all appearance to the contrary, whatever happens in this world is somehow good. Such a doctrine would imply that the Kingdom of God had already come. But that is emphatically not the teaching of the New Testament. The Kingdom of God, the state of things, that is, when "His Will is done on earth, as it is in Heaven," is always represented in the New Testament as something which is, indeed, certain to come, but which has not come yet; the beginning of it may be already here but decidedly "the end is not yet."

We may not, then, dismiss to the land of beautiful dreams that faith in God taught and lived in by our Lord without studying more exactly His teaching as to the nature of the rule of Providence on earth. So doing we find that essentially it comes to this, God's Providence is conceived of in terms of battle.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 6

 It is as though God might be compared to a General, who is indeed certain of ultimate victory, but who knows that the victory will only be attained by long and severe fighting and at the cost of enormous losses. But, on the other hand, the analogy of the General breaks down in one essential particular. The human General thinks in terms of companies and battalions: his aim is the victory of the army as a whole. Individual losses, partial and local reverses are just so much sheer loss, regrettable but inevitable, to be written off the total account like bad debts from a tradesman's ledger. But the mind of God has not these anthropomorphic limitations. He thinks not only in terms of battalions but also in terms of individuals, and His victory consists, not merely in the advance of the army as a whole, but also in the power to transform temporary and local losses and reverses into actual gains. Evil is evil and loss, but God has the power out of and through the evil and the loss to bring good and gain, just as the farmer can make the filth of the midden the source of renewed fertility to his land.

The Danish philosopher Hoffding, in a famous phrase, has summed up the essence of religion as "belief in the Conservation of Value," that is, as the conviction that good in the moral sphere, like energy in the physical, can never be destroyed, but only transformed, so that what appears to be lost inevitably returns in another form. But Christianity is more than a belief in the Conservation of Value; it is above all a belief in the Augmentation of Value. It is the belief that the whole creation will ultimately be redeemed, that the Golden Age is to be looked for not in the past but in the future, and that whenever any good thing seems to perish there will appear to take its place, not merely an equivalent good, but some far better thing. Through the whole New Testament runs this note; after tribulation, restoration, after Crucifixion, Resurrection, after Armageddon the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of Heaven. "Death is swallowed up in victory."

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 7

Christianity is not, as Goethe called it, the "worship of sorrow." It worships not the dying but the ascended Christ. It is the one religion which believes that evil can be conquered, that sorrow can be turned into joy, and that those whose sins are as scarlet can be washed whiter than snow - all things being transmuted through and by and in the power of the Spirit of God revealed in Christ. "Behold I make all things new."

It follows that resignation to the Will of God is not, as is commonly supposed, a characteristically Christian virtue; though it is often the best that most of us can attain to. Resignation implies regret, but the acceptance of the decision of One who loves us as well as we do ourselves and knows far better what is good for us, is not a matter for regret. When Christ prayed, "Nevertheless not my will but thine be done," He was not reluctantly accepting the second best. Not resignation, then, but confidence, is the characteristic Christian attitude.

This is what the Christian means by faith. Is that its right name? Or would Delusion be the better word ? "Faith," says the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "is the giving substance to things hoped for, it is a deliberated judgment about things unseen." It is emphatically not irrational, yet it is not purely intellectual. It is a commitment of the whole man. On its warmly personal side it is loyalty and devotion to leader or cause, on its sternly moral side it is the courage which rises higher in the hour of darkness, in its purely intellectual aspect it is the progressive verification of a hypothesis, reasonable but as yet unproved.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 8

But, in so far as belief in the goodness of God is a purely intellectual hypothesis, can we say that it is in process of verification? Is it not rather one that is in process of being disproved?

Sin and suffering are always with us. The problem of evil did not first come into existence in August 1914, and the fact that the sufferings of today are on so vast a scale in no way alters the intrinsic nature of the problem, it only forces it upon our attention. To the Christian philosopher the death of a single innocent child presents as great a difficulty as the massacre of millions. It is the existence of any evil at all, not the extent of the evil, which challenges the belief in the goodness of an Infinite God.

If the Power behind the Universe is a conscious intelligence at all, it must and can only be an intelligence to which the infinitely little and the infinitely great are equally and simultaneously present to , he may even perhaps know where every single battalion and even company is, he cannot know the character of every individual soldier. On the other hand, a sergeant may know the idiosyncrasies of every soldier in his own platoon, but he cannot have the same grasp of the fortunes of the whole campaign. But God is not so limited. To God, if there be a God at all, the movements of millions must necessarily be no more and no less clearly known than the fate consciousness. The Power which upholds the Universe of immeasurable distances, which we survey through the telescope, is equally responsible for the infinitesimally organized delicacy of the world which the microscope reveals. Human intelligence is limited by the capacity of the human brain. It can only attend to, it can only clearly grasp a limited number of issues at a time. The same man cannot at the same time attend equally to big things and to little. The chief of the General Staff may have a clear survey of the position as a whole of a single sparrow that falls to the ground. And if God is really good, a case of petty bullying in an infant school is as real a problem as the devastation of Europe.

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 9

The contrary notion is plausible only in so far as our imagination necessarily leads us to think of God under human analogies, as if He were a merchant who deals only in wholesale quantities. If, then, the problem is one which admits of a solution at all, the solution must be one which holds good equally in the field of world-history and in that of the individual life.

At any time, but especially in a time like this, a book on the meaning of Prayer is one in which the problem of suffering must be fairly faced. But this mystery of mysteries cannot be lightly penetrated, and no one but a fool will profess to supply any cut-and-dried solution. I would say then at once that it has not been given to me to surprise the secret which has from the beginning baffled the best and wisest of mankind. What I have to say contains little that is new. It is all to be found in the New Testament. Yet I have seemed to myself under the stress of the present crisis to have seen things in the New Testament which I had not seen there before or had seen less clearly; so I venture to write it down, in the hope that it may help some others to read that book with different eyes.

In the New Testament no pretense is made that the solution put forward is what a philosopher would call a complete solution, for it is one which, it is suggested, must be accepted in the last resort by faith and not by sight. But faith, in the New Testament, did not mean belief in that which, is unreasonable, but in that which is reasonable but not quite. That is to say, the New Testament gives what a philosopher would call a "provisional solution." But a solution which from a purely philosophical standpoint is only a provisional solution, is not therefore, I would submit, an unsatisfactory one.

In the very nature of the case no more is possible. For, unless we dogmatically rule out the possibility of any life beyond the grave and of any sphere of existence beyond our human ken, it is clear that it is improbable that the facts before us are sufficiently representative to make a certain induction possible.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 10

Moreover, as will be shown later, much of the heroism, the adventure, and the nobility of life would be impaired if we saw all this as clearly here as we hope to do hereafter.

LIVES CUT SHORT

In the first place, let me address myself to a question which is being asked in every village, I had almost said in every home, in Europe. Every day we hear of young lives cut off in their prime; every week we hear of some great hearted men, admirably fitted to do great and noble service in a world which is all too empty of men willing and able to perform such service, taken away with all their possibilities of good unrealized. We comfort ourselves with various reflections. A noble death in a good cause we may reflect can never be wholly evil, Dulce et decorum estpro patria mori: and all who believe in immortality may take comfort from the conviction that the individual himself is enjoying his reward in a better world. But such a belief, however firmly entertained, can never remove our sense of loss and waste. Whatever may be the case with the heroic dead, we are the poorer for their loss. With them it may be well, but this world seems infinitely the poorer for the lack of them and of all that they might have done. Which of us has not in mind instances of men of quite exceptional promise cut off thus with all that promise unfulfilled, all those possibilities unrealized?

To this problem, as I said before, I know of no "cut and dried" and finally satisfactory answer. But there is one reflection which has seemed to bring much light to my own mind. I mean the reflection that the life of the Founder of Christianity Himself was preeminently the life of one uniquely endowed with the possibility of doing good in the world, who was nevertheless cut off in His prime at the very beginning of a career of work of unparalleled value to His race. Given twenty, thirty,

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 11

or forty years of active work, and there seems to be no limit to the influence for good which a great and noble life may exercise. The life of Thomas Arnold and the moral revolution he introduced into English education is a case in point. Other instances of what a single good man can accomplish will occur to every one. We cannot help asking, what could not our Lord have done had He lived on earth to a ripe old age - with His unique insight into moral and religious issues, with His matchless power of forcible and clear expression, His magic gift of personal influence, His power to educate and to inspire. And this would have happened had the Pharisees been just a trifle more open-minded, had the Sadducees been only a little less apprehensive of popular movements which might impair their own privileges, had not Pilate, like many a statesman before and since, failed just a little in moral courage in the face of popular pressure - and any one or all of these conditions might quite easily have obtained. In that case our Lord would have worked and taught and trained men to carry on His work for another thirty or forty or even fifty years. And the result of such a life's work no one can estimate.

But the forces of evil in the world were strong enough to prevent this. And the fact that the crime was committed which cut short this life of absolutely unique possibility and promise, was a real triumph of the power of evil over good. But it was not a final triumph. The power of God was able not merely to defeat the object of the crime, but to make the crime itself the very means of its own defeat. The Cross which was intended to cut short, and which for the moment seemed to have succeeded in cutting short, His career of good, has proved to be the very means by which its success has been assured. For it is precisely the fact that He was crucified which has given Him His power over men.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 12

The case of Christ is a test case. No doubt, even the noblest of the men we know are men of imperfect lives whose best actions are determined by motives largely mixed; and soldiers are no exception to this rule. Yet we must affirm that any man who voluntarily and readily gives his life for the sake of a cause which he believes to be righteous, is, just in so far as he is purely and consciously doing this, following the example of Christ.

The premature death of such an one is a thing evil and to be deplored, the circumstances which have brought it about are a very real triumph of the power of evil in the world, and the exact and particular possibilities of good which their death has cut off are lost and gone for ever. But, in view of the test case of the death of Christ, I feel that we may yet have a sure confidence that, although the particular line of good work which we hoped for and looked for will not be done in the precise way in which it could and would have been done by them, it will not therefore be left undone. How this result will be achieved we cannot see - neither could the original disciples of our Lord. They at first, like us, saw only the blasting of all their hopes and the complete loss of high and noble possibilities; "We hoped," said they, "that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel." Let us, then, as we mourn the loss of some of whom we too had hoped that they would have done much to redeem their generation, take courage from the experience of the first disciples. A noble life culminating in a heroic death cannot be wasted, its possibilities cannot be unfulfilled - unless we can believe that we cannot believe in God at all - and the test case of the life and death of Christ gives us confidence that our faith is based on reasonable grounds.

ARMAGEDDON AND THE NEW JERUSALEM

Let us turn now to the problem of suffering as it is presented on the larger stage of history. Here it is

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 13

important to observe that much of the teaching of our Lord has a more direct bearing on a World-crisis like the present than most of us had noticed in quieter days. The imminence of a stupendous World-crisis is presupposed throughout the New Testament. It is, indeed, probable that the prophecies about the "End of the Age" attributed to our Lord, have been modified by tradition more than any other class of His sayings during the interval which elapsed before they were committed to writing, under the influence of the Apocalyptic ideas which were taken over from later Judaism into the primitive Church. ¹ And as it is impossible to be sure of the original form of some of these sayings, so it is also impossible to say how far the language He used was meant to be taken in a strictly literal sense, especially as in all Apocalyptic there was an avowedly symbolic element. It seems, however, certain that He anticipated the complete destruction of the existing world order, involving the disappearance both of the Roman Empire and of the religious system which had its center in the Temple of Jerusalem - the highest embodiments of the then existing civilization on its political and religious sides respectively. This was to be followed by a New Era of blessedness in a reconstituted and spiritually renovated world, the initiation of which is associated with His own Return.

In the Day of Pentecost, in the Church's conquest of the Roman Empire and in subsequent epochs of moral and religious regeneration, modern theologians have seen partial fulfillment of the prophecy of our Lord's Second Coming, that Coming being regarded as invisible and spiritual and as taking place, as it were, by installments .³ This interpretation is only the logical

¹ This influence appears most conspicuously in the elaborate Apocalypse of St. Mark xiii., and the parallel sections in St. Matthew and St. Luke.

² Thus the author of Revelation, in giving the dimensions of the new Jerusalem, makes its height equal to its length and breadth, not because he visualized it thus, but because a cube, being a perfect figure, is an appropriate symbol of the Holy City.

³ Cf. Westcott, The Historic Faith, pp. 90-93.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 14

conclusion of that line of theological development which runs through the whole New Testament and reaches its climax in St. John's Gospel - where the coming of the Paraclete seems almost, if not quite, to take the place held by the visible Second Advent in the Synoptic Gospels. This view I believe to be substantially sound, provided always that it is not maintained that such a conception was clearly and explicitly before the mind of our Lord. To maintain that is, I believe, as untenable as the contrary position of those who argue that He accepted in their most realistic and materialistic sense all the bizarre conceptions of contemporary Apocalyptic.

The minds of the great Hebrew prophets - and it is in them that we get the closest analogies to the mind of our Lord - were neither of a rationalistic nor of a materialistic bent. Their leading characteristic was a power of moral intuition which enabled them to read more readily than contemporaries "the signs of the times." The judgments they passed had reference to the tendencies and institutions of their own time, as seen in the light of their intuitive insight into what they called the Righteousness of the Lord, or into what in modern language one might prefer to call the law of the inevitability of moral consequences.

Since man is a social animal, all antisocial instincts, practices and ideals, all wrong standards of justice or of honor, are of the nature of disease; and disease unchecked means death. Since, again, moral standards and ideals depend in the last resort on man's views about and his valuation of the imponderable and the unseen, false conceptions of God or of man's relation to Him, are no less of the nature of disease. No civilization, no nation, no institution or community has ever existed which has been entirely free from moral and religious disease, just as there is probably no individual alive who is physically entirely healthy. The vital question, however, is not whether disease is present, but, in the struggle within the organism of the forces of

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 15

disease and of health, which of the two is gaining on the other. That is why the repentant Publican is in a more hopeful position than the Pharisee; not because he is a better man - he is not - but because he is growing better, while the other is staying still. For in moral character, both for nations and individuals, to stand still is the same thing as to be slipping backwards. In the physical sphere, the inevitability of the connection of cause and effect, the Reign of Law as we call it, has been one of the latest discoveries of the human mind. In the moral sphere, the Reign of Law, the inevitability of consequences, was already made known to the Hebrew Prophets, but it has not yet been learnt by men at large.

It was by virtue of their grasp on the law of moral inevitability that the Prophets rose above the contemporary conception of a capricious, anthropomorphic tribal Deity to that of God as the moral Governor of the Universe, and in the light of this conception they judged contemporary events. It was because the preservation of Jerusalem was clearly at that time necessary to the conservation of the knowledge of the true God that Isaiah was convinced that the Assyrian would besiege her in vain. It was because the Jewish state and church were detected to be morally bankrupt that Jeremiah knew that the Temple must be destroyed. It was for precisely the same reason (compare especially the decisive passage Luke xii. 54^-57) that it was clear to our Lord's mind that judgment had already gone forth on the Roman Empire and the Jewish Church.

"Except the Lord build the house, their labor is but lost that build it. Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain." Great Empires are founded on "blood and iron," but only by nations which internally are morally sounder than their rivals; and they endure but a short while unless, in the main, justice secures what the sword has won. Where too great success has undermined the moral

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 16

fibre of the ruling nation, or its rule has too little regard to justice and conciliation, a process of decay sets in, which, unnoticed for a time, ends in inevitable collapse. Not otherwise a religious community extends in power and influence by reason of the clearness of its grasp on certain great essentials of moral and religious truth and by the measure of its success in realizing in conduct the highest ideals for which it stands. Let it cease to progress, let it surrender to formalism, insincerity, or the pride of temporal influence, and its doom is sealed. No Empire had succeeded like that of Rome; none had, on the whole, so well deserved success. No religious community had, either in doctrine or in practice, reached the level of the Jewish Church. To the superficial observer it was well with both, but to the prophetic eye both were seen to be stagnant, strangled by their own great past, morally bankrupt, and therefore doomed.

The man of genius or insight necessarily speaks to the men of his own generation and about things which concern that generation, but in exact proportion to the greatness of his insight, what he expresses in relation to the conditions or the problems of his own time, is valid mutatis mutandis for all time. The rule holds good with all great art, literature and philosophy, as well as with the great preachers of righteousness. We should, then, expect it to be preeminently true of our Lord. The "signs of the times" which He bade men observe consisted essentially in moral stagnation disguised under an outward semblance of high civilization or religious activity. These being undoubtedly present He saw the certainty of approaching catastrophe.

But His vision went beyond that great catastrophe to a great hope, to the certainty of a new life and a new inspiration divinely given which should build up out of the ruins of the old a Kingdom of God in which men's sense of moral values, as well as their power of living up to them, would be profoundly changed, and

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 17

the will of God would be done on earth even as in Heaven. The moral and political situation of the contemporary Roman State and Jewish Church, He judged in the light of His intuitive grasp of the character and purposes of God, which express themselves in what I have ventured to translate into modern jargon as the two laws - the Law of the inevitability of moral consequences, and the Law of the Augmentation of Value. Hence the prophecies of destruction and restoration which He spoke in regard to the situation of His own time sum up, as it were in one conspicuous instance, a law that runs through all history, that law which is typified in the legend of the Phoenix rising with youth renewed from the ashes of a dead past.

History is crowded with instances of this law - both on the grand scale and on the small. One or two of the most obvious will occur to every one. We think at once of the horrors of the siege of Jerusalem and of the catastrophic destruction of the Temple and what it stood for. Yet this calamity only lent more freedom and fresh vigour to the Christian Church. We recall the crash of the Roman Empire, which, however, led ultimately to the reinvigoration of European civilization. So, again, the system of the Catholic Church and the mediaeval civilization which it created, when in its turn it had become morally bankrupt, fell after half a century of bloodshed at the Reformation. It fell, but only to be replaced by a richer civilization, and by a sounder religion, within as well as without the Latin allegiance. Once more the new intellectual and ethical spirit, and the new political system which was evolved, became corrupt. Beginning in France, the eldest daughter of the Renaissance, the Age of Reason and Enlightenment went down in blood; but the seeds were sown of a real advance in the moral and political outlook of Europe.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 18

And for us today - is there not comfort and illumination in our Lord's vision of the great tribulation as a necessary precursor of the better things to come In this country, at any rate, we "were eating and drinking and knew not until the flood came," but looking back we can all see that, the moral and political ideals of the nations of Europe being what they were, the catastrophe was inevitable. It is to the moral stagnation of Europe that this war is due. I do not mean to say that there has been no ethical advance in the last hundred years - the contrary is true. But in those same hundred years the advance in knowledge, in invention, in organization, in the control of nature, has been beyond all precedent; and, compared with that advance, the ethical movement has been relatively stagnant. And, in Germany, the country where the advance in these other things has been greatest, the ethical advance has been least. Had the ethical advance been anything like as great as the scientific and material, some alternative to war would long ago have been found. And it is precisely because of the scientific and material progress that modern war is so infinitely more ruinous than war of old. The unprecedented horrors of the present time are solely due to the combination of immense material with trifling moral progress. It is as true, therefore, of our present as of older civilizations that its fall - for it is falling, and the conclusion of peace will not be the end of its collapse - is due to inner moral bankruptcy.

So much of what is perishing in this war, so much of what is likely to perish afterwards from financial starvation and economic revolution was so good, so promising. Religious revival, humanitarian enterprise, political reform, international good understanding seemed all in such a hopeful way. Humanly speaking, it is impossible to see how those values are to be conserved. Not from what we can see, only from what we can believe, can we draw hope.

But let us reflect. In A.D. 70 the Holy City - the headquarters of the highest religion the world had known - was made desolate, and the offering of the central act of worship of that religion was for ever ended. 

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 19

What pious Jew could have known or hoped that, even as he wept, a religion, the consummation of all he prized and hoped for, was at the beginning of a triumphant march over all the then known world ? When St. Augustine, after the sack of Rome, wrote his City of God, to console men for the perishing of all the earthly things they loved, did he suspect that a civilization far transcending it in moral, material and intellectual achievement would one day arise out of the ruins? How many pious nuns in the Reformation Era saw in that epoch of rebellion, in that unprecedented havoc of sacred things, the beginning of a new religious life for Europe? When the French monarchy and aristocracy, so long the standard-bearers of European culture, perished in the Terror, who could see that the civilization of mankind was not permanently impoverished?

Why, then, should we expect to see? But we can hope; nay, unless we are guilty of unreason, we must do more than hope, we can believe.

We have good reason to be confident that God intends to build up a better Europe, a New Jerusalem on the ruins of the old. But - let us not deceive ourselves - we have no reason to suppose that the outward and visible signs of this process will be conspicuously visible at once, perhaps not even within our generation. The birth-pangs of a New Era may yet last long. "But he that endureth to the end the same shall be saved."

THE PURPOSE OF SUFFERING

So far we have found empirical reason for the belief that the Conservation of Value and even the Augmentation of Value is a law of life, that loss is replaced by unexpected gain, destruction by reconstruction on sounder lines. Must we, however, be content to leave it there, and merely to say that as a matter of

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 20

fact gain does follow loss, or can we see at all why this should be the case? Can the gain that follows be shown to be in any way related as a consequence to the loss that precedes? In other words, can we detect a meaning and a purpose in the sufferings of the world? We are now approaching to the heart of the mystery of life, and I would reiterate my belief that no final solution to the problem has yet been found. But I am convinced that the mystery is one which has been made to appear far darker than it really is by the fatal confusion which prevails in many minds between the functions of God and Satan.

War, sickness and other calamities are often spoken of as the act of God; as "judgments" or ^" visitations" sent by Him on men as a punishment for their sins. These things often are the direct consequences of sin, but a consequence can only be called a judgment or punishment in proportion as it falls on the really guilty party and has some equitable relation to the nature of the offence. But these so-called judgments fall with equal severity on innocent and guilty alike. Prussian officers in Belgium have massacred half a village as a punishment for the offence of a single franc-tireur. They have at least the excuse that they had no means of knowing who was the actual offender. No such extenuation can be put forward in the case of a Being presumed to be omniscient, on the assumption that punishment is the explanation of the act. Again, it is obvious that at least half the ills that flesh is heir to are the direct result of ignorance, folly or sin - if not on the part of those who principally suffer, yet on the part of some one else.

But it would seem that ignorance, folly and sin and all their inevitable consequences are ascribed by our Lord to Satan, not to God.¹ And it makes no difference to this ascription whether we regard Satan as a personal Angel of Darkness or as a convenient name for the sum-total influence of all the evil inclinations and errors, the bad customs and false ideals which have originated in the mind of man.

¹ The attribution of all evil to a Power hostile to God is one of the points in which the new Testament is most in advance of the Old. Cf. Amos iii. 6, "Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it."

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 21

No doubt God is responsible for the creation of a world which is so ordered that it really matters to others besides himself what each man is or does, in which causes inevitably produce their natural effects, and in which far reaching consequences are necessarily attached to all our acts - consequences which are beneficent if an act is good, evil if an act is bad. Since God is ultimately responsible for a world in which these laws hold good, we may assume that ultimately the good will overcome the evil. Perhaps (though this is more debatable) we may even assume that, but for the conflict involved in overcoming evil, the ultimate good itself would somehow have been far less good. But that is quite a different thing from saying that things which are obviously bad, or which are clearly the results of remediable ignorance or sin, are a clear expression of the Divine justice and a direct manifestation of the working of the Divine Providence. On the contrary, such things are a manifestation of that principle in the Universe (whether human or diabolic in origin) which is in open rebellion against the Divine Will. God is able to bring good out of evil, but to see the hand of God in the evil itself is an error which is only the more dangerous because it has been shared by many of the great religious leaders of the past. If men are taught to see the hand of God when they ought to see the power of Satan, they inevitably form a false conception of the nature and character of God - and to worship God under a false conception, is the same thing as to worship a false God; and in exact proportion to the element of falseness in the conception, it is idolatry. 

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 22

If sickness and calamity are viewed as a characteristic expression of the will of God, attempts to prevent or alleviate them cannot but seem to be tainted with futility if not impiety; the punishment of criminals or children will necessarily assume a harsher form; and an element of terror and gloom, deprecation and dull servile submission must inevitably colour the whole attitude of the individual, both in his approach to God in prayer and in his general outlook on life. Indeed, the question may well be raised whether the fact that so much of this unconscious idolatry has been mixed with truer and worthier conceptions of God in the popular religion of Christendom may not be largely responsible for the present ineffectiveness of Christianity in the world.

The notion that suffering is a judgment sent by God, and that the sufferings of each individual are equitably proportioned to his own sins has a certain amount of support in the Old Testament, although the Book of Job was expressly written to refute it. But it is definitely repudiated by our Lord. "Neither did this man sin nor his parents, that he was born blind." "He maketh his sun to rise upon the evil and upon the good." "Those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem?"

This does, not, of course, alter the fact already remarked on that most suffering is the actual result of somebody's sin. But for the culpable negligence of somebody the tower in Siloam would doubtless have been in a better state of repair; although it is clear that the person actually responsible was not one of the eighteen on whom it fell. The case is typical. Most human suffering is due to human negligence and sin, or to an ignorance which, but for carelessness and sin, would long ago have been done away. Of the suffering which each one of us has to endure, much is the result, direct or indirect, of our own ignorance, neglect or sin, but quite as much is due to some one else's; while our own sins are as often mainly suffered for by some one else. But it is precisely the fact that no kind of equitable proportion is traceable in this world between men's sufferings and their deserts which precludes us from regarding them as a direct Divine punishment or judgment. But, if suffering is not a form of punishment or judgment, what is its purpose?

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 23

The New Testament does not stop short at the purely negative observation that the suffering of the individual is not proportionate to his sins: it has an answer to give to this question. It affirms that suffering has, or rather may under certain conditions have, a distinct and positive value both for the sufferer and for others. It starts with the case which presents the moral and religious problem we are considering in its acutest and most difficult form, i.e. the case of Christ Himself - the ideally good man brought by the sins of others to an ideally bad end. It asserts that the result of this was positive good, for that through suffering He was Himself "made perfect"; and by that same suffering "he saved his people from their sins," or at least all of them who were ready to adopt a certain attitude of mind and will.

Moreover, in the New Testament view, the case of Christ, though a unique case, is not an isolated one. The same law is alleged to hold good of all men, that for those who accept it in the right spirit, suffering becomes both a means of moral development for the sufferer and a means of redemption to others. So that the followers of Christ may even be said to make up as it were the unpaid balance ¹ of the redemptive sufferings of their Master.

Suffering then is, or at least can be, corrective, educative and redemptive. Such without possibility of cavil is the New Testament view. The question is, Is that view one which is supported, or is it one which is confuted, by the facts of life? Is it a view which will stand the test of experience?

But here again a protest must be made against a widespread popular misconception as to what the New

¹ Col. i. 24.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 24

Testament really does teach. People often speak as if suffering had necessarily and automatically a purifying and ennobling effect independently of how one meets it as if suffering were therefore a thing per se desirable; or as if joy were not an equally educative and equally necessary experience to the saint.

But these contentions are neither true nor do they fairly represent the New Testament. A saint is known, not by his austerities or his gloom but by his exhibition of a spirit whose most conspicuous manifestations are love, joy and peace. Suffering is not a thing to be asked for but to be accepted when it comes, otherwise why did Christ Himself pray that if possible the cup might pass from Him ? It is merely affirmed that in a sinful world suffering is a thing without which the highest results cannot be attained. Again, it is nowhere suggested that suffering always and necessarily elevates and redeems; it depends entirely on the use that is made of it. "All things," it is affirmed, "work together for good," but only "to them that love God." Indeed, in this one text is summed up the New Testament view.

If, then, we are to verify the truth of the Apostle's contention by an appeal to the facts of life, we must first make at least a provisional definition of what we mean by those who "love God." We cannot "love God" perfectly unless we have right knowledge about Him, for we are told to love Him with all our mind as well as with other faculties. Theological truth is therefore an important thing. Nevertheless the love of God is much more a matter of the heart and the will than of the intellect, and it is a thing which is only partially attained to in this world even by the greatest Christian saints. Surely, then, at any rate provisionally and for the purpose of this investigation, we must include under the heading of "them that love God " all whom we can broadly call "men of goodwill," even though the theological beliefs or disbeliefs which they profess may seem to us to fall a long way short of the truth.

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN        Page 25

"All things work together for good to them that love God." Let us treat this dictum as an hypothesis which we are to test by applying it to the facts of experience. It is obvious at first sight, that there is at any rate something to be said for it. It does cover at least some of the facts. All of us know cases of men or women to whom suffering has proved eminently educative. "It has been the making of him" we often say. And all of us know persons whom suffering so far from elevating seems to have either crushed or permanently embittered. And this remarkable difference of result seems to depend not on the nature of the suffering but on the character of the person who suffers. For exactly the same type of misfortune which brings out the latent worth of one person seems to make for the ruin of another. The same be it noted is true of prosperity also. It seems to bring out the best in one man and the worst in another. The moral result of either depends on the way in which the individual reacts towards them, "He that hath, to him shall be given; and he that hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he hath." Sunshine and rain are both necessary to growth - but they bring up the tares as well as the wheat. Prosperity and adversity are the two great educators of mankind, but they are also the great discriminators. They make men, and they find men out.

It is clear then that the New Testament view is, at any rate to some extent, verifiable in relation to the facts of life. It is worth while, therefore, to pursue the investigation a little further. The medicinal value of suffering strikes the eye most and most frequently in the case of persons in whom prosperity has developed either something of that aggressive egotism, or a more genial but essentially luxurious and futile softness - that is to say in cases where there is a grave and obvious moral weakness to be cured. But what is the value of suffering to characters of a nobler type? The New Testament is

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 26

bold to say even of the Master Himself that He was "made perfect through suffering." And this is affirmed by a writer who is emphatic in maintaining that He was without sin. It is suggested, then, that even in the highest type of character, the soul lacks its full development so long as certain of its moral potentialities are latent, so long as they remain mere potentialities.

Experience seems to bear out this judgment. The ideal of character is no placid state of possibilities unfulfilled, some elements at least in it can only be realized through conflict - and though conflict often has in it an element of joy, conflict about vital issues always involves pain. The soldier's heroism is heroism in proportion to the value of life to him who faces death, and to the clearness with which he realizes the risk. Generosity is generosity only when the gift costs the giver much. Patience is only a virtue according to the greatness of the trouble borne and the measure of cheerfulness with which it is endured. And in all these cases being willing to face is not the same thing as having faced and having overcome. When we say of such and such an experience, "It has made a man of him," we speak truth, for it is only in and through action that character realizes itself. "No chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous," but it is a fact of experience that the men and women whom we most revere, to whom in trouble and in difficulty we turn for help and guidance, are always among those who have known suffering, physical or mental. But among those also whom we have least reason to revere there are also many who have suffered much; for it is not suffering per se, but suffering accepted, triumphed over and transcended that educates and ennobles.

In the schoolroom of the soul - a schoolroom in which it should never be forgotten that Joy as well as Sorrow is among the teachers - progress is made not by suffering per se, but only by suffering accepted with a certain attitude of mind, suffering met by a certain orientation of the will.

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 27

But if this is so, we must ask whence, then, comes that attitude of mind, that bent of the will, which alone makes it possible to learn the lessons of that school? The answer to this question will, we shall find, throw further light on the purpose of the sufferings of the nobler souls.

Certain bents of mind, certain embryo attitudes towards life, appear^, so early in the life history of the individual that rightly or wrongly we commonly regard them as innate, but these innate tendencies can to an indefinite extent be modified by the influence of other personalities. For better and for worse character is infectious; and this is especially true of just those elements in character wherein lies the capacity to profit by suffering. Heroism, generosity, cheerfulness under adversity, have an attraction for the human heart which only those can resist who are far gone in selfishness and meanness. Those who will dare all, give all, bear all, have the power to transform and recreate the whole life and character of other men.

To give all, to bear all and to dare all, what is this but to reincarnate the Spirit of Christ? Doubtless there is an admixture of selfishness, of narrowness, of blindness, even in the best acts of most men. The objects for which they dare, the egoism mingled with their acts of love, the spirit in which they bear slights and misfortunes, fall short of the ideal as seen in Christ. Yet just in proportion as men dare, love or endure in His spirit, they are found by their triumph over dangers, obstacles and pains not only themselves to have risen to nobler heights of character, but to have become (though often without knowing it) strong to convert, inspire and redeem their fellows.

Suffering then which is merited is often a sharp reminder that saves and checks men on a downward path; suffering that is unmerited is an opportunity, and a twofold one - an opportunity to become like Christ, and an opportunity to share His work. But it is an opportunity which it is open to us to utilize or to let alone. This is where Prayer helps most of all.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 28

This world is a world of lost opportunity and waste. Time, talent, money, life are constantly being squandered, but the worst waste of all is the waste of suffering. For suffering, when it does not elevate, degrades. Profitless suffering is what is meant by Hell; and Hell is the failure of God.

Suffering, we have seen, is corrective, educative and redemptive, in the first place to those who "love God" from the beginning, in the second place to those who as a result of the sufferings of these - or, to speak more strictly, as a result of the way in which these face and overcome their sufferings - are led to become recruits to the great army of those who "love God." What about the others?

Some of our sins, negligences and ignorances involve consequences which recoil on our own heads directly and immediately, others only do so indirectly or after a long interval. It is probable, though neither we nor others can always trace it, that in the long run every evil thought, word or deed of ours "comes home to roost"; although, as already insisted, we are never (though we sometimes think so) the only sufferers, and rarely the principal or most immediate sufferers from them; while the sufferings which we have to bear are as often the direct consequence of the sins and follies of others as of ourselves.

Now, it is especially in the instinctive attitude taken up toward these painful consequences that characters differentiate themselves.

Where a painful consequence is the direct and obvious result of a sin committed by himself, one man will just lament his bad luck, another will violently resent the pain, but "the man of goodwill" will say to himself, " Well, I deserved it." And in so far as he recognizes it as a just punishment of his sin, the pain has morally a corrective effect upon him.

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 29

 In a similar spirit one who realizes and keenly and bitterly repents a sin, will sometimes cry out, "What can I do to make amends?" "Let me be punished." Pain met in this spirit is purgatorial, it cleanses and strengthens.

When, however, the painful consequences seem the direct result of some one else's sin or folly, or of some quite trifling error of his own, a situation far more testing to character occurs. Even good men, when not in their best moments, will often say, "I did not deserve this." Bitterness and resentment for a time possess the soul. After a while the reflection may occur, "Well, perhaps though I did not deserve it this time and for this offence, other things I have done have gone unpunished. Strike a balance and God is not in my debt." Then, too, the pain becomes purgatorial.

But the best men in their best moments do not, when trouble comes, raise the question of merit and desert at all. They just accept the suffering as something to be faced, something to be overcome. That way lies the greatest possibility of achievement. "Who going through the vale of misery use it for a well: and the pools are filled with water."

People often speak of pain as if all pain were of the same kind, or as if the difference between pains depended solely on the differences in their cause. Thus the pain of a prick is not that of an ache, and both differ from that of a disappointment. Such differences are real, but a far more important difference in the quality of pains is one that cuts across all these distinctions. It follows from the fact that man is not a mere animal, that ultimately the nature and quality of every pain is determined by the mental and moral attitude of the sufferer. In the case of mental pain this is obvious.

"We look before and after

And pine for what is not."

Anxiety, disillusionment, mourning and resentment do not exist at all for a rabbit or a sheep. They are purely psychic in origin, and the way in which they are actually felt depends entirely on the character and habit of mind of the sufferer. 

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 30

This is no less true in the case of pains of purely physical origin. A plucky and cheerful patient does not feel pain in the same way as one who is resentful and depressed, even though both are suffering from exactly the same injury or the same disease. Pain does not merely have a different moral effect on different characters, it is actually experienced as a different quality of feeling. It is possible that there is pain in Heaven, but if so it is not the same feeling as the pain of Hell.

St. John writes that both Judgment and Eternal Life have their beginning, though not their end, in this life. Heaven, Hell and Purgatory are all to be found in this world, and most of us spend some time in each. When trouble comes and we ask passionately, "What have I done to deserve this?" that bitterness and resentment is a glimpse of Hell, for what is Hell but permanent suffering permanently resented? There is a popular notion that those in Hell are aware of their wickedness and recognize the justice of their sentence. But can it be so? It is a law of the moral life that he who sins against the light ceases to see the light. Defy conscience and it becomes less sensitive. The worse a man gets the less he is aware of it, the less therefore is he capable of regarding as just any pain or penalties which come upon him. The habitual drunkard or debauchee, so long as he still despises himself, may indeed be on the road to Hell, but he is not yet there. The absolute egoist is there already; for being quite unaware of his own nature, every pain that comes to him is violently resented as undeserved. To him pain is not medicine but damnation.

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 31

In the second place, there is the man who meets pain with courage, admitting frankly, in one case, that it is an obvious consequence of his own folly or sin, in another case, that, although not due to his own fault, it is yet not out of proportion to his total deserts. He is in Purgatory. To him pain is remedial. ¹

There remains the man who, inspired by a great purpose or ideal, accepts the changes and chances of life, in small things, like the old Viking "with a frolic welcome," like obstacles in a steeplechase, or bruises in the football field; in larger things, with cheerfulness and courage, as wounds received in battle; and in great sorrows, with the acceptance wherein is peace. He is at the gate of Heaven. He has tasted the life of God. For if Christ is, as St. Paul puts it, "the portrait of the invisible God," His Life, Death, Resurrection, Ascension, and Return to save and bless, are a picture to us, under conditions of time and space and in terms understandable to human intelligence, of something which is Eternal in the Life of God. And that something includes sorrow felt to the uttermost, joy absolutely triumphant, love itself perfected so as to become an eternal benediction on those it loves. And the sorrow is not merely followed and compensated for by the joy, "sorrow is turned into joy." But for the sorrow the joy would be other and less than it is: and just because it has experienced both desolation and triumph the love is, both for itself and others, a stronger and richer thing.

Heaven, Hell and Purgatory are all to be found in this life, and in this life we constantly see men passing through Purgatory at any rate to the gates of Heaven. What about Hell? No one of us but has been for a while in Hell, no one of us but has experienced the keenest of all pains, acute suffering bitterly resented. Yet often in the course of time the element of resentment fades away, and we can look back in calm on the great sorrow or the grievous humiliation. But this only happens to those who have declined to

¹ I am using Purgatory in its older sense, as in Dante. Suarez and most, I believe, if not all, Jesuit Theologians hold that the pains of Purgatory are purely penal and merely the retributory equivalent of sins committed, the moral character of those who are to be saved having been miraculously made fit for Heaven at the moment of death. This doctrine seems a gratuitous jettison of the most valuable element in the Mediaeval mythology of the other world.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 32

let this bitterness and resentment become the dominant factor in their mental life, that is to those who, however slowly, however feebly, and however unconsciously, have to some extent met the trouble in the right spirit. In that case what began as Hell has become Purgatory. Such men looking back, it may be after a long stretch of time, can usually realize that a tendency to self-indulgence, to dilettantism or some other form of waste of self or contempt of others was, as a matter of fact, checked by this great pain; and that the pain has become after all in the long run purgatorial. "It is good for me that I have been in trouble: that I may learn thy statutes." Such men commonly see also, that had they met that pain in a better spirit than they did, it might have taught them more quickly and less painfully than was actually the case. That is to say, the time which they actually spent in Hell was so far dead loss, and its pain was mere damnation; yet just in so far as they forgot their bitterness and resentment it became purgatorial and ultimately redemptive.

Some men who seem to be in Hell struggle out into Purgatory in this life; others, so far as we can judge, do not. They go down to the grave wholly self centered, morally callous, unrepentant. To such immortality can only mean Hell, a worse Hell and a developing one - unless some radical and permanent change of attitude can even then be brought about. We have seen how in this world men seem to pass from Hell to Purgatory, from Purgatory almost to Heaven. These things are beyond our ken, but we know that God wills not the death of a sinner, and for myself I hesitate to accept the belief that the Love of God will suffer final defeat at the hands of any individual. Yet the longer the blindness and the defiance of the individual lasts, the worse his Hell must become; and the longer (if we are to speak in terms of time of what possibly may take place in some extra-temporal phase of existence) must be the period of purgatorial new growth required.

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 33

 And though there is a sense in which to the repentant the pains of a Hell which is now past may be changed in retrospect into purgatorial pains, I cannot but feel that in the postponement of repentance, and the long endurance of profitless pain, there has been incurred a real and eternal loss both to the sinner and to God.

THE SUFFERING OF GOD

Man makes God not in his own image but in the image of his King. Hence the gods of heathendom, like its despots, are arbitrary and cruel. "The Kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, their great men overbear them, but the Son of Man (that is, the mighty Christ, the King of Kings) came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." Had the Christian, like the heathen, conceived God in the image of his King, the problem of suffering would have taken on a different shape for most men's minds. Yet surely this is what the New Testament bids us do. "Lord, show us the Father and it sufficeth us. He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Christ, says St. Paul, is the visible "portrait of the invisible God,"¹ God in man made manifest.

So we have always been taught, but until quite recently theologians have never ventured to face the full implications of what is meant by the Divinity of Christ. The greatest struggle in all Church history was the battle of Athanasius against the Arian attempt to deny the essential divinity of the Son. And, on paper, Athanasius won. The actual wording of the Nicene Creed was a victory for the cause he championed. But the predominant influence, partly of Old Testament conceptions of God, partly of that doctrine of the impassibility of God which had become a commonplace of Greek Philosophy, robbed his victory of half its fruits.

¹ (Col, i. I5).

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 34

From Greek Philosophy the Church inherited a conception of God as an Absolute remote from the world, of whom nothing but negatives can be predicated, and especially as a Being inaccessible to change and suffering. This was the very foundation and starting point of the Arian position, but it profoundly influenced his opponents also. From the Old Testament was derived the conception of a God of Righteousness and of Judgment, a God alive and active, a God alike of mercy and of wrath, very different from the cold, bare abstraction of Greek Philosophy. Yet another view of God as preeminently the loving Father came from the New Testament.

Something of each of these three conceptions has been combined in the traditional conception of God the Father. The proportions in which they were blended have naturally varied with the outlook and temperament of different individuals. But in one point there has been general agreement. The Hebrew imagination pictured God as dwelling in regal splendour in a far-off luminous Heaven remote from suffering and pain; and though even in the Old Testament another note is struck at times "in all their affliction he was afflicted" ¹ - it is only very rarely. Still less could Greek thought tolerate the idea that the Absolute could suffer. Thus the doctrine of the impassibility of God became a postulate of theology.

But capacity to feel, and if need be to suffer, is surely involved in the very conception of God as love. Men still spoke of the love of God: they only really meant it when they thought of God the Son; clemency at most - a royal prerogative - was imagined of the Father. God the Father is conceived as Majesty, God the Son as Love.

The Christian Creed acknowledges but one God and one quality of Godhead - so far Athanasius won his cause; but the Christian imagination has been driven by this postulate of the impassibility of God to worship two.

¹ Isaiah 1xiii. 9.

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 35

Side by side sit throned in Heaven God the Father, omnipotent, unchangeable, impassible, and on His right hand God the Son, "passus, crucifixus, mortuus, resurrectus." What is this but Arianism, routed in the field of intellectual definition, triumphing in the more important sphere of the imaginative presentation of the object of the belief ?

What Christianity most needs today is a resolute reassertion in terms of modern thought of the principle championed by St. John and Athanasius. Of the principle, I say, but not of the language, "of one substance with the Father" suggests to modern minds a static and purely intellectualistic conception contrary to the real spirit of the view which Athanasius fought for. Everything that lives must develop, and development means such modification of the organism as shall adapt it to its ever-changing environment. If the adaptation is good, the vital principle will gain an added life; if clumsy, it will just maintain its life until it can put forth a better; but if it can put forth no new modification to meet the changing environment, it dies. Christian theology is no exception to this universal principle, and inasmuch as belief cannot exist without some attempt to justify and express itself in intellectual categories, the Christian Church must and will find new ways of expressing to itself and to others the meaning of its faith.

We may have reason to believe that God is no more directly responsible for suffering than for the preventable ignorance or sin of which it is so often the consequence; that to those who love God the very fact of suffering gives an opportunity of rising to heights to which perhaps without it they could not have risen; and that God Himself assists and inspires them to use this opportunity aright. Nevertheless, so long as God is pictured to the imagination as living in regal

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 36

splendour in a gorgeous heaven untouched by suffering and ill, such considerations give only half an answer to the question, If God is, and God is good, why did He create a world of sin and pain? If God is a mere spectator of it all, God must be something less than perfect Love. Boldly press home the principles of St. Paul, St. John, and Athanasius - "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," the Father is essentially one with the Son, the life and character of Christ is a real mirror of the life and character of God - and all is changed. God Himself is seen to share the suffering He allows. More than that: by an eternal activity, of which the Death of Christ is both a symbol and also an essential part, He is everlastingly, at the cost of His own effort and His own pain, redeeming and perfecting the world He made.

The importance of reasserting this fundamental principle of Christianity at the present day cannot be overestimated. It must, however, be clearly recognized that the question is one which raises some difficult philosophical problems. Moreover, the lessons of history will be thrown away unless we realize that a protest against an error, or against a one-sided emphasis, in contemporary religious thought may easily lead to error in the opposite direction. Nothing is to be gained by reviving in a modern form the ancient heresy known as Patripassianism, that is, the doctrine that the Christ who hung on the Cross is indistinguishable from the Father in Heaven.

The doctrine of the Trinity was the result of an attempt on the part of the early Church to think out some of these difficulties in terms of contemporary philosophy. The dogmatic system of which it is the crown and centre has been associated in the past with a long and steady effort to stifle the intellectual development of the race. It is not strange then that many thinking men should have come to look upon the doctrine in question as the graveyard of European thought, full only of dry bones unworthy of the attention of serious philosophy.

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 37

 Yet, whatever may be thought of the doctrine of the Trinity as a piece of strict metaphysic, it at least embodies in symbolic form certain elements which are fundamental to any tenable philosophical conception of the Divine nature.

There are two methods by which Philosophy has attempted to arrive at a conception of God.

The negative method starts from the undeniable fact that the qualities which we perceive in finite things are either wholly inapplicable or are not applicable in the same sense to an Infinite Being. This is obviously true of physical qualities like shape or colour, it is also true of others. Personality, for instance, suggests at once personal idiosyncrasy and limitation which cannot be conceived to exist in God. Again there is no meaning in saying that God is honest - for honesty is a virtue relative to the institution of private property on earth. The negative method therefore infers that all that can be said or known of God is that He is not like anything we know and therefore totally inconceivable. This conclusion is the stultification both of philosophy and of religion.

The positive method, on the other hand, admits, indeed, that qualities like personality or justice, as we see them in operation in the interrelations of limited human beings in any particular phase of social development, do not exactly represent the nature of such qualities in God. But it takes personality, as being the highest thing we know, and its activities in Love, justice, (etc.) at their highest, and says, "This is the highest that we can conceive, it is therefore the least inadequate form under which to conceive God. God is more than this, but He is at least this; and therefore to say that He is Personal and Good is far more true than to say we know nothing about Him on the ground that Personality and Goodness cannot mean exactly the same thing in the case of God and in the case of man." This method leads somewhere.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 38

Christianity goes one step further and affirms that Personality and Love as we can see them in the Ideal Man are not merely the best symbol we can find of the Divine, but are veritably of the Divine essence. But, if so, orthodox theology was surely right in affirming that, though what we see in Christ is really divine, it is not the Godhead in its totality.

God then must be conceived as Personal in the fullest sense. But unless we are to conceive the life of God as being a poorer and meaner thing than the life of man, we are bound to think of it as containing certain activities which to us are only possible through life in a society - the love of equals, of parents, of children. And if worship is the highest thing we know on earth, it also must be a faint shadow of something eternal in the life of God. Hence the Unity and the Personality of God must be conceived as, in some way to us inscrutable, having within Itself the possibilities of a life which we can only think of as exercised in a society. And if we are seeking how to present such a conception in a way which will make it effective as a devotional symbol, we shall find some difficulty in improving on the old Trinitarian formula, One God in Three Persons. It is only if we insist on pressing strictly all its arithmetical and metaphysical implications that we get into difficulties.

This brings us back to our original investigation. We have seen that any philosophically tenable conception of the nature and personality of God must combine within itself attributes and activities which cannot exist, or at least cannot operate simultaneously, in a limited human personality. Up to a point emotions of sorrow and joy can coexist in the human mind, but only up to a point. The highest joy and the deepest sorrow can be experienced by the human soul only in succession, not simultaneously. But if, as most philosophers have held, the life of God is outside the time sequence, we have no right to suppose that this limitation applies to God.

GOD AND THE WORLD'S PAIN     Page 39

Moreover, the higher the stage of moral and intellectual development attained by any individual the greater is his sensitiveness not only to the sufferings of others and to the true character of sin, but also to the blessedness of happiness, to the glory of moral triumph. We may infer that both the pain and the joy of God are proportionately more intense. For God can see clearly the consolation beyond the suffering, the splendid moral growth achieved thereby, and the redemption beyond the sin.

There is, therefore, an important element of truth in the reluctance of the classical Theology to admit the direct passibility of the Father. To put it in another way. If Christ is truly to us the portrait of the unseen God, the Crucifixion is not merely an event which happened once during three hours of time, it stands for something which is eternal in the life of God - but so also does the Resurrection. Therefore everlastingly in the life of God "Death is swallowed up in Victory." And the last word of the Christian Faith is not sorrow, but sorrow overcome, in love and in joy and in the peace of God which passeth all understanding.

CONCERNING PRAYER Page     40

This page was intentionally left blank.

Page     41

II

PRAYER AND THE OLD TESTAMENT

BY

WILLIAM FREDERICK LOFTHOUSE

TUTOR IN OLD TESTAMENT AND IN PHILOSOPHY

AT HANDSWORTH THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE

AUTHOR OF

"ETHICS AND ATONEMENT,^"

^"ETHICS AND THE FAMILY,^"

^"COMMENTARY ON EZEKIEL^" (CENTURY BIBLE)

Page 42

SYNOPSIS

PRAYER & THE OLD TESTAMENT     Page 43

1. To the first age of the Church the Old Testament was the complete Bible; and in all periods it has been regarded by the majority of Christians as of equal authority with the New. Its influence on the course of Christian thought has been immense. But nowhere has that influence been more marked than in the region of prayer. The New Testament contains but few prayers to serve as models for later times. But prayers are found everywhere in the Old Testament; and, more particularly, the Psalms have not only been from the beginning the real hymn - book of the Christian Church, but have done much to determine both the language and the mental attitude of all Christian devotion. Hence a study of prayer must take account of the Old Testament and the devotional life of the Hebrews.

The Hebrew nature was in itself a strange mixture of opposites. As Professor George Adam Smith has described it, it was "coarse and tender, enduring and passionate, meditative and unspeculative." These opposites are reflected throughout its devotional literature. The stern Puritanism of the moralist, the patriot's eager loyalty to the traditional law, the tenderest and most childlike piety side by side with fierce hatred of the alien, meet us in every section of the Psalter. If we turn to the Prophets, we see the glowing anticipations of

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 44

the second Isaiah set over against the bitter recriminations of Obadiah or Nahum; and in the Book of Jonah the intolerant narrowness of Judaism finds its clearest utterance and its most definite condemnation. Invective and sarcasm came to the Hebrews as easily as the language of religious rapture. But they did not reserve their invective for their enemies. Their hoarse Semitic dialect (no less hoarse because it could be so wonderfully gentle) delighted to lash the iniquities and exult over the fate of Edom or Assyria;¹ but it exhausted its resources in describing the woes which were to follow Israel's disobedience and the brutalities of her idolatrous and shameless past.²

The same contrast strikes us when we turn to the Old Testament presentation of Jahveh Himself. How august He is, and how patient; how ready to be "entreated" and to repent Him of the evil; how slow to anger and plenteous in mercy. Yet He is a "man of war"; He thunders from the sky to bring victory to His hard-pressed people; He bids His servants exterminate their neighbours without sparing man or beast; He sends forth His angels to sweep the foe to Destruction.³ He is equally remorseless to Israel. He pities those who fear Him as a father pities his children; yet He will doom the whole nation to the horrors of exile. "You only have I known of all the nations upon earth; therefore will I punish you for your iniquities." ⁴

2. It is no wonder that many readers are simply repelled by the Old Testament. Marcion, they would agree, was right. The God of the Old Testament cannot be the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, but only His rival and foe. And those who shrink from so extreme and heretical a statement, and who prefer to distinguish between the eternal will of God and the varying and partial grasp of that will by man, must often be aware of the same repugnance.

¹ Isa. Ixiii. I ff .; xxxvii. 22 ff.

² Jer. viii.; Ezek. xxiii. etc.

³ Ps. xviii. 39 ff.; Deut. xx. 16; 2 Kings xix. 35.

⁴ Amos iii. X.

PRAYER & THE OLD TESTAMENT     Page 45

Nor is the difficulty to be met for any of us by the appeal to inspiration. There is no satisfactory or accepted definition of inspiration to which appeal can be made. The Old Testament must be judged by the standards applied to other books. No more than any other book in these days can it claim the privilege of tradition or ecclesiastical authority. It must defend itself, or its case must go by default.

This feeling of alienation from the Old Testament is by no means universal. Indeed, its very existence would surprise many Christian people. The qualities which often raise difficulties today have been part of the life of the Church in the past. For this the Old Testament must itself be held, at least in part, responsible. Intolerance, pride and self-seeking, the desire for revenge,¹ the commercialism which would approach God by gifts or propitiate Him by self inflicted pains and tortures-all these can point to familiar Old Testament language for their authority. Nor have they been eradicated from the religious attitude of today. Much off the devotion even of our twentieth-century Christianity, it must be confessed, is far nearer to the Old Testament than to the New.

By those who feel this contrast two pleas are often urged in mitigation of judgment. First, the Old Testament, we are reminded, contains the literature of a nation, produced throughout a period of at least a millennium. The cruder and harsher elements surely grow up in the elementary stages; later on, these are replaced by the morality and piety which are fulfilled in New Testament days. But this is only true in part. Both sets of characteristics are found throughout the nation's development. The earliest sections of the Pentateuch contain expressions worthy of Paul or John; the flames of hatred and scorn burn fiercely to the very last.

¹ The most startling examples are to be found in Pss. cix., cxxxvii. But we must remember that the Jews had been familiarized with the treatment accorded in later years to Belgium and Armenia. The casting of Pharisaic stones must be indulged in with caution.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 46

Secondly, it is urged that the two strands may be disentangled; and that we may throw aside the warp of hatred while we preserve with gratitude the woof¹ of pity and love. Such an attempt is equally vain. The religious spirit of Israel is an organic unity. Most of the Hebrew writers have their moods. Their eyes now flash with anger, and now melt in yearning and hope. But no one mood can be understood without the rest. The pattern in that mystic peplos, the robe of Israel's devotion, cannot be torn in two. We must take it as it is, and study it as a whole.

3. It is only when we are content to do so that we can begin to understand it at all. What are the main lines of the design? What was the conception of God and of religion which could give rise to such startling inconsistencies - which could produce the coarse realism of Ezekiel xvi., the terrible menaces of Deuteronomy xxviii., the tender grace of Psalm xxiii., and the dramatic sublimity of Isaiah liii.? If we are to enter the shrine of the worship of the Psalter intelligently, these questions must find an answer.

Our first step must be to recognize that Israel's religion was founded on a creed consisting of a single clause (a clause to which no formal addition was ever made)-" Israel is Jahveh's people. Jahveh is Israel's God." But from this creed two opposite corollaries were drawn: "Therefore Israel's foes will be punished for their hostility "; and, "therefore Israel will be punished for its sin." In either case Jahveh turns full upon man in all the majesty of His superhuman power of bestowing blessing or victory and of inflicting disaster and death, and it will be natural to approach Him, sometimes with awe and penitence, sometimes with confidence and thanksgiving. Awe and penitence were inevitable, since Jahveh, as God, was surrounded with dangerous taboos; confidence and thanksgiving were habitual because in His kindness to His people He desired them to be joyful before Him.

¹ Archaic - Poet.

PRAYER & THE OLD TESTAMENT     Page 47

In all this, however, there is little that is distinctive of Israel. Israel's attitude to Jahveh, as thus described, is very similar, if we may judge from the language of the Moabite stone, to Moab's attitude to Chemosh; when Chemosh is pleased with his servants, they conquer; when he is angry, they fall. We may call such a religion Semitic, or even pagan. For the belief in a terrible God who may be relied on to punish the enemies of his worshippers, who are also his own enemies, without some definite moral reason for dealing with them in this fashion, is frankly paganism, whether held in Asia or in Western Europe ; and if we are half conscious of it in Western Europe today, we cannot be surprised to find it persisting throughout the Old Testament.

4. This attitude is everywhere in the Old Testament; but it is everywhere subordinate. Jahveh appears as the God of terror; but He also appears as something infinitely greater. He is the source of victory; but He is the source of everything else worth having. And Israel, or at least the finer minds in Israel, knew that there were better things than victory in war.

Jahveh was therefore to Israel never the source of victory alone. He was the source of instruction, grace, life. This threefold conviction is found throughout the whole literature, though time was needed to reveal all that was implied therein. A brief consideration of these three gifts will reveal the vital forces of Old Testament devotion; it will also enable us to distinguish between the narrowness which rings false beside the clear music of the loving kindness of God, and that loving kindness itself, the deep full note on which the melody of the worship of the New Testament and of all spiritual religion is built up.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 48

(a) Yahveh as Source of Instruction. - The word Instruction sounds strange to readers of, the Old Testament. We are more familiar with the word Law. But Law represents only imperfectly the Hebrew expression. Law suggests the statute, the court, the policeman. Instruction or "Torah," its Hebrew equivalent, suggests the teacher and the pupil, transmission and obedience. Such instruction is essential, to the Hebrew, for every department of conduct, private, civic and ceremonial.¹ Judges and kings must give their decisions in accordance with it.² Priests must direct worshippers at the altar in conformity to it.³ Individuals can only hope for success and peace in life as they obey it in their dealings with one another.⁴ But where can it be found? The Hebrew, in an age when writing was at least a luxury, would answer at once," It came through Moses from Jahveh; it was committed to priests, prophets and kings to keep for us; it is the rule of our life."'

Into the various developments of the civic and ritual Torah it is not necessary to enter. Nor need we pause over the remarkable fact that the whole moral law, as understood by Israel, was attributed to the revealed will of Jahveh. What must be emphasized is that every duty of which the Hebrew was conscious he looked upon as part of the body of direct instruction given by Jahveh. And this fact has four very important consequences.

First, it led him from time to time to identify with Jahveh's will certain practices which a more developed morality would find difficulty in tolerating; second, it ministered to a distinct contempt for the nations to whom the Torah had not been given; third, it taught him that he could not hope to approach Jahveh unless in the spirit of obedience; and fourth, as the result of

¹ Observe the subjects treated of in the early code, the so-called "Book of the Covenant," Exod. xxi.-xxiii.

² Cf. z Kings x. 31, xxiii. 24.

³ Ezek. Vii. 26.

⁴ Mal. iv. 4. ⁵ Cf. Deut. iv. 44 : also John i. 17.

PRAYER & THE OLD TESTAMENT     Page 49

this, and since obedience to the Torah was the sure passport to Jahveh's favour, we find in the Hebrew's experience an apparent contradiction, a strange mixture of penitence and humiliation for disobedience with confidence and even what we are tempted to call self righteousness, where there was no conscious disobedience to be confessed. ¹

(b) Yahveh as Source of Grace. The whole Torah is a free gift to Israel; it comes to him from Jahveh's unmerited favour. To the Hebrew, the bond which united Jahveh with His people is neither physical nor fortuitous. He has chosen and condescended to be gracious to Israel. This conception colours all Hebrew thought about Jahveh. Condescension in the superior may suggest, in the inferior, something of the slavish and even of the grovelling. Nor is the Old Testament free from occasional passages which suggest this heathen attitude.

But, rightly understood, Jahveh's grace has in it just that quality which makes power liberal and obedience noble.² Jahveh stoops to man in order that man may stand up before Jahveh.³ No man can approach unsummoned the mysterious holiness of the divine presence. But when he has been forgiven for his sins and instructed in Jahveh's demands, he can stand before Jahveh himself undismayed. ²

The essence of Jahveh's grace consists in the fact, that He has chosen to give man the right to stand unashamed in that high and holy place; to clothe him, so to speak, with the ceremonial garment. Hence is produced a further apparent contradiction. The individual, as he looks at Jahveh, knows that he has no merits of his own; on the contrary, the more he understands of Jahveh's holiness, the more he is conscious of his own sins. And he must confess these sins, if Jahveh's favour is to rest upon him. But if confession has been made, and his conduct has conformed to the right norm, he can be sure of acceptance.

¹ Ps. Xvii.

² Ps. lxxxiv. ii,, ciii. 8.

³ Ezek. ii. i; Ps. xxiv. 3-4.

⁴ Ps. 1xviii. 3.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 50

Thus a sense of unworthiness is joined to assurance the assurance which is only not self-righteous because he has now been enabled to do and to be what is pleasing in Jahveh's sight. ¹

This conception of grace, rightly understood, saved man's conduct from the danger of fawning or servility. It also saved Jahveh's conduct from the appearance of caprice. That Jahveh should originally have had a favour for Israel did not create any difficulty to the Hebrew. He simply accepted the fact with gratitude. But that being the case, Jahveh's attitude to individuals could always be foretold. That Jahveh is righteous, i.e. straightforward or reliable, was to the instructed Hebrew an unquestionable truth. He might fail to understand all that the truth implied; but he knew nothing of Prophets or Law if he did not joyfully acknowledge it. Jahveh's grace and uprightness together produced a hope which was itself the parent of confidence and faith.

(c) Yahveh as Source of Life. This is less easy to formulate in precise terms. That all physical existence is the gift of Jahveh is constantly affirmed, from the earliest narratives onward.² And this existence is beyond all doubt good. Jahveh is to be thanked for creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life."³ Only in the dim shadow land of Sheol, after death, so it was generally believed, is a man inevitably cut off from Jahveh. But in time, as the nation entered the later period when personal devotion began to play a larger part in its religious expression, something of the distinction arose which the New Testament expresses. The life that is sustained by physical means and comes to an end with the death of the body is not the only gift of its kind. Life is more than that bodily

¹ Cf. Ps. xxxii. Pass.

² Gen. i. ii.; Ps. civ. 3o.

³ Ps. cxxxix. 14.

PRAYER & THE OLD TESTAMENT    Page 51

life which ends at the moment of what we in our ignorance call death. It is more than the beating of the heart, the flowing of the blood, and the play of all those "fearful and wonderful" physical forces which we share with the animals; it is more even than the continuous drama of thoughts, emotions and desires which function on a plane far higher than that which animals can reach. The Hebrew never philosophized about the functioning of these higher powers. He had not the necessary terminology nor habits of thought. But there were times - moments perhaps - when he could feel himself surrounded by the power and loving kindness of Jahveh, and could respond, not wholly in unworthiness.

The delight of such an experience could not be bounded by such "wild joys of living" as David sings of to Saul in Browning's poem. It passed on into an almost inconceivably beautiful experience of communion with God, a communion so beautiful that death itself was felt to be unable to interrupt it. Hence the rapt expressions that foreshadow the later belief in immortality.

"Thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol." "I shall be satisfied when I awake with thy likeness." "In thy presence is fulness of joy, and at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore."¹ And if it is true that this conviction is seen only at its fullest in the New Testament, in such phrases as "he that believeth on the Son hath eternal life,"² it is equally true that the conviction animated the piety of every Israelite who knew that Jahveh was not only his song but his strength.³

Thus we are faced with a third paradox. Jahveh is the source of all individual life - of saint and sinner alike because He is the source of all the activity in the universe, and of the universe itself. Good and evil alike proceed from Him. 

¹ Ps. xvi. 10, xvii. 15, xvi. 11.

² John iii. 36.

³ Exod. xv. 2.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 52

Man must receive one as well as the other. Jahveh sends the pestilence and the spirit of the lying vision.¹ But at the same time He is the giver and preserver of life. He saves from the evil which He sends. He turns aside the destructive blows which it is His alone to deal, and He delights to lift His servants out of the reach of death itself.² He destroys the hosts of the Assyrians; but after allowing Job to be flung upon the dunghill He restores him to affluence; and He satisfies the awakening saint with His own likeness.

5. Striking as are these contrasts, they will not be surprising to those who are familiar with the more intimate expressions of devotion. For when we are dealing with the prayers of a whole nation or community, it is natural that both higher and lower ranges of spiritual attainment, and higher and lower degrees of spiritual insight, should reveal themselves; and when the soul of the individual is laid bare before his divinity, selfishness and even cruelty will appear by the side of self-consecration and rapture. In the religion of the Hebrew this can be observed in another fashion. The Hebrew writings, as is well known, fall under three heads: Law, or the books of the Pentateuch, Prophecy (including the older historical books), and the Hagiography or Sacred writings; these last include the books not in the other two classes, e.g. Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Daniel, Chronicles; and this section is more particularly the embodiment of what for want of a better term we may call Hebrew Piety.

Each of these exhibits the higher and the lower side of the hopes and aspirations of Israel. To the Prophets, in their struggle to conceive a stable and moral order, we owe some of the noblest utterances of confession and prayer. The Prophets have taught us to think of God as sharing in the afflictions of man, and foreordaining for all nations the blessings of divine justice,

¹ Amos iii. 6; Job ii. 10; 1 Kings xxii. 22.

² 2 Sam. xxiv. 16 ; Amos vii. 3, 6.

PRAYER & THE OLD TESTAMENT     Page 53

mercy and peace. Yet the Prophets are responsible for expressions of the deepest racial hatred, and they can be found attributing to Jahveh unsparing and contemptuous condemnation of all His foes.

The Law, especially in the later codes, is chiefly concerned with the ritual approach of the worshipper to God. The narratives accompanying or introducing the codes often breathe an awestruck reverence which reveals, as hardly anything else could reveal, the majesty to which the suppliant dares to approach. At the same time they attribute to Jahveh the meticulous care for the performance of traditional details, and, in some instances, ruthless anger at their neglect; anger which would be unintelligible, did we not remember that to the Jew complete obedience to the revealed Law is the condition of Jahveh's unimpeded grace. ¹

In the third section, the "Hagiography," dealing with what we may call the Piety of the religious community or the individual saint, the worshippers allow themselves frequent utterance to all their desires, for prosperity and recovery from sickness, for retaliation and even for revenge, for the continuance of Jahveh's favour, for the deeper blessings of righteousness, humility, contrition and purity of heart. Men with mean and ignoble conceptions of God imagine Him - as they will always imagine Him - to be such an one as themselves. Yet the triumphant faith in the midst of persecution and disaster, the conviction that the weak and helpless are the special care of Jahveh, the sheer delight in the gifts of

¹ It has often been held that in the Levitical system of Judaism sacrifice atoned for sin. This is a mistake, unless we define our terms with more care. For sin, in the sense of deliberate disobedience to the known will of God, no sacrifice can atone. The sinner is "cut off from the midst of His people," excommunicated or put to death. The misdeeds for which the sin offerings make atonement are for the most part breaches of ritual order or personal cleanliness, chiefly unintentional. While no moral blame can be attached to the offender for these, his free access to Jahveh is regarded as interrupted until sacrifice has taken place. The great words of Micah vi. 8 condemn the false view of sacrifice which the Levitical codes themselves never recognized; they are borne out by many passages in the codes, and they are gathered up into all that is best in the piety of post - exilic Judaism.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 54

Jahveh's law, and the deep and rapturous peace in Jahveh's fatherly protection and forgiveness, easily surpass the highest achievements of ethnic devotional literature.

6. What has just been said may be illustrated by reference to a few typical Old Testament prayers. These we will choose from each of the three divisions of the Old Testament, and from different periods in the nation's literature. The date, however, is a matter of comparative unimportance; in each of them we shall see both the combination of what are to us lower and higher elements, and the varied and striking characteristics which we have already discovered in Hebrew devotion.

We turn first to the Pentateuch, and select the intercession of Abraham for Sodom in Gen. xviii. 23-33. ¹ This is in form a conversation with Jahveh rather than a prayer. But the prayers of the Old Testament saints are often so intimate that they remind us inevitably of a dialogue. The attitude of Abraham here finds distinct parallels in the prayers of Isaiah, Habakkuk and Daniel. Abraham learns that Jahveh is considering a complete destruction of Sodom. Can He destroy the good with the bad? Will He not avert the destruction if there are fifty good men in the place, or forty, or thirty, or twenty, or even ten? No one can read the simple yet elevated narrative without noticing the confidence of Abraham, a confidence all the more marked because expressed with such graceful humility. But there is more in the narrative than this. As Abraham is represented, he recognizes that a whole city may be destroyed for the wickedness of its inhabitants. He assumes that this wickedness will be shared by the vast majority, even by the children - how different from Jonah iv., II.

¹ This appears in the document known as " J," and is probably one of the later portions of that composition, dating, it may be, from the latter part of the ninth century.

PRAYER & THE OLD TESTAMENT     Page 55

But he claims that if there are good men mixed with_. the wicked, Jahveh must spare the city rather than destroy the good and wicked indiscriminately. He is sure that Jahveh's decision will be absolutely just; and he is eager to see this justice - a justice that fulfills itself in sparing as much as in punishing - fulfilled even on a city that is outside the Hebrew pale and of a thoroughly bad character.

As representing prayer in the second or prophetic section of the Old Testament, we will take the well known prayer of Jeremiah during the drought (Jer. xiv. xv.). As a revelation of a nature at once tender and impetuous, passionate yet subdued, this prayer has hardly an equal, in the Old Testament or outside it. Jeremiah is firmly convinced that the present and future calamities of his people are sent by Jahveh, as being due to their sin. How else could they have been allowed? But all other feelings are overpowered for the time by his pity. He is dominated by what is literally "Mitleid"; he suffers with his compatriots. Could Jahveh bring Himself to cast them off? Nothing else, he learns, is possible. Jahveh Himself pronounces their doom in the most explicit language. Then the prophet thinks of his own personal burden; with all his longings for the joys of social life disappointed, he is condemned to be a hunted outcast in his own home. He cries out for vengeance on his persecutors, and learns that he is still to bear witness against them. His prayer for their punishment is answered by an assurance of protection when he denounces their sin.

The theodicy implied in all this is still far from evangelical. But Jeremiah knows quite well that Jahveh does not desire the death of the sinner. His hopes are incapable of fulfillment just because his people will not turn from their wickedness and live. He longs for their salvation from the miseries of drought and war, because this is the approved and familiar way of Jahveh's blessings. In an intensely human passage he

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 56

demands their punishment for their rejection of himself. Moses is represented, in similar circumstances, as asking to be himself accursed for the sake of a rebellious Israel. But the one prayer, as much as the other, reveals the outspoken candour, the earnest and fervid pleading which is the mark of all the prayers of Israel. We may criticize Jeremiah's indignation; we cannot but wonder at the unsparing self revelation, and the confident appeal, in his colloquy with Jahveh.

To choose an example from the Psalms is specially difficult. Every desire that can be uttered to God finds its speech in the Psalter; for deliverance from disease, forgiveness for sin, victory over enemies, internal prosperity and peace, unbroken personal communion with God. But to see in its fullness the sense of separation from God, the yearning to regain His favour, and the certainty that He must hear the prayer of His servant, we must turn to Psalm li. The Psalm is so familiar to Christian readers, and has been used so constantly to express their own experience, that its significance for Old Testament literature is difficult to appreciate. There were four deep-set convictions in the Psalmist's mind. He had sinned, and this sin is one which we cannot but understand in the New Testament sense rather than that of the Babylonian penitential Psalms; he could expect God to forgive the sin, not by way of return for any payment or offering, but because of his own confession and prayer; such forgiveness meant complete restoration to God's favour; and the whole transaction was entirely consistent with God's righteousness. It may be perhaps that the Psalm was intended in part for the temple worship; and a brief appendix (vv. 18, 19) was added later, containing a prayer for Jerusalem and a promise of renewed sacrifices. This seems in contradiction with vv. 16, I7 - i.e. with the statement that such sacrifices are not needed to secure forgiveness ; the writer of vv. 16, 17 could never have passed straight on to vv. 18, 19, and it is

PRAYER & THE OLD TESTAMENT     Page 57

noteworthy that the liturgical editors made use of a Psalm where the great statement of vv. 16, 17 forms the climax of the whole poem.

Let us finally consider the beautiful prayer of Daniel (ch. ix.). This prayer, probably the latest in the Old Testament, written shortly before the Maccabean revolt, may be called a symphony on the four motifs of Israel's sin, Jahveh's righteousness, Jahveh's mercifulness, and the yearning for the restoration of Jerusalem. The thought passes from stage to stage with a movement at once passionate and majestic. Confession itself becomes dignified; humility is almost peremptory. There is no selfishness here, nor even complaint. On the contrary, the very punishments that have befallen Israel are understood as the sign of that divine righteousness in which every Jew gloried, and Jahveh's righteousness itself is not more certain and sure than is his loving kindness.

7. Summing up our previous conclusions, with these examples of Hebrew prayers to assist us, we can see that the religious life which we have attempted to analyze is built up on four great convictions - convictions which, as far as we know, have never been grasped where the influence of Israel has not penetrated, and which could not well be reached by any process of deduction. First, God has a character of His own, loving justice and mercy, hating selfishness, cruelty and vice; and this character can be revealed to human beings. Second, God has a will of His own, to be fulfilled by "joy in widest commonalty spread," but visiting disobedience and sin with inevitable suffering; and this will is the sovereign power in the universe. Third, God looks to men both for obedience and cooperation, unwilling and, as it would seem, unable to complete His designs until men have recognized and cheerfully answered the divine summons. Fourth, in response to this recognition, God inspires in man the

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 58

strength, steadfastness and grace of character without which all true satisfaction or blessedness is impossible. It must not be supposed that these four convictions were consciously held in their entirety by the Old Testament saints. It may be that no one of them was fully grasped either by Prophet or Psalmist. But in devotion a man's reach will always exceed his grasp. The shrine in which he worships has its foundations far in the deep places of the earth. The simple language of his daily prayers hints at mysteries that angels desire to look into.

Nor need we hesitate to admit that the conception of the scope of God's justice and mercy and love, in the minds of many Hebrew thinkers, is limited and confined. It may be thought of as concentrated upon Israel or even on a portion, a nucleus, of Israel. It may be thought to demand conditions which are alien to our ideas of morality. But the conceptions have life in them. The limitations, as by some inner vital necessity, are steadily pushed back, until it becomes clear that the chosen seat of God's worship is to be the joy of the whole world, and that the earth's farthest coasts are to wait expectantly for God's instruction.

Whether we regard these convictions as specifically revealed or not, the heart of all genuine devotion lies in the midst of them. This is as true of Christianity as of the religion of Israel. What they rule out, when they are really understood, is also repudiated in the New Testament - the attempt to induce God to perform man's will as distinct from His own; the idea that prayer will be heard for much speaking or for many gifts;¹ the self righteousness which claims a return from God, a "quid pro quo," and refuses to obey the call to confession and repentance and prayer for pardon;² the confidence which is based on the belief that the worshipper has some special claim upon. God,

¹ Ps. Ixvi. 18 ; Matt. vi- 5 ff

² Ps. xxxiv. 18 i Isa. lvii. I5 i 1 Kings viii. 33 ; Ps. xxxii. 5; i John i. g.

PRAYER & THE OLD TESTAMENT     Page 59

and forgets that the only path by which God can be approached is that of unselfishness and piety. ¹

At the same time, what the New Testament demands follows immediately from these convictions; repentance before a law so exacting that no mere human effort could ever fulfill it; faith in One who has made known His will to men and waits to perform it in them; confidence in the power which no foe can defy and no accident can evade, and in the love which itself bears the burdens that it removes; holiness which dreads the contamination of the desire that is repugnant to God; and the deep and loving submission which accepts whatever interpretation God may put upon its own wishes, knowing that in God's will is man's peace.

8. What strikes modern readers as imperfect in the devotion of the Old Testament may be gathered up under four heads: vindictiveness towards enemies; desires for purely material goods with no clear reference to their spiritual values or purposes; the bargaining attitude; and exaggerated self depreciation, or self assertiveness, towards God. To say that worship in the Old Testament exhibits these weaknesses is simply to say that it was the worship of men whose minds were not yet wholly transformed. But as the justice and the grace of God are better understood, the weaknesses tend to disappear. When God is thought of as the Lord of all nations, not even Nineveh will be regarded as cut off from repentance. When the real nature of God's gifts is known, and His reason for bestowing them, the suppliant will cease either to chaffer or grovel or boast in His benign presence. The Hebrews were not wholly free from the pagan worship of the tribal God. Such paganism, however, is not the essential element in their outlook. On the contrary, it is pushed steadily into the background, as

¹ Amos v. 18 ff.; Isa, i. 14-16; Luke xix. 9.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 60

the forces of positive devotion, faith in God's character and obedience to His will, take possession of the field. The old paganism dies hard. It is not yet dead in Christendom. Never thoroughly exterminated in Judaism, it survived the rise of the New Testament. But when the message of the New Testament is fully understood, it cannot live. The Gospel is the true preservative of the devotion of Israel's religion. It is essential in the New Testament that all true prayer should be in the name of Christ. This phrase is no magical formula. It means that the suppliant takes up the position and attitude of Christ, both with regard to the world around him and with regard to God. If his prayer is really in Christ's name, he sits as light to the gifts of wealth and worldly foresight as did Christ. Revengefullness and greed, callousness and fear, will be equally far from the atmosphere of his petitions. Save perhaps in moments of great stress, he will not even need to say, "If it be Thy will." The desire that will animate every request will be for more of that instruction and guidance by which he will naturally long to direct his conduct, and for more of that love which springs only from obedience to God and from communion, reverent, loving and confident, with God; and this he knows God must be waiting to give.

Again, he will have learnt to think of God as Christ thought of Him. His past sins forgiven, and the will to sin removed, he can look to God as his Father, knowing that all the powers of heaven "stand engaged to make him blessed." In such love there will be as little of fear as there can be of cajolery. If he sins as he will - he is not wholly cast down. There will be grief that any barrier should have been raised between him and his Father; but at the prayer of repentance the barrier is flung down, and sorrow is replaced by a deeper confidence in the mercy which will never fail him. He can approach with boldness - with frank and open speech-to the throne of grace, to find help in time of need.

PRAYER & THE OLD TESTAMENT     Page 61

9. The Christian conception of the practice of prayer is that of the Old Testament purified from its lower and accidental elements. It is founded on the conviction that God's purpose is to commend His will to us and to perform it within us. But the practice of prayer can only become stable and fixed when it is seen at work in Christ, and when what the New Testament calls "The Holy Spirit" is felt to be at work in the heart of the believer. Yet prayer can be both genuine and exalted even if nothing is known either of the Jesus of history or the Christ of theology. And that great light which many prophets and kings desired in vain to see was actually illuminating their path, though they knew it not. In all true prayer the spirit is one and the same. At every step in the history of prayer this spirit reveals itself in some particular fashion; and in the earlier and simpler stages we may see clearly what is half concealed by the richness and complexity of later attainments.

When this is borne in mind, the study of the prayers of the Old Testament will serve to bring into prominence an aspect of prayer that is often forgotten. Prayer is and always must be more than simple petition. To any true prayer indeed the path of petition, frank and confident, must always be open. But prayer is our word for the intercourse of the soul with God; and this means that there must be a relation between God and ourselves that is based on mutual understanding. God knows His servant through and through; and the suppliant knows the character of the Lord whom he approaches. He is not in doubt as to the mood or humour which he may encounter. There is no caprice or inconsequence for him to fear; nor does he offer his prayers in the dark, ignorant as to whether they will be acceptable or not. If God's ways are not his ways, yet

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 60

those ways have been made known. If his own heart is right, pure and sincere, without self seeking or concealment, he knows that God will grant every prayer. "No good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly." At the same time he knows that God is absolutely righteous, and that God's will is always directed to the supreme goal of holiness. He may have imperfect ideas - who has not? - as to the character and requirements of that righteousness; but he has no doubt as to the cardinal fact that what God desires it is his privilege and duty at once to accept and to carry out.

It is this understanding, constantly on the increase, and never absent, which we observe through the Old Testament. It is as observable in the prayers of Abraham as in those of Hezekiah or Nehemiah. But it is not mechanical or automatic. It is dependent on the use of all the lessons of the past, on the insight into the spiritual realities of all the great pioneers who have opened up the track of prayer. Just as the poets of a later age are not necessarily in advance of their predecessors, but are influenced and inspired by the greatest poets that have preceded them, so the prayers of a later age may not reveal a steady and uninterrupted progress; but they do reveal the influence of the accumulated experience of the past. On the other hand, progress, though it may be interrupted and checkered, is none the less real. The lower motives reappear, sometimes with surprising and disappointing clearness, even to the last. In exactly the same way the aged saint may be acutely conscious of the temptations which disturbed his youth. But the level is raised. If we look at the actual achievements of prayer, the knowledge of Jahveh's truth and grace, the sense of disobedience and sin, the conception of the majestic and adorable law of God, all grow steadily brighter and stronger as we pass from earlier to later prophets, and from the Exile to the disappointments and yearnings that followed the Return. And in the case

PRAYER & THE OLD TESTAMENT     Page 63

of those who had learned in those years to look into the deeper things of God, even the old narrowness and rancour, when they found expression, were robbed of half their virulence. They found no "depth of earth."

Survival and advance; perhaps we see these factors nowhere so clearly writ as in the Old Testament. But to see them is itself to learn a lesson of wide import. It is to understand what must often be a perplexity to the student of Christian experience whether in the individual or in the Church at large. How disappointing are the setbacks that we constantly meet in others and in ourselves, "How many a spot defiles the robe that wraps an earthly saint." Where progress is thought of as a straight unbroken line, such setbacks naturally lead us to question the reality of any advance. Augustine, Calvin, Wesley have moments of surprising weakness. Are there not certain things which Paul himself might well have left unsaid? And similarly those periods of Church history to which we may be inclined to attribute the most definite advance - the Reformation, or the Oxford Movement - remind us only too plainly of the retrograde and "atavistic" tendencies from which they could not escape.

The student of Old Testament devotion will not be surprised at all this. Here, as elsewhere, the Old Testament is the true "Pilgrim's Progress" of the Christian Church. He will not be surprised if his own experience repeats such disappointments. He may vanquish Apollyon only to find himself beset by the creeping and clinging meannesses and malevolences of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. None the less, that Valley lies beyond the plain where he met the fiend, and farther on still are the Delectable Mountains.

When progress is so understood, we may indeed take courage from the strange map of spiritual life presented in the Old Testament. We may take courage, too, from the experience of the Old Testament saints. They had no centuries of Christian life behind them; they had

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 64

no background of a world, or even of a single continent, permeated by Christian influences; they had no record of a Divine life on earth lived in unbroken communion with the Father; they had hardly guessed at the secret of prayer uttered "in His Name." On the contrary, their God was unknown outside the limits of a territory little broader than an English county; the people whom He was believed to have chosen seemed marked out for defeat and suffering; and after years of desperate resistance to hopelessly superior forces, half their little state was destroyed and the other half dragged out, as a church, an existence which as a kingdom was finally brought to an end. And yet what more courageous one is almost tempted to say, audacious - words could have been found than were uttered by those representatives of a disappointed and defeated race? "Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing." ¹

"Who is like unto the Jahveh our God, that hath his seat on high, that humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and earth?"² "O thou that hearest prayer, to thee shall all flesh come." ³

This is not bluster. The Hebrew had no illusions as to the perils that beset his community. He had hung his harp by the waters of Babylon. He had seen the temple of Jahveh razed to the ground. But he could still look forward with sublime hope to the day of Jahveh's sovereignty over the whole earth. And when, in the midst of disasters that might well have smitten prayer into silence, he demands protection and restoration for his people, his faith becomes a beacon for every age of doubt and disillusion.

Those who have entered most deeply into the secrets of that indomitable spirit know well that it "has not already attained, neither is it already perfect." It " follows on," to use the words of one who drank deeply

¹ Isa. x1. 15.

³ Ps. cxiii. 5-6.

³ Ps. lxv. 2.

PRAYER &THE OLD TESTAMENT     Page 65

of it, "in order that it may take hold of that for which also it has been taken hold of by Christ Jesus." The testimony of Jesus is the "spirit of prophecy." Confidence in Jesus is the spirit of prayer. True, the secret of "in His Name" was unknown to Hebrew seer and thinker. But the secret trembled on their lips. They could never have prayed as they did unless they had learnt how to approach God in the true spirit of the son at home in his Father's house. We can pass from room to room in that house with a knowledge impossible to them; but we can never understand the mysteries of the filial spirit, its startling frankness and yearning penitence, its hatred of all that hinders loving and its heroic contempt for all that threatens its hidden security, until we have drawn nigh, by the side of prophet and priest, to Him in whom Law and Prophecy were for ever fulfilled.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 66

This page was intentionally left blank.

III

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING

BY

HAROLD ANSON

RECTOR OF BIRCH-IN-RUSHOLME, MANCHESTER

EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE BISHOP OF LINCOLN

LATE WARDEN OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, AUCKLAND, N.Z.

LATE CO-EDITOR OF "THE COMMONWEALTH"

SYNOPSIS

Page 68

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 69

When we try to conceive for ourselves the meaning which men in general attach to the word "Prayer" we find that the word implies, first of all, that there are two parties to the transaction which we call "Prayer " one who is conceived as having boundless power to grant what is desired by the other; the other as having great need to be supplied with the good things which it is within the competence of the former to concede. The converse between these two parties is that which we call Prayer.

Our conception of prayer will vary in accordance with our view as to the character of these two parties and their relation the one to the other. We find that, broadly speaking, among races which have got beyond the animistic stage, there are two main conceptions of the relation between the two parties concerned: the one which we will call the Sultanic, and the other which we will call the Scientific, conception.

Let us examine first of all the Sultanic conception of prayer. We shall find that it is naturally coloured by the circumstances of primitive life. To the Oriental mind the person of the local despot presents itself as the depository of all power and the source of all beneficence. He is known by experience to have a limitless power of giving or withholding the

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 70

good things of life. There is no higher court of appeal to which the subject can approach. The sovereign holds all justice in gremio pectoris, in the sense that justice itself cannot be conceived as having any practical free course except it can succeed in commending itself to the temper of the sovereign despot. The petitioner knows very well indeed, by long and bitter experience, that the Sultan's memory needs considerable jogging, and his palm oiling with plentiful "baksheesh."

Moreover, he is generally of uncertain temper. His moods must be carefully watched. He will, at times, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, be in the mood of calling out with ungovernable fury, "Off with his head!" at the approach of the most reasonable and grovelling suppliant. At other times, after a good meal, or after listening to an ode composed in his honour, or after the successful destruction of his enemies, he may be expected to be complaisant to almost any demand, however extravagant or inequitable. At ordinary times he is to be approached with care, and the well-advised will not be sparing in money to procure the most skillful intermediaries to smooth the way. Acting under the advice of the skilled advocate, he will prepare costly presents, and he will take care that they are of a suitable kind. One Sultan will like gold; another will demand blood; while the favour of others will most easily be secured with ivory, apes and peacocks. One will crave the dead bodies of his enemies; another will prefer the heads of his nearest relations. The suppliant will be careful, in general, not to obtrude upon the Presence in his own person; he will not only best secure his interests, but will, in the long run, without doubt, save his purse as well, if he employ a mediator or advocate to plead his cause in his stead.

For the king, as we have noted, has his moods. He may tomorrow give without hesitating that which no cajolery and no expenditure of treasure could wring

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 71

from him today. Everything depends upon the whim of the moment. In approaching him it is not wise to appeal to justice or to law, a course which might seem to belittle his own arbitrary and sovereign will; appeal must rather be made to his vanity or to his mercy, to his well-known willingness, in answer to supplications offered with sufficient urgency, to save the lives of the worst criminals, and to grant, even to the most abject of his subjects, the most unexpected and unbounded favours. He may be reminded, if a fitting and decent caution be used, of the glorious character of his ancestors, who, while they slew the proud at sight, had often raised the most undeserving beggars from the dunghill. But, above all things, it will be necessary to be unceasing in praise of the character of the sovereign himself; the celebration of his clemency must arise, like incense, continually, and money spent on the manufacture of laudatory hymns will seldom be known to be without its due reward.

There can be no doubt that this picture of the despotic Sultan has powerfully influenced that view of prayer which we find current in ancient times. God was, quite naturally, and, as it seems to us, almost inevitably, apprehended under the forms with which men were familiar. They thought of God as one who needed to be approached by the same abject and circuitous methods as those by which they approached the powers whom they knew so well. Flattery and cajolery, sacrifices and offerings, priests and mediators, seemed to be the natural avenues to His presence.

This ideal of the character of God, which we have called the Sultanic view, has its origin outside the limits of the Chosen Race, but we shall be well advised to note that it is a conception of prayer which is by no means confined to pagan religions. In the Old Testament we trace the stages by which the Jews, with painful steps and not without singular relapses, rid themselves in very considerable measure of the degrading

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 72

associations which had surrounded the gods of the ethnic cults. We shall do well, I say, to remember that the escape was very slow and very partial, and there is many a chapter in the Old Testament which bears within it traces, if not more than traces, of this corrupt view of the relation between God and man. God sends three years of famine and is only appeased by the hanging of the seven sons of Saul. He visits sins of inadvertence with terrible punishments which can only be averted by animal sacrifices; He is equally particular about, and attaches equal penalties to, the oppression of the poor and the sowing of two kinds of seed in a field, or the wearing of a garment made of two kinds of stuff.¹ He appears to be much more careful to have priests who have no deformity than to have priests who are moral in their life: ² He makes laws and regulations enforcing the primitive customs of taboo, laws which appear to us wholly arbitrary, forbidding people to eat the coney, the hare or the pig:³ He refuses to be approached by any priests but those who could claim descent from Levi;⁴ He was subject to sudden paroxysms of rage, as when He provided the people with quails and "while the flesh was yet between their teeth, ere it was chewed, the anger of the Lord was kindled against the people, and the Lord smote the people with a very great plague": ⁵ He destroys the people of Heshbon because they, like the Belgians of modern times, refused passage to the armies of Israel on their way to invade the lands of their enemies: ⁶ His sanctuary was more like a slaughterhouse than a church. Yet, in spite of that which appears to us to be the savagery and the capriciousness of the character of Jahveh, we must remember that to the people of Israel Jahveh appeared, even in that conduct which seems to us most capricious, to be entirely reliable and just as compared to the gods of the heathen, and the procedure

¹ Lev. xix. 13, 19. ² Lev. xxi. 16-24.

³ Lev. xi. 5-8. ⁴ Num. iii. 10

⁵.Num. xi. 33^{, 6} Deut. ii. 26-37.

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 73

which seems to us to be founded on a wholly irrational basis, seemed to the people of the time very seemly, very wise, and very worthy of a Divine Power (see p. 51, "Prayer and the Old Testament"). Indeed we cannot but marvel at the continual emergence, from this seemingly irrational chaos, of spiritual principles destined in the long run to swallow up the barbarous ideas, causing even the most savage ideas to subserve the needs of spiritual progress.

Even the 51st Psalm, which will surely never lose, for the religious sense, its charm and pathos, sinks to a very low and naive strain when it ends by promising to Jahveh, in return for His gifts, that He shall receive a present of young bullocks for His altar. If we were not so used, by continual repetition, to the idealization of such language, and if we were to picture to our minds the actual scene which this vow implies, we should realize that even in this most lovely fragment of early devotion the religious evolution of the race has not as yet proceeded very far. It is indeed possible that the last verse of the psalm may have been added in order to make its deeply spiritual tone more acceptable to the conservative and orthodox religionists of the day; and if this be so, it shows that the purely spiritual motive was felt to need some balance which could be obtained by the concession which the bullocks provided to the popular religious taste. Examples of the toning down of mystical writings to suit a lower level of popular theology are not unknown even in our own day.

It will not do to suppose that we find a steady and uninterrupted evolution of thought throughout the Old Testament, showing us the lowest level of the conception of the Divine Being in the earliest literature and the highest conception in the latest. We do not, as a matter of fact, find evidence sufficient to justify such a theory, attractive as it is. In the earliest books we find many examples of the most beautiful experiences of religious feeling, and in the latest some which are

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 74

the most arid and unspiritual. The two conceptions existed together, even as they are to be found in close juxtaposition in the popular religions of our own day.

It is needless to go in detail through the ancient annals of the Jews to show how painfully they were escaping from the Sultanic view of the relation between God and man, and from the servile character which this idea of the relation involved on the part of man. If we were suddenly asked to say under what circumstances it was that Jahveh was represented to have killed indiscriminately thirty thousand persons - good and bad, men, women and children alike - we might have difficulty in remembering for the moment, if we were not students of the Bible, whether it was on account of their incautious demand for a change of diet, or for their murmuring at the tragic fate of some temerarious nonconforming ministers, or on account of the dangerously modern and humane treatment meted out to a fallen tyrant or to the scions of a supplanted dynasty, or again, whether it was for a merely ribald remark concerning the baldness of a prophetic head. Nor is it important that we should remember. The point in all these incidents that we are intended to seize is that the punishments of Jahveh are more terrible than those of even the most "frightful" of human kings. The moral intended to be taught is that which is expressed in the words of the Commination Service, that "His dreadful judgments are hanging over our heads and always ready to fall upon us"; and these judgments may not be any more lenient towards the unwary layman who stretches out an impious hand to steady the tottering ark, than towards the man who kills innocent women and children with the sword. We are intended to understand that it will be our wisdom to abandon argument once for all, and, with all the humility we can assume, to sue for peace upon the terms which Omnipotence shall dictate.

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING    Page 75

It is indeed abundantly true that this aspect of "frightfulness" in the character of Jahveh was being continually modified by the limitation of the judgments and chastisements attributed to Him, and the gradual tendency to lay less and less stress upon the ritual, or merely tribal, codes of morals. The prophets were continually urging that a life of piety and the recognition of social responsibilities were more likely to ensure a favourable answer to prayer than the offering of bullocks and rams or the observance of feasts and fasts. The religion of the Old Testament is distinguished among its Semitic contemporaries by the very fact that it was continually striving to disentangle itself from the Sultanic view of God and from the theory of prayer which belongs to that view; and the chief value of the Old Testament consists in this, that it records the history of a persistent protest against the popular conceptions of God's character and of the consequent relation of man to God - a protest so marvelous and unexampled at that period of human evolution that it may claim to be considered one of the most astonishing phenomena in the development of man. Yet, though we do now recognize the truth that the value of the Old Testament lies in the record of the protest of the minority, and not in the beliefs of the majority, of the Israelitish people, there is, nevertheless, a danger, even today, that the Old Testament should be used as a book of precedents, instead of being regarded as a mine in which the finding of gold nuggets outweighs the labour of the elimination of much dross.

The tendency to justify cruelty by appeal to the Old Testament has undoubtedly done very great harm in the past in retarding the humanization of our social legislation; but the danger grows less day by day, and it only needs mention here because there is still a tendency to forget that even the most beautiful devotional language of the Old Testament lies deeply imbedded in the dross of much very gross paganism, and that we must not be surprised to find that the constant devotional repetition

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 76

of the Psalms, with all the good effect which this habit has undoubtedly produced, has been productive also of a tendency to condone, and to prolong, the habit of approaching God as the Oriental suppliant approaches his sovereign, with anxious deprecation of His wrath and bloodthirsty demands for revenge and for the punishment or extermination of our enemies.

The danger lest the Sultanic view of God might corrupt the social conscience of mankind or hinder its moral evolution has been constantly felt in the history of the Church. Ulphilas, the apostle of the Goths, prudently suppressed (as Gibbon says) the four books of the Kings as they might tend to irritate the fierce and sanguinary spirit of the Barbarians. The Anglican missionaries of the last century, less wise in their generation, translated into the language of the natives of New Zealand the whole Canonical Scriptures. The Maori prophets afterwards taught that their people were the Israelites and the British were the Amalekites, and were ready to act upon the example recommended and enforced by the God of Israel. (I remember speaking to a Maori who, possessing a New Testament, earnestly desired to possess the Old Testament, as, he said, the New Testament had in it too much about Christ, which did not interest him.) It is certain that the Church could never have tolerated so long the savage cruelty of our criminal code if it had not recommended and sanctioned horrible punishments for ecclesiastical offences, which punishments were justified by the examples of Jahveh's treatment of His enemies in the hours of His fierce wrath. The extreme militarist parties in all lands never tire of assuring us that they derive ever new and satisfying comfort from the reading of the Old Testament in time of war - a comfort which they find with greater difficulty in the reading of the New.

We have sketched out this Sultanic view of the relation of God to man. Its essential feature is that

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 77

it does not pretend or presume to understand the character of God. It takes it for granted that certain things will be given by God and certain things withheld; but it does not attempt to discover any principle in the giving or the withholding. Everything is arbitrary. God is angry with you for something you have done you may, or you may not, know what it is; you may, or may not, be responsible for the act. He may punish you with war, or with cancer, or by slaying your children: you can do nothing but ask Him to have mercy; you may promise to amend, but it is His wrath which has to be turned aside, His mind that has to be changed, and the more humiliation you may suffer, and the more sorrow you endure, the greater is the hope that this painful process may appease the violence of His great wrath and inaugurate a happier condition of things. Who shall say that this conception of our relation to God is entirely obsolete and unknown ?

An example of the conception held of God's character in one considerable section of the Church may be found in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. "Consider," he says, "the anger of God avenging this first sin [of Adam] on all the descendants of the first sinner pestilence, war, famine, desolation of the earth; so many disasters, so many violent deaths, so many tears shed, so many crimes committed, so many children for ever deprived of the sight of God, so many souls cast into hell. What consequences and what chastisements for one single sin! . . ." "One single sin, committed before the Incarnation, before he had experienced the justice of God; above all, a sin which he expiated by nine hundred years of penitence.'' "There is, perhaps, in the depths of hell a soul that God has eternally condemned for such or such a mortal sin committed one single time." "Ask yourself what this God is who punishes a single mortal sin in this manner." "How long is it since you first committed a mortal sin ? Why did not God strike you dead after this first

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 78

sin? " This book is used as the textbook of the Jesuit Order, and was thought by George Tyrrell to be far more liberal and tolerant than most other Catholic textbooks; and this passage may serve to show how pagan views of God survive even in the writings of great saints.

Let us now examine that idea of our relation to God which I have called the Scientific conception, a name chosen because it expresses the conception which the student of physical science has towards Nature. I am not intending to refer to that rigid and mechanical conception of Nature which was almost universal a generation ago and has not altogether vanished today - that theory which made the pursuit of physical science nothing but the discovery and cataloguing of fixed, unalterable phenomena - but to that newer conception which is being more and more widely entertained, that conception which regards Nature as the expression - not always the perfect and unimpeded expression - of reason, and as being, therefore, necessarily akin to the reasonable nature of man, open to his discoveries, to some extent at least pliant to his manipulations, comprehensible ultimately to his understanding, and only realizing its full purpose, only becoming Nature in its fullest meaning, when it is bound up indissolubly with the mind of man.

But while the modern student who has cast aside the materialistic conception of a rigid and mechanical world does thus believe that the face of Nature may change almost infinitely under the influence of human thought, disclosing always new mysteries hitherto unknown, he yet knows that scientific discovery involves accurate and patient research to discover the laws through which Nature will work his will; it postulates uniformity of results wherever there is uniformity of causes; it has no place for caprice, or inaccuracy, or forgetfulness, or sudden gusts of anger or pity. He could not work at all unless he postulated this uniformity: it is the very basis of all his hopes, the ground of all his confidence.

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 79

He has also to postulate everywhere a rational basis in Nature, that everywhere there is discoverable eventually a law of causation which can be demonstrated to be in line with man's understanding of what is meant by reason and law. It is true that, inasmuch as the student of the physical sciences is dealing not with moral but merely with material relations, the question of the moral character of the Source of all phenomena does not enter into his researches as it must enter into the researches of the student of moral questions, but this fact does not detract from the value of the analogy which we propose to draw between the pursuit of Science and the adventure of Prayer. It is the tone and temper of the man of science, and not the subject matter of his enquiries, which is of value to us at this point of our enquiry.

This, then, is the conception which a student of physical science holds towards that which he may call "Truth," or "the Law of Nature," or "Ultimate Reality." He, like the pagan suppliant, feels that this supreme Reality has something which he greatly needs, and which it is competent to bestow. He desires to establish relations with it. He feels his own need of knowledge. This need may grow to be a great necessity, a crying aloud, of his whole nature. So far he is at one with the pagan devotee. But he never imagines for a moment that Nature can be tricked or cajoled. Give her what presents you will, sing to her what odes you may, flatter her, praise her, grovel to her, hire mediators to teach you her weaknesses and her whims, yet this will not avail to make her give you the good things which she still hides. She is, indeed, the student knows, not a willing concealer of her treasures; he is convinced that Nature is waiting to disclose her gifts to those who know how to approach her. But to Wisdom alone can she reveal herself; and her self revelation is never given in answer to any litanies of entreaty. She has no moods, she asks for no

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 80

intercessors or mediators to appease her wrath, she demands no bloody victims, there is no privileged approach to her shrines. The student of science approaches his deity with sane and confident steps; with reverence indeed, but with the intelligent and fearless reverence which is inspired by the austere and adorable majesty of justice and of Law. He knows that if at present he lack response to his prayer, it is not because his deity is angry or in need of appeasement; it is because of some want of understanding on his own part, some want of knowledge, or some disinclination to follow after truth at all costs and in spite of all perils, some lack of insight which wisdom alone can correct and amend.¹

This calm and confident approach of the student of science to Nature, and its relation to Religion, is expressed by Wordsworth, who, speaking of his studies in geometry at Cambridge says:

Does the student make petition to Nature? In one sense he does, even as the pagan does. He asks, he seeks, he knocks; but while he asks, he knows that it is his own mind that must clear the way for the answer to

¹ "The man of science seeks Truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude; the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of Truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. - Wordsworth, Preface to Poems.

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 81

come; he seeks, but it is in his own mind that he knows the treasure will be found; he knocks, indeed, but he knows that it is not until his own mind is cleared of ignorance and self will that the door will be opened, and then it will open of its own accord. The response to his research will not come either because he deplores his state, or because he wrings his hands and casts ashes into the air, or clothes his body in sackcloth, nor yet because he praises his deity in psalm and hymn. It will come from a source which can only make its response through the suppliant's mind when it is cleared from the darkness of error by the discipline of wisdom and of self devotion.

If we seek to analyze the psychological process of the "prayer" of the student of physical science, we find that:

1. He has a confident belief that there always is a rational solution of every problem of science;
2. He is certain that Nature will always meet research rationally undertaken with a rational answer, and will never betray his confidence, so that he can count upon Nature to respond with unvarying uniformity to the accurate demonstrations of the intellect;
3. His desire to know Truth grows until the heat of that desire may be fitly described as an unceasing knocking at the door;
4. He is confident that the answer will come along the line of revelation to him of some rational law and by his cooperation with some rational process.

This clear, sincere, intelligent intercourse with Nature is in strong contrast to the dark and tortuous method of the Oriental suppliant with his God. It seeks not to alter the mind of its god, nor to remind him of his duties, nor to flatter his wisdom, nor to deprecate his outbursts of wrath: it adores with reverence; it asks with confidence; it waits with assurance.

The Oriental who holds the Sultanic view of God has never been able to make any solid progress in physical science, because he assumes that the God, who in answering his own personal prayers is immoral and

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 82

corrupt, is also likely to be wayward and capricious in his government of Nature as a whole. It is useless to discover any laws of mechanics when Allah may choose at any moment to smash to pieces the best constructed bridge, and futile to learn scientific agriculture when Durga will bless or blight your crop, not because you have observed or neglected the laws of nature, but because you have either flattered or upset her dignity or her whims. That is why we find advance in physical science in Mahometan or Hindu society comparatively small, and the same observation holds true in those parts of Christendom where a kindred view of God has prevailed. Where Christians still hold a conception of God tainted with this belief they will meet a famine, not by better irrigation, but by extra litanies, and will attempt to stay a pestilence, not by sanitation, but by carrying in procession the image of their favourite Saint; they will not seek for the moral and scientific causes of great disasters, but will attribute an outburst of cholera to the prevalence of the Higher Criticism, or the devastation of a great world wide war to the disendowment of some local priesthood. No progress can be made in physical science where there is not a belief in a rational order of the universe; and so long as prayer and the moral intercourse of the soul with God are conducted on the assumption that God is, just in this particular relation, irrational and weakly sentimental and subject to manipulation by priesthoods, just so far as prayer alone of all human activities remains outside the sphere of reason and law, no progress can be made in the Science of Prayer.

The reader who has followed us thus far may perhaps here urge that, after all, the student of physical science is confronted with quite as great and difficult a problem as the Sultan's unhappy suppliant, if we consider the grim cruelty and the terrific catastrophes of nature. Nature, as conceived by the student of

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 83

pure physical science, appears at times to be both blind and cruel, and to be as capricious and wayward as any Oriental potentate. It punishes stupidity or error with extraordinary violence; it seems to have no regard at all to pious and devout folly, and to reward with callous liberality the immoral student who is also wise, persevering and accurate. The electric current will kill the pious widow on her way to church just as surely as the burglar on his way to rob her house. The obscene novel concealed in the breast-pocket of the frivolous soldier is just as likely to ward off a bullet as a copy of the Prayer Book. The surgeon operating in a case of syphilis may fall a victim to that horrible disease and may transmit it to his family just as surely as the man of evil life who, as we say, has brought it upon himself. This is all true; but the difference between the student of physical science and the suppliant of the Sultan is that, while the latter feels that he has got to put the Sultan into a good temper again, the scientific student knows that Nature is not angry and does not require appeasement, but that it is for him to find some remedy in his own mind for the erroneous thought or action which has involved him in disaster. The disaster is not a call for more litanies, but for more accurate methods and more searching investigation. We are certain that however cruel Nature may seem to be, that apparent cruelty can be overcome, and is intended to be overcome, not by any deprecation of Nature, but by a persevering and constant cooperation with her laws, and this is true also of Religion.

It is, surely, of real value to us in our search to notice here that Nature does seem to lay great store upon right understanding, where we should be disposed to give more weight to devout and sentimental ignorance, and this consideration may have value for us, not only as investigators of nature, but as students of the science of approaching the Eternal God.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 84

It is disconcerting to us who believe in a moral law behind the Universe to find that Nature appears to set this extraordinarily high value on scientific insight and so little on bhakti or devout affection. We have come to think of godliness, or saintliness, as being quite compatible with gross stupidity; and we regard Nature as cruel because we think that ignorance or error is merely the result of misfortune, which ought not to be punished at all, whereas sin is something for which man must always hold himself responsible. Bishop Creighton remarked that "after we have let the ape and the tiger die, we have to deal with the donkey, which is a much more intractable and enduring animal than the others." We quite expect to be called upon to cleanse our hearts from sin before we approach God; we hardly take seriously the demand, no less rigorous, to purge our minds of error and stupidity. Men and women, and even popular divines, are described as being real saints but wonderfully silly and narrow minded. This implies, of course, that to be like God is not inconsistent with being also both silly and narrow minded. In fact, we fail to regard God as the Author of wisdom and knowledge as well as of goodness and love. It is possible that we may have to learn that ignorance is just as serious a sin as, let us say, dishonesty. It may, like dishonesty, be, in any given case, almost wholly due to circumstances exterior to the person who exhibits it, or it may be a sin for which he is verily guilty.

We may argue that God is not really displeased with our ignorance, but with our desire to be ignorant, or our indifference to the attainment of knowledge. But this is equally true of sin: it is not the sinful act, but the deliberate doing of it, which we conceive to be specially displeasing to God. Knowledge, like the keeping of the Law, may be entirely without religious value, but its absence, if it be voluntarily acquiesced in, is culpable, just as immoral acts are culpable in like circumstances.

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 85

In this sense to be wise is as necessary in the approach to God as to be good. There is a real science, which demands wisdom, in the things of the Spirit as in the things of this world.

We may, then, take the manner of the scientist's approach to truth as affording us a real, if only an imperfect, analogy - to that which we have called the "scientific" idea of prayer. If we apply this analogy to prayer, it would lead us to consider it not as a deprecation of the wrath of God, but as a determined effort to give entrance to God's light, which is endeavouring without ceasing to penetrate the darkness of our error. This is not anything new, nor is it absent from the religion of the Hebrews. It is found side by side with the Sultanic view. We find it in the Psalms, especially in that 119th Psalm which has been the constant companion of Catholic devotion. But still more clearly in the Wisdom literature do we find the confident approach to Wisdom substituted for the anxious deprecation of the God of Wrath.

The Book of Wisdom abounds in beautiful passages in praise of this new and higher outlook. "Wisdom is a spirit that loveth man." "God made not death, neither delighteth He when the living perish; for He createth all things that they might have being, and the generative powers of the world are healthsome, and there is no poison of destruction in them, but ungodly men by their hands and their words called death unto them." "Wisdom is radiant and fadeth not away, and easily is she beheld of them that love her, and found of them that seek her. She forestalleth them that desire to know her, making herself first known. She goeth about, herself seeking them that are worthy of her, and in their paths she appeareth unto them graciously, and in every purpose she meeteth them." "Wisdom is more mobile than any motion, yea, she pervadeth and penetrateth all things by reason of her pureness, for she is a breath of the power of God, and

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 86

a clear effluence of the glory of the Almighty; therefore can nothing defiled find entrance into her. For she is an effulgence from everlasting light, and an unspotted mirror of the working of God, and an image of His goodness. And she, being one, hath power to do all things, and, remaining in herself, reneweth all things: and from generation to generation passing into holy souls, she maketh men friends of God and prophets. For nothing doth God love save him that dwelleth with wisdom." In many beautiful passages of this kind we can note the nobler estimate of prayer-the confident but reverent converse of the seeker after Truth with the gracious, wise and unchanging Spirit that goes forward to meet her lovers and discloses to them her secrets of knowledge and right living. In spite of the apparent hostility of Nature to man's advances, the Hebrew philosophers were confident that Nature, when she is sought out and loved and honoured, is wholly beneficent to man.

When we pass to the New Testament we ask ourselves the all important question, What is the teaching of Jesus concerning prayer? What is His attitude towards God? Did He approach as a suppliant to Jehovah of the thunderbolts, or did He approach as a student the source of wisdom ? Neither of these figures wholly represents His attitude towards God; but who can doubt that He is nearer to the mind of the writers of Wisdom than to that of the writers of the Pentateuch or the imprecatory Psalms? Our Lord conceives of God as a Father having relation to a son who shares His nature and is capable of understanding His counsels, who does not fear to approach Him, nor does He deprecate His wrath. He is as confident that God is wholly on the side of health as that He is wholly on the side of holiness. He teaches us to pray in the same simple and confident tone in which the student approaches Nature, not with ^" vain repetitions," like

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 87

the heathen who think that they will be heard for their much speaking, but as certain that "your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him," and as knowing also that the answer will come with unerring accuracy and intelligence - "for if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will forgive you your trespasses: but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses," i.e. you do not need to inform God of your needs, but you must indeed clearly understand that your attitude to life is your true "prayer," and the "answer" will, in the long run, be an exact reflex of your attitude towards God and man. Love will always bring love; forgiveness will bring forgiveness; hatred will bring hatred. Prayer is correspondence with, and understanding of the purposes of God. The absolutely certain answer to such prayer is power over nature exactly proportionate to the measure of our understanding.

It is true that Jesus once and again compares prayer to God to the approach of a petitioner to a cruel or unwilling giver - as when He speaks of the suppliant widow and the unjust judge, who gives way only to the perpetual nuisance of her crying; to the friend at midnight who will only leave his children who are in bed with him because of the battering of his door by his friend. These stories are sometimes held to justify the theory of anxious and grovelling supplication, as of the beggar in the street. Their language might at first sight seem to imply this; but on reflection it surely becomes at once apparent that the argument is that if these most unpleasant characters will give way to unceasing pressure, it is much more certain that we shall, without any manner of doubt, find an abundant "answer" to our scientific understanding (which is indeed nothing else than confident faith in God who makes the sun to shine on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust), and

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 88

that therefore we need, in dealing with God, no such wiles as do those who deal with an unwilling giver. Christ's constant message is "Have faith in God - in His will to overcome evil, to remove obstacles, to destroy sickness, to give holiness, to conquer death, to reveal instantaneously the Kingdom and make men partakers in it today if only they desire it enough."

Everything is open to those who believe enough and want with sufficient concentration of desire. There is no "baksheesh" necessary; no arbitrary sacrifices, no mystic passwords, no forms of introduction. There are no dragons in the way. God is not angry that He should be appeased, nor deaf that we should shout at Him, nor blind that He cannot perceive our needs." Whatever your problem or your difficulty, there is a full, sufficient and intelligent answer; and it is the will of God that you should possess it as soon as you have established your claim to it by the intensity of your need, the boldness of your faith, and the careful accuracy of your knowledge of God's ways. That is the message of Christ as it is the message of physical science.

So when our Lord sees sin, He sees at once forgiveness; when He sees sickness, He sees at once healing; when He sees the destruction of Judaism, He sees at the same time the promise of the Kingdom; when He sees death, He sees resurrection. That is His life of faith; and the attitude of faith is in itself prayer.

We need not, indeed, be concerned to deny that those who came to our Lord with faith most crude,

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 89

most uncritical, but yet most urgent and unswerving, received benefits beyond all their hope. Let us not seek to deny it; but in proportion as we approach our Lord's own example and teaching, we get the impression that He regarded prayer as a full, exact and scientific demonstration of the eternal Laws which proceed from the eternal Nature of God. To know Him is Eternal Life.

When we pass from our Lord Himself, and come to consider the teaching of His followers, we have to take into account the constant tendency, always discernible at every stage of religious development, to deflect opposition by compromising with the religious tendencies and prejudices of the day, and to translate unfamiliar and unpalatable ideas into the popular language of the moment. Can it be seriously doubted that we find this tendency in the Epistles? The Jews were accustomed to the ideas of Mediator, Intercessor, Propitiation, Sacrifice, Temple, Altar. They could not readily conceive of any approach to God except by some one who should appease His wrath, should hide the sins of men, should offer a sacrifice or be himself the sacrifice¹ to appease the wrath of an angry and vindictive potentate.

It was perhaps necessary, it must certainly have been tempting, to translate the simple and profound teaching of Jesus into the terms of the offended sovereign, demanding a victim, the victim willingly offering himself, the offering accepted, and the wrath of the king appeased. We cannot be surprised that there is so much Judaism in the Epistles; the wonder is that there is not far more. Christian writings of a not long subsequent date are overloaded with such ideas. Angels showering down plagues and pestilences; horses wading in blood; strange beasts with horns and terrible eyes - all the imagery of fear is quick to return. Here, as in the Old Testament, we must not be surprised that there is so much of all

¹ There is, of course, an entirely true and Christian sense in which these ideas can be truly used and which gives them permanent value (see Essay on "The Eucharist," pp. 306 ff.).

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 90

this - so much meal and so little leaven; we must be content to be reconciled to much that is below the level of Christ for the sake of the inexpressibly precious remnant which is left. Here too we are content, and more than content, to buy the whole field for the sake of the treasure hid in it. But we are not going to say that the whole field is necessarily of equal value with the treasure. There are some elements in the Apostolic teaching, beside the regulation of women's attire and deportment, which are below the level of Christ's teaching and are not on the highest level of Apostolic inspiration; and there is not a little to remind us that in the matter of prayer there was a tendency to think in terms of the old method of approach to God by way of sacrifice and mediation, of deprecation and propitiation, of which we find few, if any, traces in the teaching of our Lord.¹ We can afford to allow all this and yet rejoice in the triumphant sense of victory and deliverance from fear and darkness which is so characteristic of the Apostolic writings. We must remember that St. Paul and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews were the modernists of their day. They spoke in terms of the ecclesiastical language of their age, while they were continually teaching people to reinterpret the current language and even to transcend the ideas which the language expressed. Religious people of that day thought in terms of wrath and propitiation, of blood and expiation, of bullocks and goats. They tried to express the revolutionary thought of Christ in terms of a conservative religious theology. We are apt to conceive that the terms in which they expressed their teaching, which are entirely foreign and, indeed, almost incomprehensible to us who have never seen a bullock

¹ Yet there is much less of this than is often supposed. Dr. Westcott believed that there is no thought of 'propitiating God' in the New Testament. Such language as propitiating God' and 'God being reconciled' are foreign to the language of the New Testament. Man is reconciled (2 Cor. v. 18 ff.; Rom. v. 10f.). There is a 'propitiation' in the matter of the sin or of the sinner. The love of God is the same throughout." - Westcott, Comment on Epistles of St John, p. 87.

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 91

or a goat in church, are as sacred and necessary to us as the ideas which these images, even in those days, very inadequately expressed. If these writers were teaching now, we can be tolerably sure that they would not speak in terms of bullocks, but in terms of the highest religious ideals of our own generation.

We are now in a position, perhaps, to ask ourselves what this idea of scientific prayer means to us Christians today. What is the practical change of attitude which it involves for those who have been educated in "Sultanic" prayer?

It means just that we are absolutely confident that God is all powerful to do, all wise to know, all loving to give. He can do exceeding abundantly for us beyond all that we ask or think. We have no need to remind Him of His promises, to stir His memory, to appease His anger, or to employ mediators to assure His favourable response. We are conscious, indeed, that we cannot expect an "answer" to our needs unless we come in that same spirit of filial confidence which our Lord Himself had. We must come to Him as the true student comes to Nature, "as little children," willing to be born again so that old prejudices and preconceptions may be taken away, but yet in bold and confident assurance. We must come in our Lord's spirit; we must have His mind; we must "eat His flesh "and "drink His blood," that is, we must assimilate and make our own all His life, all His outlook, all His teaching; in a word, we must come "in His Name." In this sense, indeed, we may truly say, in Jewish language, that He is our Mediator; not a mediator needed because of God's unfriendly attitude, but on account of our estrangement and ignorance and moral obstinacy. The filial spirit, which is the very spirit of Jesus, which knows no fear, and knows itself to be Son of God because it is also Son of man, is the one mediator between God and man, and there is none other Name than this given unto men whereby we must be saved.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 92

Jesus Christ is the eternal Mediator between God and man, not because He is the greatest man among many, but because He incarnates that ideal Manhood which is the perfect expression of true Godhead. He is God and Man, and through His Spirit He makes real to us the freedom of approach to God, the Divine nature of perfect Manhood, the possibility of an exact knowledge of the faith God requires, in order to produce for us tangible and demonstrable results. His Spirit, by which, as He foretold us, He lives now in the world, is thus the one Mediator between God and man, as, in a lower sense, the artist is to us the mediator of natural beauty, and the scientist the mediator of natural law. He mediates to us those laws which without Him we should never have perceived. He mediates, too, to us the power to perceive them and to carry them out into practice.

So, praying "in His Name," we believe, we are certain, that an exact and wholly adequate answer to every need is always at hand. We have the same certitude that a scientist claims that for every problem there is a solution. However great the problem, it can be solved in accordance with eternal spiritual law. The world of phenomena is not rigid; it is plastic to him who has the mind of Christ; and no mountain of matter is so great that it cannot be moved, no sycamine tree so firmly rooted that it cannot be plucked up.

Once again, we shall believe that the "answer" to prayer will not arrive as a parcel is brought to our door, as something handed over to us from outside. The answer will come, as it comes to the scientist or the artist or the musician, by an enlightenment of the mind, which opens out to us the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven. We shall be given the inspiration, and we shall work out our own problem according to the law of our own measure of faith. Just as the modern doctor is less and less inclined merely to hand over a bottle of medicine to his patient and more and more sees that he must seek

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 93

to evoke in the patient the impetus of life which will enable him to cooperate with the law of life within,¹ so the spiritual student will expect that the healing of outward conditions will come by the revelation to his mind of the laws of natural release. Our prayers will thus tend to become less and less anxious cries for mercy, and petitions that God will change His attitude towards us, and will altogether cease to be prayers that He will take away His anger and not suffer His fierce displeasure to arise; and in place of such faithless petitions we shall put forth strong and filial claims to understand, and cooperate with, the eternal and loving will of God in the face of each problem that confronts us. "True prayer," Bishop Westcott has said, "the prayer which must be answered, is the personal recognition of the Divine Will."² "The questioning of ignorance is to be replaced by the definite prayer which claims absolute accomplishment as being in conformity with the will of God."We know that it is God's will, and His, pleasure, that we should make this confident claim.

There are many people who have been brought up in the Sultanic view of God who afterwards pass over in reaction to the view which regards God as an omnipresent and impersonal Power, always impartially and, as it were, automatically and inevitably making for love, wisdom, health and beauty, and certain to cooperate with any living soul that will lend its energies to this Divine force. This view is often seen today where we find God spoken of as "Science" or "Principle" or "Causation," with an apparent disregard (as it seems to some) of the common use of those terms, which renders this teaching very confusing to the uninitiated. In spite of this unwonted use of terms, these people have hold of an important aspect of truth. This is proved by the practical results of their faith.

¹ See Dr. C. Burlureaux, Traite pratique de psychotherapie.

¹ Commentary on Hebrews v. 7.

³ Commentary on John xvi. 23.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 94

There can be no doubt that many people have found in this changed conception of God a wonderful inspiration and peace. To them the idea of personality could never be separated from the idea of emotionalism, of changefulness, of contingency and mood. How could they ever tell whether God was really appeased, and whether, even if He were appeased today, His wrath might not break out afresh tomorrow? To people brought up in such an atmosphere the idea comes as new that, in worshipping God, we are really worshipping Goodness, Love, Life, Principle, and so on; it comes as a new strength and stay in life. To this newly discovered belief "Christian Science" and similar religious movements owe much of their influence and their power of regenerating character.

Many people thus attain for the first time something of the calmness and balance of the man of science. They learn to believe that the results of cooperation with God's purpose are as certain and accurate as the demonstrations of the laboratory. They have been accustomed to worship God as though He were an individual man of superhuman powers, it is true, but still, after all, an individual, with all the individual's liability to limitation, to waywardness, to forgetfulness and caprice. Even the most loving man may sometimes fail in love, but Love itself can never fall short of loving. The wisest ruler may sometimes grow slack, and his wisdom may fail to interpret itself to our moods, our folly may annoy or infuriate him, but Wisdom will never forget to be wise, and Goodness will never be impatient, and Life can never see death. Thus the idea of God as the abstract, active principle of good does, as a matter of fact, bring to many in our own generation a new steadfastness in disappointment, and a confident assurance in the search after God which they did not possess before. Nor does it in practice end in an otiose quietism. Just as the belief in the uniformity of nature is the basis of all experiment and

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 95

the bedrock of all confidence in scientific achievement, so this belief in God as the active principle of good has, as a matter of fact, led to bolder and more successful experiments in healing the sick, in conquering overwhelming sorrows, and overcoming long standing habits of sin than perhaps have ever been attempted before in the history of the Church. Never have there been more men and women in the Church of Christ who look for sure results from cooperation with God in the actual transformation of physical conditions than today. And this confidence does not come from the expectation of miraculous intervention by the suspension of law, but by belief in the simple, accurate and certain demonstration of spiritual laws which actually and always exist, and are made immediately available by our faith and understanding.

The people who obtain these results would not say that they believe in a miraculous or supernatural Christianity, because they would probably feel, in using such a phrase, that they were allowing that the ultimate and true nature of the universe was something less than good; but in an experience which is supra-normal no one could believe more enthusiastically. No Christian of any age would feel more confident in the power of prayer to cast out devils, to heal the sick, to put an end to war, to banish the evils that beset society. They would say that these things are accomplished by intelligent and never ceasing cooperation, with God's laws; that their success depends quite as much upon the carrying out of accurate and immutable laws as the building of a bridge depends upon the laws of mathematics. They would say that no amount of beseeching, no rending of hearts or garments, will bring about the desire of the prayerful man apart from conformity to the spiritual laws that govern all beneficent action. Thus in the textbook of Christian Science (Science and Health) Mrs. Eddy says: "God is Love. Can we ask him

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 96

to be more? God is intelligence. Can we inform the infinite Mind of anything he does not already comprehend? Do we expect to change perfection? Shall we plead for more at the open fount, which is pouring forth more than we can accept? The unspoken desire does bring us nearer the source of all existence and blessedness. Asking God to be God is a vain repetition. God is the same yesterday, today and for ever, and he who is immutably right will do right without being reminded of his province. The wisdom of man is not sufficient to warrant him in advising God. Who would stand before a blackboard and pray the principle of mathematics to solve the problem? The rule is already established and it is our task to work out the solution."

While this is a line of thought very characteristic of some modern religious movements, the insistence upon the being of God as "abstract principle" is not so new an idea as many uninstructed Christians might suppose. The insistence upon God's character as Eternal Wisdom which pervades the later literature of the Hebrews may well have been a happy reaction from the Sultanic view of Him as an all powerful and often wrathful king. The Johannine teaching which attributes Eternity and Divinity to the Logos or Reason supplies just that element of fixity and immutability in the idea of God which the Christian Scientist finds in his thought of God as " Divine Science." The idea of salvation so characteristic of the Alexandrine school of Theology, presents again some analogies with the teaching of these modern cults.

To another class of minds this aspect of religion will seem always remote and cold. It appears to lack the joy of personal intercourse, to be a philosophy for the study rather than a religion for the clash and turmoil of life. Such people cry out for "the flesh in the Godhead, a hand like their hand." They would rather even have the Sultanic conception of a Divine

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 97

despot, with all his faults and whims, than the cold, austere "Principle" of the Neo-Platonist or the Christian Scientist. And indeed if this impersonal view of God caused men to forget that Goodness, Wisdom and Love can only inhere and be manifested in Personality, or something which is more and not less than Personality, it is clearly a view as dangerous as it is untrue to our knowledge of life. The idea of Personality, if rightly understood, by no means runs counter to the ideas of steadfastness, unity and law. The fickleness and waywardness of individuals is due, not to the possession of personality, but to the lack of it.

Christianity, however, has within it the necessary correction to the one-sidedness of this, as also of the Sultanic view of God. Christ's vision of God as the Father enters as the reconciliation of these two types of religious experience. The Father is a person; He knows whereof we are made, and remembers that we are but dust; He numbers the hairs of our head, and cares for each sparrow that falls. Yet the Father is the antithesis of the capricious tyrant. He is to the son the symbol of steadfastness and beneficent law; He shares the nature of His children; their interests are one with His, and He rules by cooperation, not by fear. He less than any one else, needs information as to His son's needs. He anticipates them because He knows them so well. He will be stern, if need be, when strangers might be slack. The more intimate the relation between the two, the less there is of conscious petition; the son has learnt to know that each petition, as it comes to be really and urgently felt, is promptly met by His Father, and that its supply is immediately at hand.

If the filial soul does not in words ask for the things he needs, it is not because his relation with God is less than personal; but because it is so intimate that he knows that the demand in his own heart, the source

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 98

of the supply, and the gift itself are all one in their origin. They are all of God and from God. He does not imagine for a moment that it is his business to acquiesce idly in whatever state he finds himself and to wait until it is altered from outside. All his desires for betterment are of God; he sets no limit whatever to the change which his God given faith can bring about in the universe; his prayer is not an effort to alter God's will, but to unbar the doors and unstop the channels of his own nature so as to admit the urgent stream of Divine and eternal beneficence.

So we attack the problems of war, of disease, of social distress, not as asking God to put aside His fierce wrath and have pity upon those whom hitherto He has not pitied, but as being sure that the understanding and working out of eternal, spiritual laws by us is possible and practicable. We believe that spiritual resistance in the face of injustice or disease is the highest, the most radical, the most practicable form of resistance. It has the most assured results. The Church today is almost more timid and hesitant in believing this than the men of science who reject or ignore "religion." We are afraid to use the powers of the spirit to check an illness, to reform a drunkard or to redress a great wrong. We are more at home with drugs, with explosive shells, with the methods of the police court. These methods seem to us more sure and drastic and successful; methods which depend wholly upon Love seem doubtful and sentimental. We apologize for them, and those who use them are under suspicion. Yet those who have experience of them are gaining more and more certainty that they alone are the weapons of precision. Our criminals are more surely saved to society, the sick are more surely cured, when spiritual laws are believed and acted upon, than when they are distrusted or ignored.

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 99

The main hindrance to prayer is the sense of uncertainty which lingers in the minds of most people as to whether any particular prayer will, or will not, have any result whatever. It is comparatively easy in the study to form theories and give instructions which are supposed by the man in the study to overcome and neutralize this sense of uncertainty; but as long as God is conceived of as the author of misery and wrath, of pestilence and war, as well as of happiness and grace, and as long as His purposes are regarded as quite inscrutable, this sense of uncertainty will continue to destroy the faith of the multitude. The Gospel promises to faith stand out in startling and marvelous contrast to the teaching that breeds this uncertainty.

A little devotional manual, very widely used, and which is full of real piety, affords us a good example of this attitude of fearful uncertainty as to God's loving attitude towards us. "You see in what a terrible condemnation sin has involved you! It has brought you under the Wrath of God. O words of awful meaning! O terrible reality, for a soul to find itself under the Wrath of God! For think what it means - what it involves, even this, that if the soul leaves the body, that is, dies in this state, it will be driven away from God, and be plunged into a place of darkness and misery for ever. Can a person thus convicted of sin - who feels this curse always hanging over him, and ready to fall upon him, without perhaps any warning - can such a person feel happy? No, he cannot." The penitent is taught to repeat as his own the language of the Old Testament, and to say of God.

• He lieth in wait for me as a leopard.
• He runneth upon me as a giant.
• I cry unto Him, but He heareth not. ¹

Does not such language show us the need for a reformation in the teaching of the Church ? We must cease to attribute to God those qualities which Christ

¹ Pardon through the Precious Blood, or The_. Benefit of Absolution and how to obtain it.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 100

consistently attributed to the Devil. We shall also find that we have to revise our idea of omnipotence as applied to God. We have hitherto felt that at all costs we must predicate of God an omnipotence which made Him responsible for every event that occurred and every phenomenon which presented itself on the surface of the globe, whether it seemed to us good or bad. If a child died in a slum, or a drunkard fell into the river and was drowned, if a horrible war broke out which swept away its millions of men, or pestilence and famine devastated an empire, at all costs men have thought God's character for omnipotence must be asserted, and we must say that those calamities are God's will and seek to find for them some rational justification. So far has this been carried that the phrase "Thy will be done " has been generally applied as our answer to every enormity which legislatures and scientists are painfully and laboriously endeavouring to counteract and overcome, and which all moralists are denouncing. While scientists and social reformers have been diligently and with great zest combating quite preventable evils, the religionist, in the interests of God's character for omnipotence, has been blindly repeating

• Let me be still and murmur not,
• But breathe the prayer Divinely taught,
• "Thy will be done."

Yet this prayer, "Divinely taught," was, as a matter of fact, the prelude, not to acquiescence in things remaining as they were, on the theory that whatever is is God's will, but to an uniquely vigorous and triumphant onslaught upon things as they were in the interest of things as they were intended to be.

The Christian Gospel does not by any means teach us the doctrine that all which is good, but even goes to the length of risking an extreme appearance of dualism in its effort to make plain to us that the doctrine of omnipotence is not to be taken as teaching that everything

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 101

which happens is agreeable to the will of God. Christ might seem to have gone to an extreme length in endowing the Jewish belief in Satan with new vitality by His earnest insistence upon the dissociation of the idea of God from all responsibility for cruelty, disease and sin. We shall have to learn that it were better, if need be, to revise our idea of omnipotence than to weaken our hold upon God as Love and Righteousness and Freedom. Let us hold to God as Love, as the enemy of all that is not Love, even if provisionally we feel it to be difficult to reconcile this view with our belief in Omnipotence. If we so do, we shall, in the long run, find that it gives us a less mechanical and infinitely more moral idea of the meaning of Omnipotence - the Omnipotence which can make, not mechanical automata, but spirits which choose good because they could also choose evil. This revised belief in Omnipotence will immensely enlarge the scope of prayer, because we shall plunge boldly into the achievement of destroying many things which are now firmly planted in the world through the mistaken belief of Christians that they are the works of God, and we shall be encouraged to bring into being much which is now only dimly shadowed forth and hoped for, undeterred by the chilling fear that we may perchance be fighting against God.

We must allow that the devotional literature of the Church has not wholly cleansed itself from these pagan ideas. It is not necessary to enlarge upon this very real difficulty, but the language which makes the Commination Service or the Prayer against plague now almost wholly impossible to use,¹ makes some

¹ "O Almighty God, who in thy wrath didst send a plague upon thine own people in the wilderness, for their obstinate rebellion against Moses and Aaron and also, in the time of King David, didst slay with the plague of Pestilence three score and ten thousand, and yet remembering thy mercy didst save the rest; have pity upon us miserable sinners, who now are visited with great sickness and mortality; that like as thou didst then accept of an atonement, and didst command the destroying Angel to cease from punishing, so it may now please thee to withdraw from us this plague and grievous sickness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." (It is only fair to add that, though this prayer is officially authorized for use in the Anglican Church, it is seldom, if ever, used in modern times.)

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 102

phrases and forms in other parts of the Prayer Book not wholly easy to reconcile with the filial approach to God, and the certainty of His will to hear us, and the sure knowledge that He is Love - that certainty which casts out all fear and removes all desire to be spared from punishment. This new attitude must in time find its reflection in a revision of the public worship of the Church.

Prayer in the future will surely lose wholly its element of deprecation; it will, perhaps, lose in part its form of petition; it will tend to increase its element of affirmation. Acts of faith and hope, of love and penitence, will find a larger place. Greater stress will be laid upon the element of adoration, the quiet contemplation of God's nature and purpose, the corporate silence in which God says much, while we listen much and speak not at all, the cleansing of the avenues of the mind through which understanding comes to us as we live in conscious fellowship with Divine purposes. Petition may perhaps become less frequent, not because our needs become less urgent, nor yet because we hold to any mechanical "Law" of God which makes us think that the course of this world is fixed and unalterable, but because we shall realize more and more that the answer to our petitions lies, not in any change in God, but in our own greater measure of understanding. If this should be so, we need not be disappointed or alarmed.

The soul should not be surprised," says Madame Guyon, "at feeling itself unable to offer up to God such petitions as it had formerly made with freedom and facility, for now the Spirit maketh intercession for it according to the will of God. We must cooperate with, and second, the designs of God, which tend to divest us of all our own operations, that in the place thereof His own may be substituted."

The Christian suppliant, conscious both of God's entire willingness to grant, and of his own right as a son

PRAYER AS UNDERSTANDING     Page 103

to claim, all that is necessary both for his own and the world's fullest and highest satisfaction, will yet continue, with all simplicity, to "make his requests known unto God." Many of these requests may be very crude and undeveloped: many will cease, as spiritual progress is made, to be offered at all, because they will be seen to be out of harmony with Divine purposes, but yet it is essentially right and expedient that every desire, however simple and foolish, should be laid before the presence of the Divine Love. Only, the result the happiest result, of this will often be that such desires will be wholly laid aside, as they are answered by an increasing understanding that their attainment is inconsistent, alike with the fulfillment of the suppliant's own good and the F'ather's Divine purposes. But the petition has not been wasted; it has done its work. The element of petition will then, in all probability, so long as we are on this earthly plane, never be wholly laid aside, but we shall, in making our prayer, lay ever greater stress upon that which is now felt to be the preparatory stage of prayer: the placing of our spirit in harmony with God's purpose; the contemplation of that purpose; the desire that that purpose may be revealed to us, so that we may see it with the steady gaze with which the scientific student contemplates a great law of Nature, with the clearness with which an artist sees the vision of Beauty, so that it may become a fixed principle governing our own future desires and thoughts.

If we so act, it is certain that much prayer which now takes the form of petition that God will intervene to change the course of this world will take for the future the form of a steady and intense realization that God's purposes of Love are unchangeably good and need no alteration, and that it rests with us, with minds cleansed from error, and hearts attuned to nobler desires, to go forth and do the will of God. We shall stop beseeching God to cast out devils, and go forth in His Name and cast them out ourselves.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 104

This will be not the abandonment of Prayer, but its consummation.

It will, indeed, be no mere quietism which will take the place of petition; but even the insistent and agonizing hunger and thirst for righteousness, for peace among nations, for the coming of the Kingdom, will turn itself into an intense faith in God's willingness to give us all, and more than all, we ask; and, we shall turn in loving faith to Him who surely says to us, "Thy faith shall make thee whole," "Ye are not straitened in God; ye are straitened in your own affections." We know that He is willing to give; we have no need to ask; we need only to have the heart conscious of a dire emptiness, the mind ready to receive, untiring in the search for Divine wisdom, quick to understand the answer which will be given, the will to cooperate with the purposes of God.

This, surely, is the prayer of understanding, the prayer of reasonableness, the prayer of Christlike faith. Such prayer will never become antiquated by the advance of knowledge, and will never cease to arise to Heaven until the Kingdom of God shall come.

IV

PRAYER AND THE MYSTIC VISION

BY

RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., LITT.D.

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, HAVERFORD COLLEGE, U.S.A.

AUTHOR OF

"STUDIES IN MYTHICAL RELIGION"

"SPIRITUAL REFORMERS IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES" ETC.

SYNOPSIS

Page 106

IV

PRAYER AND THE MYSTIC VISION

I

The great central realities and practices of religion are all so rich and complex, so bottomless in their depth, that no individual account, based upon personal experience and temperament, can do more than emphasize selected aspects of the particular many-sided reality or practice under consideration. Then, too, all definition, of necessity, means limitation, and more than that, all attempt at definition instantly reveals the lines and tendencies in the character of the person proposing the definition. The true reality all the time immensely overflows the barriers and limits set by the partiality of the definer.

This is particularly true of all realities of an inward and spiritual sort, realities, that is to say, which cannot be dealt with in terms of space and mathematics. The definition of a wedge in mechanics can be made exact, rigid and final. The variations in definition here are negligible. But when we pass over to the realm of the interior life, with its infinite attitudes and aspirations, the personal equation cannot be ignored. No one can tell us what constitutes the essentia of prayer, or what mystic vision really is, without discovering at the same time to us on what level of life he lives and what formative preferences are controlling his mind; and whatever he may say, we shall know that there is still

Page 107

CONCERNING PRAYER    Page 108

something more and different to be said. I am therefore making no claim in this article to cover the whole range and significance of prayer. I am merely calling attention to what seems to me the heart and central core of this great spiritual function, and I willingly grant that I am touching only one aspect of one of man's richest human privileges.

My studies of mysticism have gradually led me to the view that religion is essentially and at bottom a mystical act, a direct way of vital intercourse between man and God. Religion is thus in its essential features as genuinely a matter of experience as is our relationship with an external world. This interior experience of relationship with invisible reality is what I mean by "mystic vision." The experience of mystic vision is one in which life appears at its highest level of inner unity and integral wholeness. All the deep lying powers of the inward self, usually so divergent and conflicting - the foreground purposes defeated by background inhibitions and by marginal doubts become liberated and unified into one conscious life, which is not merely intellectual, nor merely volitional, nor solely emotional, but an undivided whole of experience. With the inner unification is joined furthermore a sense of. a flooding, invading Life and Energy from beyond what William Watson calls:

• The bubbling of the springs
• That feed the world.

The usual insulations of the narrow individual life seem broken through and the recipient feels as though actual contact were attained with an enfolding Presence, life giving, joy bringing, light supplying.

There is something in the structure of the soul, in the nature of personal self consciousness, which prepares the way for mystic vision and which fits us for the type of experience above described. We are framed and made for intercourse with a supersensuous

PRAYER & THE MYSTIC VISION    Page 109

world and we cannot live within the limits of the tangible and describable world. Everyday life is over rational and over practical. We arrive at some of our most important certainties and we come upon some of our most imperative compulsions often with a minimum of dialectic. There are regions in us which underlie our cleverest logic, our clearest thinking, our most accurate calculating. Our memories and our imaginations spring to birth out of a deeper innermost life in which all so called "states" of consciousness are embedded, and deep lies under deep.

Heraclitus was right when he said, "You cannot find the boundaries of the soul by travelling in any direction." There is something in us which demands correspondence with another environment than that from which we draw our physical supplies. Eternity has in some sort been set in our nature and we can no more shut the infinite out of our being than the inlet can shut out the tides of the sea. Maeterlinck has well declared that "there is in us, above the reasoning portion of our reason, a whole region answering to something different, which is preparing for the surprises of the future, and which goes on ahead of our imperfect attainments and enables us to live on a level very much superior to that of those attainments." ¹

Still more clearly in his impressive essay on The Energies of Men, Professor William James has shown how men "habitually use only a small part of the powers which they actually possess and which they might use under appropriate conditions," and he has indicated in this essay many ways by which the hidden reservoirs of power within reach may be tapped - and the energy released and turned into working power.

Jacob Boehme's account of the way in which his hampered spirit "broke through the gate" and came out into a wider inward world of life and light and

¹ Maeterlinck's motto, which he adopted from an ancient mantelpiece in Bruges, is: "Yet more is to be found in me."

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 110

power is one of the best accounts available, but something like the great Teutonic mystic's experience has come to most of us. "While I was: in affliction and trouble, I elevated my spirit, and earnestly raised it up unto God, as with a great stress and onset, lifting up my whole heart and mind and will and resolution to wrestle with the love and mercy of God and not to give over unless He blessed me - then the Spirit did break through. When in my resolved zeal I made such an assault, storm, and onset upon God, as if I had more reserves of virtue and power ready, with a resolution to hazard my life upon it, suddenly my spirit did break through the Gate, not without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, and I reached to the innermost Birth of the Deity and there I was embraced with love as a bridegroom embraces his bride. My triumphing can be compared to nothing but the experience in which life is generated in the midst of death or like the resurrection from the dead. In this Light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in all created things, even in herbs and grass, I knew God, who He is, how He is, and what His will is - and suddenly in that Light my will was set upon by a mighty impulse to describe the being of God."

It is, I maintain, the experience not only of rare and unusual personalities that a larger Life impinges upon the margins of the inner realm, but most normal persons have at least moments when:

• A bolt is shot back somewhere in the breast,

and they find themselves possessed of unsuspected energies, flooded with added life, as though a new compartment of being or a new dimension of space were opened, and they are inwardly convinced beyond all doubt that they have been in correspondence with - a real though invisible world of Spirit and Life.

It has, I know, been pointed out that there is a

¹ The Aurora, xix, 10-13.

PRAYER & THE MYSTIC VISION     Page 111

similarity between these experiences of mystic vision, these moments of inward "flooding," and the varied phenomena of "auto-suggestion," and we are reminded that all this discovery of new dimensions and this joyous correspondence with a divine Companion may be only an illusory, solitary, one-sided, subjective experience, produced by the well-known dynamic effect of "live" vivid expectation. It is true that mystics have sometimes exhibited phenomena of hysteria and that they have sometimes made use of methods of suggestion which are indistinguishable from those which appear in the familiar phenomena of hypnosis. It may even be granted that there is no absolute proof that these mystic experiences, inwardly so saturated with the conviction of contact with something beyond the me, are what they seem to be. It is notoriously difficult to find coercive ontological proof in any field. There is no infallible mark or brand upon these experiences which puts them in a class all by themselves and which divides them. by a great gulf from all that can be called " auto-suggestion." But "autosuggestion" is only a learned phrase which explains nothing It merely means that some experiences which seem self transcending are in reality not so. In the last resort we must fall back in this particular strait upon pragmatic tests and verifications. "Auto-suggestions" which end in abortive fears and which shut the subject up to the vain and debilitating chase of his own illusory seemings are on their face abnormal and unhealthy states.

They reveal no constructive, or survival, value. They assist the subject, furthermore, in no way to get into more genuine cooperative relationship with his fellows. On the contrary, they tend to isolate him and to sever his connections with every kind of environment. There are experiences of mystic vision, on the other hand, the type we are now discussing, which work transforming and permanent life-effects and which appear to bring verifying evidences that extra-human

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 112

forces have been discovered. Such experiences minister to life, construct personality, equip for a mission, fuse men into more dynamic groups, conduce to the increased power of the race. Energy to live by has actually come to these persons from somewhere. We have here a kind of experience which the universe backs and confirms. It is, then, at least a worthy venture of faith to trust this inner vision by which men have lived and by which many are still living.

Emile Boutroux has supplied us with a happy phrase for the heart's inner testimony to this junction of finite and infinite within us, a junction to which philosophers as well as mystics bear witness. He names it "the Beyond that is within" - a genuine Beyond, he calls it, a greater and more perfect Being than himself with which man comes in touch on the inner side of his nature.¹ "Religion," he concludes, "pledges, in the innermost depths of the soul, the fundamental unity of the Given and of the Beyond." ² St. Augustine, the keenest psychological observer of the ancients, had already in his day discovered that there is a Beyond within which he calls "the abyss of consciousness," where with ineffable joy the soul can come upon That which Is.

Whenever we get back to the fundamental experience of mystic vision and catch the soul's firsthand testimony, we get evidence that the human spirit transcends itself and is environed by a spiritual world with which it holds commerce and vital relationship. The constructive mystics, not only of the Christian communions but also those of other religions, have explored higher levels of life than those on which men usually live, and they have given impressive demonstration through the heightened dynamic quality of their lives and service that they have been drawing upon and utilizing unusual reservoirs of vital energy. They have revealed a peculiar aptitude

¹ Emile Boutroux, The Beyond that is Within (1912), pp. 10-11.

² Ibid. p. 25.

PRAYER & THE MYSTIC VISION     Page 113

for correspondence with the Beyond that is within, and they have exhibited a genius for living by their inner conviction of God. They are striking examples of real mystical experience.

On the other hand, what is styled "Mysticism," as it has appeared in the long history of Christian thought, involves an intellectual formulation and has of necessity been affected by the prevailing metaphysical conceptions. There are always two strands to be found in all Mysticism. There is first the strand of intimate personal experience which, like the web-thread of the spider, is made out of the very substance of the inner life itself, and, secondly, there is a dialectical, metaphysical strand which partakes of the intellectual climate of the age, the mental environment which many thinkers, living and dead, have toiled to produce, and through which the mystic endeavours to express what his soul has felt.

This second strand or aspect is, however, something more than "intellectual formulation." It includes as well the prevailing ideals, aspirations and sentiments which have become the unconscious inner habits of the time, for no one can escape the group tendencies in which he lives. If piety culminates in asceticism in one's period, and if sainthood in one's time is characteristically attached to renunciation, those traits will almost certainly be an indissoluble part of the spiritual fibre of one's mysticism. Both the intellectual formulations and the emotional and motor habits under which the pattern mystics of history lived, strongly favoured the formation of a negative cast in thought and action.

God, according to the metaphysical conception which underlies the main line of historical mysticism, is absolute Reality, that which Is, Pure Being. In order to maintain the absoluteness of God, it seemed necessary to insist on His immutability and His oneness, as opposed to all mutability, duality or plurality or otherness. To find Him, therefore, the face of the seeker must be sternly turned away from all finite things, all transitory

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 114

happenings, all passing states of mind, all that is here or now, all that can be seen or felt or known or named. The Absolute, by processes of elimination, seemed best conceived as "a nameless Nothing," "an undifferentiated One," "an abysmal Dark," "the silent desert of the Godhead where no one is at home." All Christian Mysticism that came from Neo-platonic influences is a quest for a God who is everything which finite things are not, and is consequently committed to a via negattiva as the only way up to Him. This negative way is taken by many interpreters to be the real differentia of Mysticism, and the whole mystical process is thus thought of as the pilgrimage of "the alone to the Alone."

But this abstract and negative cast is by no means confined to Mysticism. It is involved as well in much of the non-mystical piety which ran parallel with the course of mysticism, and it is likewise profoundly in evidence in all the metaphysical thinking of the same period. Mysticism took the negative way because, for the fearless and venturesome seeker who was determined to cut all cables and swing clear out to sea with God, there was no other way yet found from the finite to the Infinite.

It has taken all the philosophical and spiritual travail of the centuries to think through the idea of a concrete Infinite, interrelated with us and with the world, and to discover that the way to share in His immanent and comprehending Life is as much a way of affirmation as of negation. Mysticism will not be revived and become a powerful present day force until it is liberated from dependence on outworn and inadequate forms, and until it conquers for itself more congenial thought-terms through which in a vital way it can translate its human experience and its vision of God.

There is a growing tendency abroad now to define Mysticism as a way of life, the emergence of a higher life type and a higher way of corresponding with the spiritual environment of the soul; and this is a

PRAYER & THE MYSTIC VISION     Page 115

movement in the right direction. But unfortunately much of the work of present day interpretation carries on consciously or unconsciously the abstract, dialectic and negative features which doom Mysticism to remain an affair of books.

We can learn very much from the experience of the great mystics, but we must not come under the spell of the outworn thought forms and motor habits through which they endeavoured to utter themselves. The well marked, sharply defined "mystic way" which many mystics of the past have taken is esoteric and more or less artificial, not grounded in the inherent nature of the soul and not a universal highway for the whole race of the saved, though even here the experience of mystics, as a typical pilgrim's progress, may be and often is illuminating. The "ladders" of mystical ascent must be treated as parables of the way upward rather than as literal rungs and necessary stages of religious experience, and one feels how artificial they are when an attempt is made to fit the mighty life experiences of Christ and of St. Paul and of the author of the Fourth Gospel into these mystical model forms and to make them follow the "purgative," the "illuminative " and the "unitive" stages.

The modern studies in this field have, I think, convincingly shown that Mysticism cannot safely be mapped off and isolated as a special and peculiar "way" either of knowledge or of life. Both life and knowledge are far too rich and inclusive to be reduced to one elemental aspect of experience. There can be no doubt, to those who have been there, that there do come moments of mystical opening, fresh bubblings of the stream of life, swift insights, the inrush of new energies, when the soul feels an irresistible surge of certainty. But it is as impossible to live by inarticulate experience alone as it would be to live physically on ozone alone. The actual content of religious faith, the definite beliefs which give us marching direction, the concrete ideas which furnish body and filling to our religion, the whole structure of our

CONCERNING PRAYER    Page 116

thought of God and of the world and of men and of duty and of eternal destiny, are the slow accretions of racial experience and do not come to us by the secret door of mystical openings. In so far as mystics receive definite "openings," with concrete content, they are likely to be the product of group influence. They are gestated by the literature on which the mystic has fed himself, or they are suggested by the social environment in which he is saturated, or they have subconsciously ripened within under the maturing guidance of expectation.

The ideas, the illustrations, the phrases, and the words of the master mystics appear and reappear, disguised or undisguised, in the accounts of the experiences of hundreds of succeeding mystics, as the artistic devices of great masters of painting reappear in the works that follow them. It is always possible to show that the content of the mystic's insights has a history, as our ideals of right and wrong have and as our ideals in art and literature have. The most positive contribution of the mystic to the world is his own personal life, heightened and dynamized by his inner experience. What he brings to us in terms of interpretation is always heavily laden with the immemorial gains of the spiritual travails of men behind him.

But the mystical experience itself as it bursts upon the soul is, as I have said, a unifying, fusing, intensifying, inward event. It may not bring new facts, it may open no door to oracular communications, it may not be a gratuitous largess of knowledge; but it enables a soul to see what it knows, to seize by a sudden insight the long results of slow-footed experience, to revalue and select what is morally and spiritually highest in the immemorial gains of the race, to get possession of regions of the self which are ordinarily beyond its hail, to fuse its truth with the heat of conviction and to flood its elemental beliefs with a new depth of feeling. This dynamic inward event is not dependent upon any peculiar stock of ideas and is not

PRAYER & THE MYSTIC VISION     Page 117

confined to what is usually called the purview of religion; it is the sudden transcendence of our usual fragmentary island of reality and the momentary discovery of the whole to which we belong. We can best help our age toward a real revival of Mysticism as an elemental aspect of religious life, not by formulating an esoteric "mystic way," not by clinging to the ancient metaphysic to which Mysticism has been allied, but by emphasizing the reality of mystical experience, by insisting on its healthy and normal character, and by indicating ways in which such dynamic experiences can be fostered, and realized, and put into practical application.

I shall now identify mystic vision and the central act of prayer. I have said that there is something in the fundamental ground of our nature which makes us religious beings, and I have called this primary spring of religion mystic vision, by which I mean an inner, immediate consciousness of relationship and intercourse with God as the spiritual environment of the soul. This "divine mutual and reciprocal correspondence," to use the great phrase of Clement of Alexandria, is, furthermore, I believe, the elemental basis and ground of prayer.

We have not to do with a God who is "off there" above the sky, who can deal with us only through "the violation of physical law." We have instead a God "in whom we live and move and are," whose Being opens into ours, and ours into His, who is the very Life of our lives, the matrix of our personality ; and there is no separation between us unless we make it ourselves. No man, scientist or layman, knows where the curve is to be drawn about the personal self." No man can say with authority that the circulation of Divine currents into the soul's inward life is impossible. On the contrary, Energy does come

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 118

in. In our highest moments we find ourselves in contact with wider spiritual Life than belongs to our normal me.

But true prayer is something higher. It is immediate spiritual fellowship. Even if science could demonstrate that prayer could never effect any kind of utilitarian results, still prayer on its loftier side would remain untouched, and persons of spiritual reach would go on praying as before. If we could say nothing more we could at least affirm that prayer, like faith, is itself the victory. The seeking is the finding. The wrestling is the blessing. It is no more a means to something else than love is. It is an end in itself. It is its own excuse for being. It is a kind of first fruit of the mystical nature of personality. The edge of the self is always touching a circle of life beyond itself to which it responds.

The human heart is sensitive to God as the retina is to light waves. The soul possesses a native yearning for intercourse and companionship which takes it to God as naturally as the homing instinct of the pigeon takes it to the place of its birth. There is in every normal soul a spontaneous outreach, a free play of spirit, which gives it onward yearning of unstilled desire. It is no mere subjective instinct no blind outreach. If it met no response, no answer, it would soon be weeded out of the race. It would shrivel like the functionless organ. We could not long continue to pray in faith if we lost the assurance that there is a Person who cares, and who actually corresponds with us. Prayer has stood the test of experience. In fact the very desire to pray is in itself prophetic of a heavenly Friend.

A subjective need carries at any rate an implication that there is an objective stimulus which has provoked the need. There is no hunger for anything not tasted, as John Fiske in his little book, Through Nature to God, has well shown; there is no search for anything which is not in the environment, for the environment has always produced

PRAYER & THE MYSTIC VISION     Page 119

the appetite. Then, may not this native need of the soul have risen out of the divine origin of the soul? It would at least seem that it has steadily verified itself as a safe guide to reality.

What is at first a vague life activity and spontaneous outreach of inward energy, a feeling after companionship, remains in many persons vague to the end. But in others it frequently rises to a definite consciousness of a personal Presence, and there comes back into the soul a compelling evidence of a real Other Self who meets all the soul's need. For such persons prayer is the way to fulness of life. It is as natural as breathing. It is as normal an operation as appreciation of beauty, or the pursuit of truth. The soul is made that way, and as long as men are made with mystical deeps within, unsatisfied with the finite and incomplete, they will pray and be refreshed.

Professor William James in a famous passage of his Psychology has set forth what he believed to be the fundamental spring of prayer. He says :¹

We hear in these days of scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of prayer; and many reasons are given us why we should not pray. But in all this very little is said of the reason why we do pray, which is simply that we cannot help praying. It seems probable that, in spite of all that "science" may do to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time, unless their mental nature changes in a manner which nothing we know should lead us to expect. The impulse to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius (its "great Companion ") in an ideal world. Most men, either continually or occasionally, carry a reference to it in their breasts. The humblest outcast on this earth can feel himself to be real and valid by means of this higher recognition. And, on the other hand, for most of us, a world with no such inner refuge when the outer social self failed and dropped from us would be the abyss of horror. I say "for most of us," because

¹ Vol. i. p. 316.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 120

it is probable that men differ a good deal in the degree in which they are haunted by this sense of an ideal Spectator. It is a much more essential part of the consciousness of some men than of others. Those who have the most of it are possibly the most religious men. But I am sure that even those who say they are altogether without it, deceive themselves, and really have it in some degree.

In later years Professor James found the impulse to pray, not alone in the idealizing tendency of the human spirit, i.e. not in the need of an ideal Spectator, but rather in the experience of direct transaction between the soul and God - "The consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related." ¹ This "intercourse," he further declares, is felt to be "both active and mutual," "a give and take relation," "a sense that something is transacting," and he derives the experience from "the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come." ²

Auguste Sabatier in like manner finds the ground of religion in what he calls "an intercourse, a conscious and voluntary relation" between the finite spirit and the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and prayer, he believes, has its root and spring in this inner intercourse "this vital act." "Prayer," he concludes, "is religion in act"; that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer which distinguishes religious phenomena from all those which resemble them or lie near to them, from the moral sense, for instance, or from the aesthetic feeling. If religion is a practical need, the response to it can only be a practical action. No theory would suffice. Religion is nothing if it is not the vital act by which the whole spirit seeks to save itself by attaching itself to its principle. This act is prayer, by which I mean, not an empty utterance of

¹ Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 465.

² Ibid. p. 515.

PRAYER & THE MYSTIC VISION     Page 121

words, not the repetition of certain sacred formulas, but the movement of the soul putting itself into personal relation and contact with the mysterious power whose presence it feels even before it is able to give it a name. Where this inward prayer is wanting there is no religion; on the other hand, wherever this prayer springs up in the soul and moves it, even in the absence of all form and doctrine clearly defined, there is true religion, living piety." ¹

Baron Von Hugel is as emphatic as was the great French theologian just quoted upon this central act of intercourse. He says: "Religion is essentially social vertically - indeed here is its deepest root. It is unchangeably an intercourse with God; and though the soul cannot abidingly abstract itself from its fellows, it can and ought frequently to recollect itself in a simple sense of God's presence. Such moments of preoccupation with God alone bring a deep refreshment and simplification to the soul." ²

St. Teresa, speaking from great experience of interior communion, makes practice of the presence of God or the presence of Christ the important act of prayer. She declares in words freighted with experience: "God, in His great mercy, will have the soul comprehend that His Majesty is so near to it that it need not send a messenger to Him, but may speak to Him itself, and not with a loud crying, because so near is He already, that He understands even the movements of its lips."

Professor Pratt's empirical study of prayer, based upon a large number of answers to his questionnaire, comes to the same conclusion, that prayer is at bottom "intercourse," "interchange," "immediate social relationship with God" - "prayer opens a door into a larger life, a source of strength, not further to be described." F.O. Beck in his Study of Prayer declares that nearly 70 per cent of his correspondents state that

¹ Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, pp. 27-28.

² Eternal Life, pp. 395-396.

³ James Bissett Pratt, The Psychology of Religious Belief, pp. 271-279.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 122

they feel the presence of a higher power while in the act of praying.¹

I have perhaps spoken of mystic vision - the experience of intercourse - as though it were an experience which just "comes," like a wind blowing where it lists, man knows not how; but that is far from the truth. When it "comes" it is to a soul prepared for it and expecting it, as Jacob Boehme's account of his strong onset to break through the gate indicates. There are of course mystics who can be cited to bear testimony in favour of passivity and who will declare that the way to spiritual plenitude is a way of quietistic repose and the suppression of all individual desire and effort - "God comes in when man goes out." But sound convincing testimony, both from mystics and from psychologists, runs the other way. If the central act of prayer and mystic vision is intercourse and social communion, then the true preparation for it will not be loss or annihilation of personal selfhood but rather the heightening and intensifying of everything which constitutes the inner citadel of personality. Fellowship, it is true, cannot flourish where selfishness or self seeking dominate, but on the other hand all great fellowship demands the cooperation of rich, active, dynamic personality. To receive great human love one must bring a great human spirit to the fellowship. It is true also of communion with God, which is both a divine grace and a human act. To enter the holy of holies and to commune with the great Companion one must want to enter and one must expect to commune.

Are there not Two points in the adventure of the diver,

• One-when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge,
• One-when, a prince, he rises with his pearl

There must be in the spiritual adventure of the soul the decision to plunge, or to change the imperfect

¹ Journal of Religious Psychology and Pedagogy for March 1906, p. 118.

PRAYER & THE MYSTIC VISION         Page 123

figure, the resolution, as Boehme puts it, to lift the whole heart and mind and will and raise it to God. If one is to have the experience of incoming divine tides, the consummate beatitude of communion, one must seek it with earnestness of purpose and open the gates of the soul for it. The central act of religion, on the human side, is this expectant, cooperative raising of the soul to a personal experimental consciousness of the real presence of God. St. Gregory said: "When a soul truly desires God it already possesses Him."

Religion is primarily, and at heart, the personal meeting of the soul with God. If that experience ceases in the world, religion, in its first intention, is doomed. We may still have ideas about the God whom men once knew intimately, and we may still continue to work for human betterment, but there can be living religion only so long as the souls of men actually experience fresh bubbling of the living water within and know for themselves that a heart of eternal love beats in the central deeps of the universe within reach.

To give up the cultivation of prayer, then, means in the long run the loss of the central thing in religion; it involves the surrender of the priceless jewel of the soul. In its stead we may perfect many other things; we may make our form of divine service, as we call it, very artistic or very popular; we may speak with the tongues of men and sing with the tongues almost of angels, but if we lose the power to discover and appreciate the real presence of God, and if we miss the supreme joy of feeling ourselves environed by the Spirit of the living and present God, we have made a bad exchange and have dropped from a higher to a lower type of religion.

Silence is beyond question a very important condition for the great inner act of prayer. So long as we are content to speak our own patois, to live in the din of our narrow, private affairs, and to tune our minds to stockbrokers' tickers, we shall not arrive at the lofty

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 124

goal of the soul's quest. We shall hear the noises of our outer universe and nothing more. When we learn how to centre down into the stillness and quiet, to listen with our souls for the whisperings of Life and Truth, to bring all our inner powers into parallelism with the set of divine currents, we shall hear tidings from the inner world at the heart and centre of which is God.

But more important than private silence is group silence - a waiting, seeking, positively expectant attitude permeating and penetrating a gathered company of persons. We hardly know in what the group - influence consists, or why the presence of others heightens the sensitive, responsive quality of each soul, but there can be no doubt of the fact. There is some subtle telepathy that comes into play in the living silence of a congregation which makes every earnest seeker more quick to feel the presence of God, more acute of inner ear, more tender of heart to feel the bubbling of the springs of life, than any one of them would be in isolation. Somehow we are able thus to "lend our minds out," as Browning puts it, or at least to contribute towards the formation of an atmosphere that favours communion and cooperation with God.

III

This type of interior prayer, or prayer of intercourse and communion, received powerful emphasis through the mystically inclined groups and societies which sprang in large numbers into life with the spread of the protestant reformation. ¹ I am referring to them especially here, not because they have brought a more intense light than the mystics before them did, nor

¹ It would not be difficult to illustrate, intensively and extensively, the intimate connection between prayer and mystic vision out of the writings of great mystics of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or, again, out of the experiences of the mystics of the counter reformation, but there have been in recent years so many illuminating studies of the experiences of these great spiritual guides that I pass them by here and draw instead upon the writings of a later group of mystics who are not so well or so widely known.

PRAYER & THE MYSTIC VISION     Page 125

because they reveal a greater depth of soul or a more certain contact with God, but rather because they have been far too much neglected and because they are closer to us both in time and in spiritual insight. They had traveled farther than their predecessors toward an affirmation-mysticism and they have made a large contribution to the vital religion of our present-day world. These groups gathered about some intense spiritual leader and they seriously aimed to return to primitive Christianity. They formed their ideas from and lived upon the writings of the New Testament, taken for the most part in a simple, direct and popular way. They loved and eagerly read the writings of the great mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They held established ecclesiasticism and theology in very light esteem and strongly inclined toward a religion of life and experience. The various leaders called their groups of followers and disciples to make it the first business of their lives to have the Day Star rise in their own hearts; to possess the key of David which opens the inner spiritual universe to the soul; to enjoy as the true Sabbath an inward rest for the soul of man in the life of God.

The early leaders of this movement were Hans Denck, Christian Entfelder, Johann Bunderlin, Sebastian Franck, and Casper Schwenckfeld in Germany; Dirck Coornhert in Holland and Sebastian Castellio in France. The later, or second, group of leaders were Valentine Weigel and Jacob Boehme in Germany, and John Everard, William Dell, John Saltmarsh, Gerard Winstanley, Francis Rous, and Peter Sterry of England. The most important societies, or groups, that gave popular expression to this general type of experimental Christianity were the Schwenckfelders, the Family of Love, the Collegiants of Holland, the more sane and spiritual groups of the Anabaptists, the English Seekers, and the early Quakers.

CONCERNING PRAYER    Page 126

Among all these diverse people the central act of prayer was one and the same thing, an experience of inner intercourse with God. An anonymous English writer of this school of thought, writing in the seventeenth century, declared that "a man should be unto God what a house is to a man," i.e. a habitation of the living presence;¹ and John Everard keeps saying through all his sermons that men can always hear God if they will only still the din and noise within themselves. "All the Artillery in the World," he says, " were they all discharged together at one clap, could not more deaf the ears of our bodies than the clamourings of [egoistic] desires in the soul deaf its ears; so you see a man must go into silence or else he cannot hear God speak."²

Jacob Boehme, who was the spiritual father of most of the mystical movements and societies in the period of the English Commonwealth, was a profound exponent of this interior experimental prayer. He says: "When we pray we do not only speak before God; indeed the will boweth itself before God; but it entereth into God, and there is filled with power and virtue of God and bringeth that into the, soul: the soul eateth at the table of God, and that is it of which Christ said, Man liveth by every word of God."

All over Europe in the seventeenth century there spread, both among Roman Catholics and Protestants, an intense passion for this inward, experimental prayer. The little books of Brother Lawrence very vividly portray how one earnest, simple soul endeavoured to practice the presence of God. But he is only one out of a multitude of lonely or busy Christians of this period who, by themselves or in little groups of seekers, were exhibiting as the central purpose of life their attempts to realize and to practice the divine presence.

A passage in Jeremy Taylor's Life of Christ (1649) gives a good account of the method of interior prayer, and it reveals, furthermore, the fact that great religious

¹ The Life and Light of a Man in Christ Jesus (London, 1645).

² Gospel Treasures Opened (London, 1653), p. 600.

³ Threefold Life of Man, xvi. 95.

PRAYER & THE MYSTIC VISION     Page 127

souls in England outside the groups of sectaries were practising the presence of God in hush and silence. Jeremy Taylor says: "There is a degree of meditation so exalted that it changes the very name and is called contemplation. It is in the unitive way of religion, that is, it consists in unions and adherences to God; it is a prayer of quietness and silence, a meditation extraordinary, a discourse without variety, a vision and intuition of divine excellencies, an immediate entry into an orb of light, and a resolution of all our faculties into sweetnesses, affections, and starings upon the divine beauty." This way of prayer, he says, is "not to be discoursed about but felt," but, he adds, it is a way by which the soul "flames out into great ascents."

The early Quakers from 1648 on made silence and personal prayer of inward discourse the very basis of their way of worship. They gathered and sat down in the quiet, possessed with a common faith that God was a real presence in their group, and that they were admitted behind the veil into a holy of holies. There were often tears of joy, or signs of rapture, on their faces as they sat in this living hush, and sometimes a tremulous movement swept over the whole company, like a fresh breeze over ripe grain.

Robert Barclay, the foremost scholar of the early Quakers, has described how this impressed him when he first experienced it before he became a Quaker.

"When I came into their silent assemblies," he says, "I felt a secret power among them which touched my heart, and as I gave way unto it, I found the evil weakening in me and the good raised up."

George Whitehead, one of the pillar Quakers of the seventeenth century, in a concrete illustration of this effect, tells how he saw a young woman who had drifted into a Quaker meeting so moved by the power of the silence that she could stand it no longer, but going outside put her face in her hands and cried out: "0 God, make me clean! 0 God, make me clean ! "

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 128

One of the most striking accounts is that given by Isaac Penington of his impression the first time he attended a Quaker meeting. "When I came among them," he says, "I felt the presence and power of the Most High, and words of Truth from the Spirit of Truth reached my heart and conscience. I did not only feel words and demonstrations from without, but I felt the dead quickened and the seed raised up, insomuch that my heart said:

"This is He, there is no other! This is He whom I have waited for and sought after from my childhood. I have met with my God. I have met with my Saviour and I have felt the healings drop into my soul."

No other English mystic of the eighteenth century compares with William Law in spiritual insight, depth of experience, and power of expression. In the later period of his life, after he had come under the influence of Jacob Boehme, prayer became for him a way of inner experience of intercourse and a joyous practice of the divine presence, and religion was henceforth always thought of as the operation of God working, unhindered and with positive human cooperation, through persons. In almost the same words as the Quaker Penington, Law says: "A new life is opened in my soul. I am brought home to myself. I have found my God. I know that His dwelling place, His kingdom, is within me."¹ When religion has done its perfect work, has melted away human passions and selfish inclinations, prayer changes, Law again declares, to something far higher than petition or request. It comes now so near to God, finds such union with Him, that the soul does not so much pray as live in God.²

It should be said in conclusion that this consciousness of a great Companion, this discovery of life enhancing energies within, this mutual correspondence with what seems to be a real heavenly Friend, is not confined to a few chosen spirits of the genius type.

¹ Spirit of Prayer, p. 5 I.

² Ibid. p. 128.

PRAYER & THE MYSTIC VISION     Page 129

It is a far more common experience than the mere reader of books would realize. The mystics of history to whom we go for data are the few and rare persons who possessed a literary gift and who could report in living and winged words the experiences of God that were granted them. But as there were poets before Homer, so, too, there have been great mystics who lived upon the shining table lands To which our God Himself is moon and sun, but who could not tell to others what they saw and felt and knew. Their only way of uttering the vision of their souls was through a heightened life and a radiant personality, witnessing like the little brooks in Browning's Saul With their obstinate, all but hushed voice s- "E'en so, it is so."

There are multitudes of men and women now living, often in out of the way places, in remote hamlets or on uneventful farms, who are the salt of the earth and the light of the world in their communities, because they have had vital experiences that revealed to them realities which their neighbours missed, and energy to live by which the mere "church goers" failed to find. I have personally known many such lives, to one of whom only I shall refer. He never once in his life swung out of his ordinary orbit. There were no flights of fancy, no spurts of enthusiasm, no uprushes of genius - the entire life was a plain, steady, straightforward march through the daily routine of commonplace duties. And yet - and yet it was one of the noblest lives I have ever known. It exhibited almost every quality which we demand in a saint. There was at the heart of the man a religious passion which throbbed in everything he did. Nobody knew, he least of all, what his theological system was. He never bothered to think it out. But nobody ever hoed a row of potatoes with him, or pitched a load of hay, without discovering his religion.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 130

His religion showed itself even to his sheep and cows and horses. He did not learn how to express himself until he was long past middle life, and he was already growing old when he learned to pray in public, but before there were any words which told of that religious passion and devotion we all knew it was there. It radiated from him like light from a luminous body. Little children always believed in him and enjoyed being with him, and he loved them with a warmth which was a surprise to those who knew only the matter-of-fact side of his nature.

This transforming experience through direct relation with God inwardly revealed is, further, confined to no one type of piety. It appears again and again not only among those reputed to be mystical, but as well among those who are emphatically evangelical. It would be difficult to find a more striking illustration than that written by Jonathan Edwards of Sarah Pierrepont:

They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that great Being who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this great Being. She is of a wonderful calmness, and universal benevolence of mind; especially after this great God has manifested Himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly; and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her.

Many of the primitive preachers of the Methodist movement, who generally believed themselves to be anti-mystical, were recipients of experiences which raised them far above their ordinary human level and gave

PRAYER & THE MYSTIC VISION     Page 131

them abounding life. John Nelson, the Yorkshire mason, was one of these. He says in describing his experience: "My soul seemed to breathe its life in God as naturally as my body breathed life in the common air." John Haime was another rough specimen wrought into a life of goodness and power by the operative grace of God. He lived in terror of the judgment during his period of sin, and "many times," he says, "I stopped in the street afraid to go one step farther lest I should step into hell." Then came the great experience which led to his new career:

One day, as I walked by the Tweed side, I cried aloud, being all athirst for God, "Oh that Thou wouldst hear my prayer, and let my cry come up before Thee !" The Lord heard. He sent a gracious answer. He lifted me up out of the dungeon. He took away my sorrow and fear, and filled my soul with peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. The stream glided swiftly along, and all nature seemed to rejoice with me. I was truly free; and had I had any to guide me I need never more have come into bondage.

One more instance must suffice and that shall be from the life of the illiterate but extraordinary evangelist, Billy Bray. He describes his initial experience of the new life as follows

I said to the Lord : "Thou hast said, they that ask shall receive, they that seek shall find, and to them that knock the door shall be opened, and I have faith to believe it." In an instant the Lord made me so happy that I cannot express what I felt. I shouted for joy. I praised God with my whole heart. I think this was in November, 1823, but what day of the month I do not know. I remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world. I spent the greater part of my time in praising the Lord.

It would undoubtedly be a grave mistake and blunder to reduce prayer, with its vast gamut of

¹ W.F. Bourne, The Kings Son, a Meoir of Billy Bray, p. 9 (London, Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1887).

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 132

possibilities, to the simplicity of mystic vision and inner intercourse. But both in its origin as the homing instinct of the soul and in its consummation as the joyous practice of the presence of God in the experience of the ripest and richest souls, this inner way of communion is an impressive fact of life. I believe we are justified in going still farther, and in asserting that it is the central act of prayer, the living ground and basis of religion. It is surely in some sense because of this experience that we have gained the abiding assurance that the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

V

REPENTANCE AND HOPE

BY THE

AUTHOR OF "PRO CHRISTO ET ECCLESIA "

ALSO AUTHOR OF

"CHRISTUS FUTURUS,"

" ABSENTE REO,"

" VOLUNTAS DEI,"

"THE PRACTICE OF CHRISTIANITY"

SYNOPSIS

Page 134

SYNOPSIS

Page 135

SYNOPSIS

Page 136

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 137

It is above all things necessary, for the glory of God, for our own welfare, and for the salvation of the world, that we should rejoice more each day in the great love with which God loves us. The message of the Incarnation, the Cross, the Resurrection, is this - that God is man's eternal Lover. Even an earthly love is imperfect - although all austere hearts in the world should say to the contrary - even earthly love is imperfect when it desires only the welfare of its object without desiring love in return. What is the glory of a lover? Is it not to be enjoyed by the beloved?

Therefore, to glorify God and to enjoy Him are one and the same. It is the heart knowledge of this which will advance us more in prayer than all sin offerings and sacrifices. We have most of us partaken of the swine husks of the far country. Even though we turned and came home, we brought some with us to eat by the way; and the elder brother is always telling us that we should hoard them carefully, and eat a little, each day, to remind ourselves of our miserable selves. What. are these husks ? They are the disagreeable physical consequences of our bad and foolish actions, and the sad, mournful memories that those actions leave behind them. The elder brother thinks these husks are profitable for us - thinks that we ought not to try to escape the physical consequences and that we ought to brood upon the memories.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 138

He is also always telling us that, in spite of the Father's bounty, we ought to think and act for years to come as if we were only hired servants. Now, this is exactly what the hard, cruel nature in our own hearts also tells us; so we listen to the elder brother. Who is the elder brother? He is the ordinary devout person who, like ourselves, has a core of hardness and cruelty in his heart. He believes that offenders ought to be treated with severity. He knows he is none too good, so he treats himself with severity; he does not ask for a kid or seek to make merry with his friends. We prodigals are sons of the same slave mother as he. Encouraged by him, we slip out from the feast the Father offers; we throw aside the robe and the ring, and go beyond the sound of the music and the dancing feet. We only seek to enjoy our home at rare intervals. We persist in toiling, and often sigh and furtively munch our imported husks.

Think now again of the picture our Lord drew of that great hearted, generous father in the parable - a prince of love! Think of him with no one to enjoy his love, no one to understand him or love him; the elder brother with him always - always, that would be the sting of it - ever with him, but never understanding or rejoicing. How sad a picture! Yet that is the way we very often treat God. And not only so, but the hard core of our hearts has so long dominated our lives that we truly think that God is like ourselves, that it is His will - some are apt to say His fault that our lives are not more full of joy and nobility and grandeur than they are.

Some urge that God banishes us from the enjoyment of His presence while we retain our sinful nature and habits, and that if we deny this we ignore the awful fact of sin. They urge this because in recognizing the two facts, God and evil, it is most difficult for men to see life steadily and see it whole. The Greek, who at one period came nearest to this achievement, just missed the

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 139

vision of Love as the Supreme Power, and therefore missed the consequent sense of personal obligation to the Divine will which alone can justify for the rational mind the idea of sin. The early Hebrew, with the more limited notion of a tribal God of uncertain justice, still conceived of God as showing a personal devotion to his nation, and acknowledged a consequent obligation the breach of which was sin. Without some belief in God's personal love exercised toward sinful man, primitive taboos do not develop into an abiding moral conception of sin.

But although any moral idea of sin has its roots in some belief in God as Love, men who thus catch a glimpse of the true nature of wrongdoing are apt to become obsessed with the thought of it until this obsession almost obscures their vision of God's love and loveliness, and the loveliness of the earth He has created. In this obsession Religion - both Pagan and Christian - too often thought of God chiefly as Wrath, and not only arrayed herself in sackcloth and ashes but carried a scourge. Therefore Reason and Good Feeling have too often turned their backs on Religion, obviously or covertly, and gone off hand in hand to build the House Beautiful without conscious regard to God. So well have they often built, that true Religion, always sincere, has experienced reaction of mind, sitting in doubt, and in some of her moods she has herself become inclined to look upon wrongdoing as a necessary evil productive of good, and sin as nonexistent.

It may be said that in some such reaction of thought today the majority of well intentioned, God serving people refuse to concern themselves much about sin and repentance; but they do not tend, as a consequence, to rejoice in God's friendship. As far as the theology of modern indifference to sin is articulate, we find that it speaks of the Supreme Power rather as impersonal, acquiescent Goodwill than as personal Love seeking ceaselessly to ennoble each child of man and win his

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 140

love and so to produce on earth, and beyond, the ideal society or Kingdom of God.

It is the contention of this essay that true Christian faith will neither minimize man's sin and degradation and his constant need of repentance, nor will it fail to see the fundamental wholesomeness and beauty of human character and of the earth life as the image of God's thought: and that, above all, Christian faith will rest secure always in the personal love of God for the individual soul - a love all - creating, a reality so supreme as to dominate all jarring facts, and therefore a love in which every man, always, is called upon to rejoice.

WHAT IS SIN?

In Christian teaching we commonly hear of sin in two aspects - as racial and as personal. Out of these grows a third aspect of sin as corporate. In its first aspect it is racial and universal. Thus the Anglican Catechism teaches children that they are by nature "born in sin and children of wrath." Baptism is, no doubt, viewed as changing wrath into grace, but Catholic theology recognizes sin - both conscious and unconscious - as pertaining to baptized as well as unbaptized persons. Evangelical theology takes the same view of the universality of sin; I quote from a study by one of this school:

The religious view of sin regards it as universal. It finds the whole of mankind to be in need of redemption. And this view becomes a keen and immediate experience to any one who stands like Isaiah or Job in the presence of God, or like Simon Peter in the presence of Christ. Undoubtedly the divine nature makes exceedingly high demands upon us; but the love of God, whatever varied forms it takes, never compromises the requirements of holiness for our momentary convenience. In God's presence we know at once that we ought to be like Him, and that we are not. We are polluted; He is stainless white. The Old Testament thought of

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 141

the angels themselves as spotted with evil. Jesus Christ proclaims that none is good save God. ¹

In this wide sense sin may be defined as whatever man is or does which differs from God's ideal of what, he ought to do or be.

While the Church has always emphasized this universal aspect of sin, we nowadays connect the sense of guilt only with sin in its second aspect, as the conscious, personal violation of any known duty. Much modern thought, indeed, tends to regard the racial view of sin as an artificial idea. It would ascribe to God's will and pleasure the whole course of evolution, animal and human, as we know it, and with it the condition into which every man is born. Or, if men hesitate to ascribe so much evil to God, they still do not now regard themselves as in any way guilty of their evil tendencies and unconscious lapses. Conscious misdirection on the part of the individual will is all that they recognize as sin.

The limiting of guilt to individual choice came with the individualism which was so wholesome a reaction, first from the corporate, tribal consciousness, and, later, from the encroachments of mediaeval religion upon individual responsibility. We are now tending to think of a man as less individually responsible for his own shortcomings or crimes, and more responsible for living so as to ensure the moral elevation of the whole community. Thus it is possible that we shall come again to emphasize - and perhaps to over emphasize racial sin or the sin of humanity, thinking less of the sins of the individual because we now realize so keenly that man's moral life is corporate, that as a result of a universal tendency to evil, whole communities commit sins which each member shares although he takes no personal initiative in the matter. We must seek to look steadily at all these aspects of sin; we must seek to have feeling sensitive to all.

¹ Dr. R. Macintosh, Christianity and Sin, p. 159.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 142

Can we be sinful without being guilty? What the psychologists call "negative self-feeling," or consciousness of inferiority, when this is moral, involves in its most notable forms, consciousness of guilt. It thus seems to have been confused with guilt in early times. It does not follow, however, that a man feeling morally inferior in the presence of God - as described in the above quotation - is actually guilty of any conscious misdirection of will; the keenest moral shame may be felt when for the first time a man sees that he has honestly admired what was unworthy. Any element of what we should call "personal moral guilt" was a late addition to the Hebrew notion which we translate sin. We will revert to the older meaning of the word "sin" in this paper, using it to cover both its more general and its more individual sense, and to mean all coming short of what God intends for us, whether the shortcoming be conscious or unconscious, whether individual or corporate. In this sense it is possible to sin without being personally guilty. What, then, constitutes sin? It depends upon what the will of God for men is.

We have much confused our knowledge of right and of God by commonly talking of the best choice a man can make under given circumstances as "the right," while we go on to assume that such a type of conduct is the highest to which under earthly circumstances we can attain. That is, we assume that because it is right to take the least bad of various bad ways, such a way should become a standard of conduct. The next slovenly step in thought is easy; we claim for this standard the authority of God. A man who falls into a pit certainly must get out; one side of the pit may be slimy and sloping, the other precipitous rock; his choice lies between crawling out bemired or bruising himself in ape like climbing. No one would question that he does right to get out and get his feet once more on the sunny land; and while men might differ as to

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 143

which is the better method of getting out, it is quite clear that he does right to choose the way he thinks the better. But if, because of this, he go on to exalt ape like climbing, or crawling through mire, as a per se desirable standard of manly locomotion, he reasons badly.

If we have any moral sense telling us what is and is not evil, we must admit, on reading history, that humanity early found itself in the pit of sin. I give three illustrations of how men, in their endeavours to struggle out of that pit, have shown the confusion of thought just suggested.

(1) When tribes and nations had conceived no better means of struggling for existence than waging wars of aggression on more prosperous peoples, it was the best thing a man could do to fight along with his people. Each tribesman felt this to be the call of right, and proceeded to consider that form of valour the highest standard to which man could attain, and to picture God as the God of hosts, leading them on to the cruel destruction of their enemies.

(2) Again, in the ancient world, when little was known of child psychology, the free use of the rod by the father was constantly found better than leaving the child untrained; again, the best available was elevated into a standard of virtue and attributed to God.

(3) When the early mediaeval Christian missionary was sent to Christianize ignorant men in masses and make them accept a somewhat cumbrous theology, often the best thing he could do was to silence ignorant questioning by intellectual authority. This, by degrees, came to be raised into a standard method of religious education. God came to be represented as imposing a complex theological and ethical system upon the human understanding, and condemning all souls who rebelled against its intellectual tyranny.

These illustrations show that the best a man can do in an imperfect society is easily assumed to be a

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 144

permanent law for humanity. While there is great ethical value in good intention and that earnestness of purpose which counts ease as loss, if these are employed in conformity to a past standard - social, political or religious - the man who is thus doing his best may be involved in a whole complex course of life in which he and his associates fall far below what they might attain if they revised their standards. They may, then, be jointly guilty of great corporate sins while they think they are doing right.

The revision of standards requires the previous recognition of the fact that when a man does what he seriously thinks right he may still be doing what is disapproved of God. It is true that he would do worse if he failed to do what he thought right; but his conformity to standard is not enough; he must be eager for further inspiration and enlightenment, because the knowledge of right and wrong rests alone with God. It comes to man by the inspiration of the Divine Spirit; it does not reside within the spirit of man. His heart and his reason, when open to God, are the channels by which God can guide him.

There are whole systems of moral and religious teaching under which a child is trained from the cradle to believe that its own heart or reason are never the channels through which comes knowledge of good and evil. Systems of morals based on authority, theological or military, naturally inculcate distrust of reason; systems of self-culture based on asceticism naturally inculcate distrust of the affections. History plainly shows that generations of people thus trained to distrust these natural channels of God's grace have come to call right what is actually wrong. These cannot be said to act in the best way for themselves and the world, or with God's approval, merely because they do what they think right. The knowledge of right is not in them. They may not be blameworthy, but they are running counter to true righteousness.

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 145

e.g. the soldier trained in a fierce militarism may think acts of "frightfulness" his duty, yet they are not pleasing to God. Such cases prove that it is not true that a man has always within himself the knowledge of what is right to do, and therefore we have no reason to believe that principles conscientiously held are infallible guides in other cases where the wrong teaching and wrong action are of a less obvious nature.

To some the whole structure of moral principle will seem to fall away if this be admitted, but I incline to think that experience condemns it, and that a nobler principle of action can be built upon recognition of its falsity. In communities of well intentioned people a sense of failure or sin has commonly been reserved for action that failed to reach their own standards. When they came within moderate distance of these standards the majority were satisfied. It has only been here and there that stray and often obscure prophets have asked God to forgive them, not only for their conscious lapses, but for what seemed to them their highest ideals, their noblest deeds, and their most fervent prayers. Yet it is these few who have been the salt of the earth, the light of the world. Until the commonality of religious folk are as intent upon asking God each day to open up to them fresh vistas of truth and duty as they are upon asking for the moral strength to live up to the duty they see, until they realize that God's grace comes to them, not because they are doing right, nor because they repent of some conscious lapse, but because they constantly hold up to Him their conscious emptiness and ignorance to be filled with His fulness, Christendom will make but little real progress in individual or corporate virtue. It goes without saying that a man must do what he sees to be his duty, but God's approval only rests upon him if he is humbly seeking a deeper insight into the privileges and demands of the Christian life.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 146

Further, if, as Christians believe, God bestows upon men His Spirit to teach them what His will is, that knowledge must be worked out in the community in order that it may be fully realized in the individual life, because while the individual is in advance of his community he is not in harmony with it and is hindered by it.

Sometimes, in order to preserve the conventional belief that a man, if he will, can always know God's standard for human life and live up to it, theology has met the preceding argument in two ways. It will urge:

1. that each man, at some time, has had in his heart of hearts a glimpse of the standard of ideal values that would have enabled him to extricate himself from a wrong prevailing system (e.g. that all Christian persecutors have known that they acted wickedly); or
2. that such wrong systems are always the highest social ideal for the time and place in which they obtain (e.g. that Christian persecutions were a necessary phase of development).

I am convinced that there is no sufficient evidence in support of either of these assertions. Men trained in, and surrounded by, bad moral standards have their whole inner life more or less formed by them, however "conscientious" they may be; nor is there any reason for supposing that human systems which have prevailed and become historic have been the best that could have been. Progress is not mechanical. In every age and place it has depended upon the number of men who were determined, not only to do right, but to find out what was right. Here and there, where men have together sought both to do and to know the right, a high level in social conditions has obtained, and a permanent contribution to the world's progress has been made. Here and there, where men have singly and alone sought both a higher light and a stronger sense of obligation, they too have contributed to the world's progress, but they have also been stoned, and their ideas garbled, for lack of corporate support.

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 147

For the most part, men have either sought to conform to some tradition and neglected their obligation to seek higher standards of conduct, or, becoming restive and speculative in thought, have neglected monotonous virtues, and thus often degenerated even from standards formerly realized. To call such evils necessary, or to call progress the natural fruit of time, is absurd. To a community earnest to discover and conform to truth, beauty and justice, one day is as a thousand years. It leaps out of barbarism with apparent suddenness; it shines from one horizon, to another. Jerusalem under Nehemiah, Rome in the best days of the Republic, Athens in its prime, the fellowship of the Early Church - these bear little relation to the condition of other communities at the same time or to the corrupt stagnation of nations to whom a thousand years have brought less progress than a day of renaissance might have secured. The ancients ascribed both progress and stagnation equally to God; we cannot do so.

It appears, then, that when men seek both to get light and to perform duty, they realize that the good life can only be lived in the good society, and failing that, a man can but do the best open to him in the system in which he finds himself, and strive always to bring about a better system.

This point is very important in trying to estimate the nature of sin. As already intimated, a very lofty conception of right, which contributed greatly to the world's progress, was formed in the best period of ancient Greece. But the good Greek citizen required the polij in which to exercise his virtue; it was not thought that he could live the good life if he were cast astray among barbarous tribes. When his polij was subjugated by the invader he carried everywhere the ideals formed in the days of its freedom; these ideals were a real and lasting contribution to the progress of less enlightened parts of the world, but the progress of the Greek was arrested when his community was overborne by foreign conquest.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 148

Another small nation that fixed its eye steadily on the necessity of an ideal state for the ideal life was the Jewish. The Jewish conception of good and right was at once higher and less definite; but they were quite definite in their insistence on the fact that God's will for the individual could not be realized until God's will for the state was realized.

The position of Judah, a little land between contending civilizations, was like that of Flanders. If the people of Flanders had developed for themselves a very strong and distinctive conception of good, both for the individual and the state, we can see that their desire for independent political existence to work out that conception would be intensified by the whole miserable history in which they have so often struggled, and are still struggling, for freedom. Such struggling nations in all ages might easily confuse their own political independence with the conception of the ideal community, but the religious element in their ideal for the community would not be less significant. It was such a struggle for national existence that in the Jewish nation gave birth to the Apocalyptic hope. Civilization to the Jew was not progress except in so far as it was theocentric civilization. This is his great, contribution to the world.

The Apocalyptic poets saw unspeakable visions of the ideal state, and saw it brought about by the power of God to the overthrowing of such world civilization as did not contribute to it. But they mixed up this religious conception with angry political passions and carnal dreams of a savage revenge upon oppressors. They felt sure that God was on the side both of their spiritual ideals and their political passions, and would swiftly vindicate both. This mixture of a sure faith in the highest religious ideals with an oppressed people's carnal thirst for vengeance is expressed in such highly figurative language that we have reason to distrust the materialistic interpretation which some theologians have placed upon the Jewish expectations of that period.

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 149

What is important for us is that when our Lord came He endorsed to the full the belief that God's will being realized in the individual on earth involves His will being realized in a Kingdom of God on earth, and that this is the only worthy goal of human endeavour. He dissociated this ideal from the thirst for political revenge and political ambition, for He seems to have foretold the advent of the ideal state and the downfall of the Jewish state.

This endorsement and purifying of social aspiration by our Lord is very important in relation to the question of the nature of sin. It lifts it out of all legalism. The emphasis is thrown upon achievement rather than upon abstention. Men are to seek for, to labour for, the Kingdom. It sets aside the whole question of the incidence of guilt as of secondary importance. The all important matter is that God shall win His victory in the world. If our social condition falls short of the social standard which God has put within our ken, we are living in corporate sin; but we could only know the extent of each soul's share in this sin if we could know how far each might have sought to make the noblest standard of life the common standard and did not. This we cannot know. We have all transgressed the Divine purpose; we have all come short of that renovated theocentric life which God has put within our reach.

To take this failure to reach the highest social standard as our sin seems at first sight to make the distinction between holiness and sin less significant, and the standard of moral values too vague. But if we start at the other side of the subject - at the point of wrong and personal initiative and conscious sin - we shall find ourselves forced to work back to the same conclusion, and see it perhaps more clearly.

There is a very general belief that much waywardness in child or man, often called "sin" by our religious teachers, is not sinful. But few responsible minds are willing to argue from this that moral guilt does not

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 150

exist; rather they say that certain wicked actions to which all men are prone are rightly called "sin." If we ask such people where they draw the line, their answers make it clear that they have no definition of sin, that even in their most intimate conduct they are not quite sure what is sinful and what is not. Certain acts they may be sure are sinful, but psychological examination shows that these were led up to by innumerable actions and conditions of mind which, had they not culminated in some excess, would have been passed by as sinless. To limit sin or conscious guilt to certain obviously wicked actions or moods cannot be right, because it is just that way of looking at sin which our Lord condemned when He declared that the milder form of any sin was the same in kind as the overt act. Or again, the modern Liberal confessor often regards only some excess of inward mood as sinful - the sin, although only in thought, still consisting in excess. This may be temporary wisdom; it is not a true facing; of facts; for the predisposing, more temperate moods are the same in kind, and without them the excess would not come about.

eg. the man who has allowed himself to look upon his own side of every question almost exclusively, dwelling on every argument that pleases him, and merely glancing at the opposing argument to deny it, will, if circumstances happen to make it easy, overreach or override his neighbour in material things. A moderate degree of habitual injustice to his neighbour's opinions is the same in kind as an overt injustice to his neighbour's material rights. And the same might be said of almost any form of sin.

Our severer teachers, who have proclaimed that there is no line to be drawn between trivial and important iniquities, and that our daily life from childhood up is full of sin, are scientifically in the right of it. Sin is something that runs like a woof thread through the warp of our life. It is in our heredity; it is in our environment; and how far each soul is to blame for its share

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 151

none can tell - certainly not the soul itself, or any onlooking moralist, however skillful a spiritual director he may be.

We inherit from the animal world passions difficult to understand, subtle in their revenge whether over cultivated or suppressed; digestive organs that so easily poison the brain that slight and passing manias often unconsciously distort the moral vision; self-regarding desires, excessive as soon as civilization makes the necessities of life available without the need to risk life; nerves too easily set off the normal balance; and participation in the corporate mind of herd or pack which makes us liable to mental epidemics. Very much splendid theological sophistry has gone to make all this appear necessary and good, because whatever is not of man's conscious evil will was held to be of God; but deep down in the springs of our nature is something which recognizes evil in this inheritance and we recognize God as the author of good only; and we cannot worship Him without admitting that some element inimical to His purpose, and which cannot be covered by conscious evil doing, mars the world. As we are using the word "sin" in this essay to mean whatever phase of life comes short of God's purpose for His creation, we are bound to admit that we inherit sin and find it in the whole atmosphere of our environment, that it obscures from us not only the love of God, but also His standard for humanity, and that it is only by each of us seeking with might and main to hand on a better inheritance and environment that our race can come into line with God's creative purpose and be in union with Him.

If it be felt that there is something unnecessarily confusing in the idea that sin is partly to be found in our physical inheritance, it must be remembered that the renovation or recreation of what we call "lower nature" was part of the Christian message in its very inception. It was upon an earth brought into obedience to God

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 152

that our Lord foretold His future reign, and St. Paul, as in a vision, saw the whole creation perfected. If everything that exists were according to God's will except man's conscious sin, it is quite clear that this renovation of earth, this redemption of the whole creation - spoken of by our Lord and St. Paul - would be unnecessary. Church teaching has always contained this belief in racial or corporate sin, and I think it will be seen later on that this larger view of sin becomes very illuminating.

Again, an action has ethical quality apart from conforming to or violating the agent's sense of duty. Because the sinfulness of an action is not proportionate to its accidental evil results it does not follow that its ethical quality lies only in the intention, or the final result proposed by the agent. In judging the ethical quality of an action, its natural results upon the moral character of the agent and those associated with him must be taken into account, whether the agent could perceive these or not. A Calvinist mother of a recent generation refused to teach her children the harsher doctrines of her creed, declaring that she would rather they grew up wicked than miserable. This she did with a strong sense of a guilty conscience. Later in life she was perceived to have developed a finer character, and brought up a more virtuous family than most of her neighbours. Such good consequences, if merely accidental, could not prove her action good; but they were not what we call accidental, and therefore they indicate that her action had a good quality in spite of her prolonged sense of violated duty. We should most of us admit that in the long ages of slavery and religious persecution men may have helped ill treated fugitives to escape, convinced that in doing so they were yielding to insubordinate and unworthy desires of their hearts, and that duty lay in another course. The action was such that, in spite of the conscious violation of supposed duty, they would naturally be

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 153

better men for doing it, and in a better position to attain new light. In the same way, actions that people perform with a strong sense of duty may harden and coarsen the character and close the eyes to higher light, and thus must be judged as ethically bad actions.

All the hatred, malice and uncharitableness, all the self-righteousness and spiritual pride, fostered - unconsciously fostered - by the defence of religious or political causes each supposed to be the cause of God, must count as evidence of the ethical quality of the actions involved. Let us take, as example, the case of persecution. The late Dr. Mandell Creighton, in his Hulsean Lectures of 1894, makes a very able defence of the position that the Christian always knew, always knows, that religious persecution is condemned by the law of God and the spirit of the Gospel. Let us consider this. Persecution cannot be limited to legal action, which is what Dr. Creighton has primarily in mind.

The spirit of persecution works publicly and privately in a thousand ways; thus we can examine it as we see it in existence today. The roots of persecution lie in the attribution of moral inferiority to those who differ from us in any opinion we hold to be righteous, and in the belief that God works righteousness by denunciations and condemnations rather than by inward persuasions, so that in thus working, man is imitating and pleasing Him. The notion that our opponents are morally inferior rests on the very assumption that they know, or could know, or could at one time have known, that what they call right is wrong. The belief may be honestly held, yet the result is always not only some form of cruelty to the neighbour, but degeneration of personal character.

Thus in many circles today, where pious dames and ministers of religion foregather, depreciation of the political or religious opponent of the hour is the favourite topic of conversation. But I do not think that all such people know that they are making the

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 154

lower choice or rebelling against God; I do not think it is a fair reading of facts to assume that they all must sometime have known; I believe that many of them honestly think that the spirit they thus foster in all who come under their influence is the chief bulwark of the Church of Christ. Such people have some vivid conception of the cause of God on which they fix their attention, and they do not stay to analyze the methods by which they seek to promote that cause; nor are they conscious of the spiritual pride and self righteousness their judgments, involve. These very people go home and examine themselves by the rule of some familiar manual of devotion, humbly straining out gnats, unconscious of camels.

How many fathers have sent their sons into wrong courses by painfully endeavouring to break the high spirits that ought to have been fostered and guided, and themselves lost gentleness of heart and spiritual insight in the process. How many mothers have turned many to unrighteousness by instilling into the tender minds of their daughters prudery in honest mistake for purity, and lost their own chance of the beauty of holiness in the process. Consider all that self-interested conduct which, in many times and places, has been taught as the first duty of man, and when markedly successful has been honoured and applauded in every civilized state, but which has been the direct cause, not only of the growth of slums, the neglect of prisons, and the inadequacy of schools, but of the spiritual degeneracy of the very class of men who wrought the mischief. Wrongs wrought by fanatical asceticism, by patriots in the awful emergencies of war, by youth in its headlong, vice breeding rush for natural pleasures, are not the result of evil intention, but they leave the character of the agent stained and his mind unprepared for higher light. These wrongs, although on very different levels, all arise from moral blindness.

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 155

There are very different causes for moral blindness, but the assumption that it is always the fault of the blind soul is not borne out by experience. The idea that such men could know, or could once have known, that what they call right is wrong, is merely academic. It is not the verdict of fact. Actions which are committed with a knowledge, clear or dim, that they are wrong and ought not to be done, constitute but a small part of wrong thinking, wrong feeling and wrong doing.

In a small book of essays published near the end of his life, Henry Sidgwick gives it as his opinion that if all men did what they thought right without further enlightenment, the world would be a worse place. He says that the causes of men's failure to do right "divide themselves naturally under two distinct heads. Firstly, men do not see their duty - with sufficient clearness; secondly, they do not feel the obligation to do it with sufficient force." And he continues:

"The commonest opinion is disposed to lay most stress on the latter, the defect of feeling or will, and even to consider the defect of intellectual insight as having comparatively little practical importance. It is not uncommon to hear it said by preachers and moralizers that we all know our duty quite sufficiently for practical purposes, if we could only spur or brace our wills into steady action in accordance with our convictions. And it is no doubt true that, if we suppose all our intellectual errors and limitations to remain unchanged, and only the feebleness of character which prevents our acting on our convictions removed, an immense improvement would take place in many departments of human life." But other inevitable results of such a change would constitute serious and substantial drawbacks. We recognize the dangers of fanaticism; a "fanatic" is one who resolutely acts up to his convictions when they are opposed to the common sense of mankind; if, therefore, intellectual error remains unchanged while feebleness of character and weakness of will to do duty are entirely removed, fanaticism must increase. "We must also suppose an increase in the bad effects of more widespread errors in popular morality, which are now often prevented from causing the full evil which they tend to cause, by the actual feebleness of the mistaken resistance which they oppose to healthy natural impulses." The opposite view is therefore held by some - that

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 156

it is chiefly important to remove the intellectual source of error in conduct, that what every man really wants is his own true good, if he only knew it. But this view also is too simple and unqualified, since, "in the first place, a man often sacrifices what he rightly regards as his true interest to the overmastering influence of appetite or resentment or ambition; and, secondly, if we measure human well being by an ordinary mundane standard, and suppose men's feelings and wants unaltered, we must admit that the utmost intellectual enlightenment would not prevent the unrestrained pursuit of private interest from being sometimes antisocial, anarchical and disorganizing. Still, allowing all this, it seems to me not only that a very substantial gain would result if we could remove from men's minds all errors of judgment as to right and wrong, good and evil, even if we left other causes of bad conduct unchanged; but that the gain in this case would be more unmixed than in the former case. ¹

On the religious side we are apt to assume that by doing what he thinks right a man always obtains greater light, or renders himself more open to such enlightenment. But we have already seen that such is not necessarily the case; for he may be serving the devil when he thinks he is doing the will of God, and so inevitable is the ill consequence of wrongdoing that it obscures the moral vision even when - or, perhaps, more when - it is done in genuine mistake for righteousness. As is said in the Fourth Gospel, "he that doeth the will shall know of the doctrine,"; but in the same Gospel we are told, "Whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service," implying that to think we are doing God's will, and to do it, are not the same thing. There is an objective standard of right. It is the doing of God's will, whether we think we are doing it or not, that alone puts us in the path of further enlightenment.

It is entirely necessary that we should each strive to do what we think right, but we should not be satisfied with that. It is only the beginning; aspiration

¹ Practical Ethics, H. Sidgwick, pp. 83-86.

REPENTANCE AND HOPE    Page 157

should go beyond, because, if we admit that the word "sin" may be applied to all those states and actions of the human mind which do not conform to God's will, we must admit that conscious transgression or moral failure is not coterminous with sin. Unconscious sin is universal, not only in primitive, savage, pagan or irreligious men, but in man when highly moralized and evangelized by the Christian tradition. There is an objective standard of right, but we are not yet able to see its full beauty and splendour. Yet its violation grieves God, insults His holy purpose, is detrimental to us, and is sin.

If this be a true account of sin, what is efficacious repentance?

WHAT IS REPENTANCE?

Repentance is necessary to all progress. This is as true in every art and science as in morals and religion. Change of mind, is necessary in all things, at all times, and in all places, wherever a human being endeavours to improve the thought that moulds practice in any field of activity. Something in the past way of looking at the thing in hand, whether it be little or big, must be corrected if advance is to be made.

The psychological necessity of a change of mind for all advance is habitually overlooked for want of analysis. The scholar, for example, will be found to be always following a new light if he is in the way of making anything of his scholarship and is not a mere hack. The true artist begins his work each day with some "newness of life." He is always subject to new light, not only on the inward vision he is trying to express, but on the way to express it. Even at the zenith of his power he is never satisfied, and he is always discovering, in small things or great, new causes for his failure, which he hopefully removes. The so called artist who is a copyist or hack has none of this experience;

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 158

his vitality runs low; he produces nothing of worth; to him it is a matter of mere will. He whips himself up, if need be, to his daily task without a new idea about it.

Now, if we open our eyes, we see this distinction even more markedly in the cultivation of the art of living. Certain people are always discovering the causes of their failures and successes - little and big - living, not by a mere effort of will, but vitally attracted by the better plan of dealing with their own powers, and with men and things, which is constantly unfolding itself. Further, while inborn genius in scholarship and the arts is rare, faith in the indwelling Christ opens to every man, if he will enter it, a life of constant renewing of the mind in the difficult art of living. The Divine wisdom provides just that sure, clear insight into the better possibility, that daily and hourly increase of power, which gives new outlook, new insight, the constant change of mind, necessary to progress. At certain crises of life, when the wrong way has long been followed, this enlightenment comes with overwhelming force, but it seems to be the same in kind as the daily renewing.

Let it be freely conceded that enlightenment as to the right is not virtue if it merely comes to the soul as a reasonable conviction. True repentance implies a

stir and spring of the whole mind. The insight, the vision, the inspiration, is the essential thing. It is the sudden chiming of a man's whole mind with God's which produces at once the inflow of new life and new light.

Repentance requires a voluntary nerving of the brain and grip of thought. This voluntary movement synchronizes with some desire evoked by the perception of something desirable yet unattained, and with unrest at its lack. "Jesus came into Galilee crying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent ye." ¹

¹ 1 Mark i. 15.

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 159

His command obviously calls for activity of the will, yet what was here commanded was clearly no mere recognition of past sins but a change of mind, new vision. It is obvious that at the outset Jesus could not have asked His hearers to deplore their own recognized faults of commission and omission without causing their minds to be filled with the legal exactions of the only religion they knew - a prepossession which would have turned them away from the light He desired to give. He sought, not to do away with the symptoms of sin, but to strike at its root. The splendid object of desire, the Kingdom, was held up as a stimulus for voluntary and intelligent reaction, which would of necessity include the appropriate feeling. This principle was not true or valid only in the supreme religious drama then enacted in Palestine; it is true of every hour of the Christian life; and it is for lack of grasping this fact that the ineffective Church today misses her greatest opportunities.

The futility of dealing only with the symptoms of sin may be shown thus. It is quite impossible that any man's activity should come up to his ideal or to what he knows to be right, because the inner vision is far more swift and sure than hand or foot or habit of mind. These must lag after; therefore if we bound our horizon with that vision, and waste our energies in tears over our failure, we shall never attain it. If we have any vision at all today, even the smallest, we shall never live up to it until that vision has moved forward and we are seeking to live up to something beyond. It is the beauty or goodness that we see with our minds that attracts our wills; but vision to be attractive, to be true vision, must not remain the same; if it does, it is artificial and so must fail to attract. When we imagine we can do better, feel better, without any newness of thought on our course of conduct - i.e. if we are seeking better volition and better feeling without attention to better thought or new vision - we are on a treadmill

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 160

which is not attached to any useful machine. We get no further ourselves, nor do we improve the world. We no doubt develop certain muscles of character, but to what purpose ? A great deal of what goes by the name of repentance is of this sort. There is no change of mind about it, no turning from the wrong way of looking at things to the right way; just a dull, or poignant, regret that our activity is not conformed to the vision of right that we have long had.

In this sense a man may be penitent every day, every week, concerning the same sins; and he may be exceedingly sorry, and may, by reflection, depress his spirits and those of others, and set out again with exactly the same outlook or mind that he had the day or the week before; with the natural result that his conduct, if it improves at all, improves little or slowly; or, what is quite as common, he triumphs negatively over certain faults without becoming markedly more attractive or more useful. Hence the common stagnation of the respectable life.

The thing aimed at by this sort of penitence would be morally worthless if achieved. A man who lived up to his ideal would be a mere stunted futility, perfect perhaps in the sense in which a marble statue might perfectly represent the high or low ideals of the sculptor, but, because static, failing in human goodness as much as a marble statue must fail, and as useless for the salvation of a living, growing world. We cannot justify this stationary ideal by saying that our ideal is not subjective but objective in Jesus Christ. This is ignoring the fact that a man's ideal is constituted by his interpretation of the objective goodness embodied in Jesus Christ. Our interpretation of the divine ideal may be, and constantly is, "fashioned according to this world," and we can only be "transformed into His image " by the constant "renewing" of the mind.

We are guilty in so far as we have intentionally taken the lower, rather than the higher, path.

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 161

Recognition of this guilt when incurred, contrition, confession, are among the deepest and truest instincts of the soul, and are one of the most important aspects of prayer; but they can only come healthily to their fruition - when man is already living in intimate filial relation to Divine Love. This relation is well entered upon when, without bemoaning ourselves or wailing for mercy as if to a reluctant God, we give our confidence to Him as to a Father who takes great pleasure in His children.

TRADITIONAL PENITENCE

In the past the sense of sin has often obscured the joy of repentance. In our religious literature too much emphasis has been laid on grief for past sin. Some spontaneous grief of this sort is the natural concomitant of a change of mind. The glimpse of a better way of serving God and our neighbour naturally brings with it a poignant vision of how much better we might have served in the past. There can be no question but that in proportion as the change of mind and of resulting activity implies greater or lesser degrees of wrong activity in the past, the normal mind will feel a corresponding grief. The man who simply pities his own past ignorance will naturally feel less grief - "be beaten with fewer stripes" - than he who is forced to blame his own open eyed wrongdoing and perceives that his wrongdoing gave pain to Love. What is called "the grace of God" brings a heightening of all man's powers and therefore of this grief. This ought not to be minimized. But, while recognizing all this, it is also to be noted that much of our religious tradition teaches us to give a large proportional emphasis to this grief which paralyses the nerve of thought; it teaches us that to augment this grief by fixing our attention upon the sin, and expending energy upon self upbraiding and self punishment, is the best way of overcoming sin. Self upbraiding, under the titles of "penitence " and

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 162

"contrition," is inculcated as expiatory in nearly all the modern manuals of the Church, as well as those that are time honoured. Thus I recommend persons who have in any grievous way sinned or neglected God never to forget that they have sinned. If they forget it not, God will forget it. I recommend them every day, morning and evening, to fall on their knees and say, "Lord forgive my past sins." I recommend them to pray God to visit their sins in this world rather than in the next. I recommend them to go over their dreadful sins afresh (unless, alas, it makes them sin afresh to do so) and to confess them to God again and again with great shame, and to entreat His pardon. ¹

It may well be said that the greatest hindrance of all to a true and lasting repentance is the want of a deep contrition, an abiding sorrow for sin. Special promises are given in God's Word to those who cherish such a sorrow as this. "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted"; "Blessed are ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh," are our Lord's own words. "Oh that my hard, proud heart would melt, and that I might weep and sorrow day and night before Thee." "Look upon me, I beseech Thee, with the eye of Thy mercy, that I may see and mourn for my sins. Feed me, O Lord, with the bread of tears, and give me plenteousness of tears to drink." The chief of these good dispositions is a healthful, loving sorrow for past sins, springing up increasingly in the heart as the knowledge of God teaches us what still remains in the life displeasing to Him. This sorrow will continue and increase as long as life lasts; for every new thought about God casts a new light upon our sins, and gives us a truer estimate of their guilt and hatefulness. Increasing sorrow is produced in us by a deeper knowledge and experience of our Heavenly Father's love. We are called upon at repeated times (Advent and Lent) to renew our acts of repentance for past sins, thus impressing upon us the necessity of cherishing the spirit of life long sorrow for them. ²

Contrition is sorrow for sin from love of God, whom sin has insulted, grieved, wounded. This is pleasing to God and obtains His pardon . ³

¹ Dr. Pusey, as quoted by Rev. T. T. Carter.

² Rev. T. T. Carter's Manual of Repentance, pp. 30, 31, 120, 123, 201, 202, 203.

³ A Broken Heart, Rev. P. B. Bull, p. 9.

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 163

This teaching must, of course, be judged by its fruits in the lives of those who follow it. It is offered as a means to an end - the training of the human will that it may unite with God's will, and the resulting elevation of character and help to the world. We have, on the one hand, the evidence of many great and notable saints who exemplified this way of the religious life, with the testimony of thousands of less distinguished but saintly people who regard a life of penitence as the only adequate cure for sin. On the other hand it must be admitted that the majority of average persons who in past ages were trained in such doctrine did not hand on to their descendants a civilization that throbbed with the love of God. When penance was offered by the Church everywhere as a panacea for the disease of sin, a penal ethic crystallized, in which cruelty to sinners was a virtue because cruelty was conceived of as an attribute of God.

It may be replied that this proves no more than that every institution of earth partly fails to effect its end. Yet the test of fruits is always a matter of proportion how much is claimed for a method? how much does it actually produce? Let us take the religious orders, and, since written records have usually a strong bias of admiration or detraction, let us look at contemporary facts. If we go to so new a country as French Canada today, and examine monasteries and convents of which it is full, we shall find there multitudes, thousands upon thousands, who are honestly following a rule based on penitential theories, and they are producing little better and little more for the world's salvation than did people of their kind soon after the Christian era, - and indeed, before it. Inspiration for the world does not come from these institutions. If we watch processions of such monks or nuns in any Roman Catholic country, where they are not a select few drawn from a Protestant majority, we are forced to observe that their faces do not, as a rule, indicate inward light. It is, I think,

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 164

false to say that these monks and nuns are not honest and earnest, but the same number of honest and earnest men of the world have a more spiritual appearance. If among such a vast host of average Christians so little has been produced along this line of devotion, it is natural to conclude that the dynamic Christian repentance that brings the Kingdom is in some way missed.

Or again, if we take the average man who becomes "a penitent" and still lives in the world, do we usually find him a conqueror, inspired by a splendid purpose which is purpose and discipline in one, leading him unconsciously to avoid all activities that do not contribute to the divine end? Does he not more often appear to be the victim of an artificial self - culture - his wing feathers clipped into some neat and comparatively useless shape? We shall each answer these questions according to our own experience. All I would urge is that we have no right to judge this way of religious life merely by the glowing annals of certain unusual and inspired men and women who by temperament may be able to get the most and best out of a deliberately induced emotion of penitence, or may have the religious genius that can turn every doctrine or habit to the best possible account. Unless we have real evidence that constant penitential exercises produce the best fruit of righteousness in the average person we ought to question their general efficacy. We should also weigh the fact that seldom in the world's history has any one man done more to turn multitudes from vice to righteousness than did John Wesley, and in preaching repentance he laid the emphasis upon the conversion of the will, while his doctrines of "justification" and "assurance" were at variance with the doctrine of continued penitential exercises. Later evangelical revivals, and the majority of modern foreign missions, in the main accepted these doctrines, as does the Salvation Army. The preaching of them has proved to be to multitudes of people the channel of God's

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 165

power to reform themselves and send them out to sacrifice their lives in efforts to save the world. It is always difficult to assign an accurate value to facts, but there seems good reason to hold that a life of studied penitence does not incite the average man to put out his natural gifts of mind and heart to that usury which is requisite for the spread of the Kingdom.

Undoubtedly the practice of confession before a priest conduces to the building up of certain types of character, but it also has a danger not always recognized. Consider for a moment the condition of a soul that, even for an hour, thinks itself clean and acceptable to God, cleansed from sin, because it has confessed and repented of, and received absolution from a priest for, all its known inclinations toward, or lapses into, vice and ill-temper, when all the time it is unaware that its whole life is set to the purpose of opposing some of God's causes, or even slaying some of God's prophets. Is not the condition of such a soul more dangerous than a state of irreligion? Will not open sinners go into the Kingdom before such an one? Do we think that only in past ages was it possible for a man to slay God's prophets and at the same time practice a strict morality and a hallowed system of religious observances which he feels absolve him from any sin he may commit?

A little consideration will show us that much antisocial action in our own day and close to our own doors, and probably in our own lives, is based on adherence to a moral tradition which blinds us to its own limitations. To the religious mind this very limitation is constantly sanctioned by habits of repentance and confession of well recognized sins and a belief in consequent absolution, a process which often leaves the core of the wrongdoing untouched, and - this is the point - confirms the heart in its worship of a false ideal of God. This may, no doubt, happen when the confession is made to God alone, but the evil seems

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 166

accentuated when reliance is placed on the absolution of the priest. This danger, indeed, the best confessors recognize.

We are all guilty, more or less, of corporate sins, of acquiescence in pagan survivals in legal code and social custom which today make Christendom unchristian¹ and taint us and our homes with the inevitable taint of an evil environment. This acquiescence may take the form of culpable ignorance or mere indifference quite as often as it takes the form of complacency with an evil tradition; but whether the acquiescence be a sin of omission or of commission, it is certainly sin, sin untouched in our manuals of repentance and confession, sin unsuspected, unrepented, unconfessed, unwept. It is a sin that separates us from the mind of Christ. It is only a change of mind - the metanoia - consequent upon belief in the coming Kingdom - that will avail to open the door of our hearts to God and the grace of God.

THE LAW OF SIN AND DEATH

So far we have arrived at the conception of the human soul as deeply involved in the world's sin, and before it at all times lie two paths - the one that of repentance and forgiveness, the other that of remaining non-repentant, falling short of the grace which is called the forgiveness of God. We must ask ourselves what reality is covered by these common phrases to which we are so accustomed, what these two paths mean in actuality.

Let us first consider the path of the unrepentant soul.

In this world we see that sin is followed by evil consequences. Such consequences are related to sin in the way in which throughout nature an injury to a living organism, whether inflicted by itself, its fellows,

¹ For illustrations, see the present writer's Practice of Christianity, Bk. II.

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 167

or by what we call "accident," entails evil consequences upon that organism, be it plant, animal or human, and usually through it upon other members of its species. Any attempt on the part of a living organism to act contrary to what is for it the law of its own healthy development entails such evil consequences. This is so in the physical sphere, and when we rise to any form of conscious moral wrongdoing, evil results follow in the same way. These consequences - this is the essential point - are strictly related as effect to cause, their operation is strictly in accordance with law; but that law bears no relation to what we call justice.

What we need to see clearly is that this necessary consequence of cause and effect applies to spiritual as well as to physical consequences.

It is not true faith in God which makes us refuse to look steadily at the whole of life, or causes us to hold some theory of divine providence which is in direct contradiction to all the facts that we know. It is true in this world that we reap what we sow; but it is also true that we reap what others sow, and they reap our sowing. It is an undoubted fact that however unintentional, however innocently mistaken, the sowing of bad seed may be, the crop is bad, and each vile weed goes on bringing forth after its kind.

If we look at the sin of humanity in a large way, losing sight for the moment of conscious individual responsibility, we observe that false beliefs and evil superstitions, for which no individual seems to blame, degrade the physical conditions, the bodies and minds and morals, of whole communities, and that for ages; or, again, we see the mischief begin apparently on the physical side, and plague or famine, brought on by neglect of physical right doing, so enfeeble a community that its moral standard sinks, and its children have neither right understanding nor spiritual force.

Returning now to the influence of individual sin, we observe that the vicious man or drunkard, although he

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 168

certainly ruins his own mental and physical health, for the most part inflicts far greater suffering on his innocent wife and near relatives, and commonly imposes on his little community a coarsened environment and lowered moral standard. Sin, like disease, is infectious; sin breeds sin and the brood is prolific. The profligate's children, even if normal, are trained in a bad school. But they are not often normal; he entails on his innocent children and children's children not only enfeebled bodies but enfeebled power of spiritual resistance and spiritual insight. Moral obliquity, in a more or less marked degree, is a constantly recurring form of feeblemindedness in the generations that spring from a bad ancestry. When we turn to observe the results of sin upon the character of the sinner, we find that whenever a man commits sin, his moral perception becomes duller, his power of resistance to evil weaker. The natural spiritual consequence is to make him morally worse. Sin unrepented of is persisted in and slowly produces inevitable and cumulative moral disaster to the sinful soul.

Thus we can see even upon this earth that the evil results of sin are in themselves hellish. We are not speaking here of those conventional "sins" which may be invented by false standards of moralists and pietists; we are speaking of those actions which war against man's truest social and religious life. All experience, all scientific analysis of experience, shows that from the law that governs the healthy development of human nature manward and Godward the individual cannot swerve without dwarfing and deforming his own soul and injuring humanity in this life.

If we believe in immortality, and that human character in its next stage is in any sense a development of what it is in this, a glance will show us what the natural result of unrighteousness would be when projected into the next life; for the human spirit is essentially gregarious. Groups of the unjust - the

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 169

characters in which the love of evil predominates would be attracted to, and surrounded by, companies of the unjust. In such companies there would be no true friendship; the more gregarious the spirit, the more solitary. The unjust spirit unjustly treated by all associates would become more unjust. The natural classification, like to like, would intensify both the sin and its natural dullness and stupidity.

DOES GOD PUNISH SIN ?

Punishment in ordinary language implies the imposition of a penalty on account of some conscious offence committed by a responsible agent, and the justice of the punishment consists in the extent to which the penalty is proportioned, on the one hand, to the enormity of the offence, and, on the other, to the degree in which the offender was fully conscious of its nature and fully responsible for it. We have seen that the greater part of the evil consequences which follow sin, and especially the greater pains which those consequences involve, are not related to the sin in the way in which the sentence of a judge is related to the crime. These consequences fall largely upon, the innocent, and they are the inevitable result of wrongdoing, whether the agent is responsible or irresponsible, whether he is aware of his sin as such or whether he calls it righteousness. The only consequence of sin which has any direct and proportionate relation to the guilt of the agent is the fact that he becomes more sinful.

This greater liability to sin and insensibility to righteousness is the only consequence which may be considered as directly and proportionately related to the offence as a judge's sentence is related to the crime. If we cannot find in our hearts the power to attribute this sentence and this penalty to God's will, it must be admitted that, so far as this life is concerned, there is no evidence at all that God does punish sin. All our evidence goes to prove

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 170

that, in this universe, evil produces evil. There is no evidence to suggest that the results of evil are more in accordance with God's will than is any initial crime, no evidence at all to show that specific misfortunes are to be regarded as God's judgments for sins committed; for these are natural consequences and fall alike upon innocent and guilty. For example, the nations of a continent may be controlled by governments which exist in antisocial relations to one another. These governments may heap up armaments, heap up jealousies, envies and distrust of one another. No special statesman may be specially to blame for the international relations of these governments, in fact the responsible statesmen may be doing their best according to an unchristian but almost universal standard of right and wrong, yet the inevitable result of their united conduct will be war.

The miseries of the war will, chiefly fall upon millions of the peasant or working classes. Innocent women and unborn children will suffer privations and oppressions, years of hopeless and helpless poverty, even when they have escaped the fiercer cruelties and degradations of the field of conflict. Thus, to call such a war a judgment of God, meaning, as the word does, that God deliberately passes this sentence upon those who suffer by it because of His anger against the sins that have brought about the war, is to attribute to Him what in any human being would be the most gross injustice, the most pitiless cruelty. If the doctrine of the Incarnation has any ethical meaning for us, it teaches that God has chosen that we should apply the standards of human goodness to His character as far as we can apprehend it. We are, therefore, bound to reject the traditional doctrine, as old as Job's friends and still vigorous, that such disasters represent God's will for man.

We are thus brought up against the question, "Does not justice demand that God should punish the wicked?" This question cannot be answered without considering

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 171

the popular conception of the theory and purpose of punishment. Such an examination will reveal a confusion with regard to two things :

1. the place and purpose of the element of pain, which is one of the inevitable and natural consequences of wrongdoing; and
2. a primitive and crude conception of justice.

Historically, we observe that the blind instinct of human wrath has always called for unlimited vengeance against a fellow being who commits an injury. Very early the primitive community found it necessary to limit this. "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" was a great limitation imposed by the moral sense of the community upon individual vengeance. Thus, probably, arose the conception of the balance between crime and pain as the type of ideal justice; and from this it became natural that justice should be conceived of as vengeance, but as a mercifully limited vengeance. This conception of justice underlies all the varying references to justice in the writings of the Old Testament, e.g. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord."

With the progress of thought it was gradually recognized that if A puts out B's eye, the result of putting out A's eye may well be to leave A and B in as bad, if not a worse, condition of enmity, and to leave the community with two half-blind men instead of one,

CONCERNING PRAYER    Page 172

and the partisans of both A and B in a condition of futile animosity. All that has been accomplished toward establishing a principle of justice has been that the community has expressed moral disapproval of A's crime.

It is imperative that a community have some expression for its moral sense. Right thinking and right speaking propagate virtue and supplant vice. Hence a civilized society must speak clearly and strongly on moral questions to the extent of its moral insight. Until recently, condemnation and punishment have been the one language in which the civilized community spoke out its collective judgment against wrong. Good has often resulted from such expression. Instances could be quoted in which repression of some crime or vice by severe punishment has led to the enlightenment of the popular mind as to the heinousness of the offence. But we must not argue from this fact that the spiritual force behind such corporate moral judgment might not find a nobler and therefore more effective expression.

The business of a community is not only to express certain moral judgments upon certain particular sins, not only by deterrent penalties to secure its members against certain forms of physical violence and in the enjoyment of their own material possessions; it must also seek to reform its offenders and to educate all the members of its society to a self respecting and other respecting social life. Its business is to train its members to a beneficent social life, and so to adapt its penal code that antisocial tendencies may be seen in their true light. For example, a society which had men hanged for sheep stealing sought to secure the material property of the farmer at the expense of fostering in the whole community a conception of the worthlessness of human life which was bound to react with appalling consequences upon the moral standard of the whole community. The same may be said of every penal code in which

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 173

legal cruelties are upheld as a cure for crimes which are the outcome of human impulses much less morally bad than the impulse to cruelty. All legislation which tends to make men believe that material property is more sacred than the health and education and happiness of the men who work to produce it, must of necessity produce antisocial results, which will ultimately render its very foundations insecure. Justice, then, seen in its true light, must seek to educate the whole community to a high social ideal. Seen thus, justice and mercy will be found to be not antithetical. It is most important that we should consider this carefully in its relation to our conception of the justice of God, and that we should remember that much of our traditional teaching concerning the Divine justice comes to us from ages in which men sought to interpret even the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ by a priori theory rather than by patient observation of the facts of life and what it is that really makes men better and what it is that makes them worse.

With increase in psychological knowledge and more complete analysis of social and antisocial processes, our belief in the moral value of penal suffering has been greatly modified. Consider the following cases. Here is a young mother with her little ones about her. She understands how to manage her own health, and consequently has an even temper. She is well trained in the science of the kindergarten and the school. She trains her children to be obedient and companionable without whipping them. Next door to her is another mother, overworked for lack of knowing how best to work, and with nerves strained to the breaking point. She has no knowledge of child psychology or of methods of arresting and training the child's attention. She brings up her children to be obedient and sociable by a conscientious effort to be what she calls "just" in her punishments. In a third house we find a mother with no moral force at all, who spoils her children by

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 174

indulgence and indifference, and they grow up to swell the criminal class. These households represent in epitome child education as we see it before us today. The children of the second mother are frequently whipped, not on account of their own naughtiness, but because of her ignorance of how to train them and her lack of serenity. The children of the third family are cruelly punished by society when they grow up because of their mother's carelessness and non-moral training. Can the punishments in these two cases be a parable of God's method of dealing with men? Because the redemptive force of the first mother's method is an unfamiliar idea to most of us, and so untried by the majority, and because the punishments of the second mother carry with them a certain redemptive force, are we justified in concluding that the methods of the second mother are the more accurate reflection of the Divine mind?

Take, again, what we have learned in recent years of the young criminal. In the most enlightened communities he is now at once welcomed into a little society in which he is given happy conditions, a choice of attractive occupations, a good and kindly education. He finds himself one of a community to which responsible self-government is accorded. The first rule of such institutions is that the crime that brought the boy to the place is never spoken of. All that is at first done for him is done with the express object of making him forget that he is a criminal. I was once spending the day at the "Boys' Farm" which takes the young criminals from Montreal and Quebec. We had seen the boys rush out from school in tumultuous joy for a swim in the warm river, and return laughing and romping to an ample tea, when in the distance along the white road from the station loomed the burly form of a policeman leading by the hand a small, ragged figure. The Governor met the child first with a smile and a welcome, as if he were

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 175

an expected guest. There was no ceremony, no word of reproach or warning. This welcome to, a happier life was the official act of a law that had once been merely penal. The results from such institutions are so good that no one who has known them would be foolish enough to go back to the old method.

With older criminals, children of a larger growth, the world has been much slower in attempting to apply the corrective quality of mercy and trust and goodwill, and the consequence is that experiments in this direction are so new that the only astonishment is, not that in some cases inexperienced efforts have met with partial failure, but that the results have been so markedly good. In the United States the owner of one large factory has gone out of his way to engage discharged convicts, giving them excellent wages and putting them in the charge of a small staff employed to help, encourage and advise them without espionage. They were treated exactly as if they were respected members of the community. In several cases they rose rapidly into positions of trust; and, although there have been some individual failures, when the experiment was reported by the Philadelphia Ledger in the spring of 1915, no one connected with the experiment was at all discouraged, but rather enthusiastic as to the out come.

Other efforts to carry goodwill and fellowship into the prisons themselves, to treat criminals with trust rather than distrust, to give them good conditions and all possible liberty and a share in the profits of their own labour, have met with a degree of success which proves to any candid enquirer that these efforts are directed along the right line of progress, and are only the beginning of a great reformation, and this in spite of the fact that the self righteous members of modern society are busy, as the self righteous have been busy in all ages, endeavouring to decry whatever appears to transgress the traditional morality and howling aloud for sacrifice rather than mercy.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 176

The truth is, this new way of moral expression involves a new attitude of mind, as is proved by the very fulminations launched against it by men otherwise excellent. The main differences between the new mental attitude and the old are :

1. The wrongdoer is considered, not as merely an offender, but as the concrete whole he is, a person of mixed vice and virtue in a mixed world, sinned against by society and circumstance as well as sinning against God and man.
2. It is recognized that if he is to receive justice at the hand of men, he must be rewarded for all his good, as well as punished for his evil, deeds.
3. It is recognized that his personal initiative (which need not be minimized because it is not exaggerated) can be most easily guided by giving him a sense of security and then directing his attention to truly desirable objects.
4. When the wrongdoer is studied and dealt with in this way, a friendship springs up between him and his reformers; they no longer even desire to ostracize him.

From this brief consideration of the subject three conclusions arise:

1. We are only beginners in a new science of social moral expression.
2. Its study involves a new attitude of mind toward wrongdoers.
3. And involves also a new attitude toward the theology and devotional literature which come to us through generations of men on whom this new social light had not forced itself.

If, then, the reform only recently begun in the methods of child education and in our penal legislation is an evidence of God's Spirit working in the world, we do ill to perpetuate a doctrine of God's penal code for humanity which, judged by the mind of the plain man, is more cruel and more unjust than methods of education and penal codes which we ourselves are discarding.

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 177

The problem of evil remains unsolved, but if we believe the great and far reaching fact of human sin to be inimical to God's will, there is no further difficulty in believing that pain and disaster and all that we find associated with wrongdoing is also inimical to God's will. It is difficult for reason to reconcile the sufferings and catastrophes of life with a belief in a beneficent and ever watchful Providence, but the worst possible way of attempting thus to reconcile them is to regard them as God's punishments, sentences that He passes upon humanity because of His wrath against sin. It is well also to notice that such a method of reconciliation is in direct contradiction to our Lord's teaching.

In our Lord's day the best religious minds either regarded calamities and diseases as God's judgments and punishments for sin, or else they regarded them as specially arranged and inflicted by Him upon the good as purifying chastisements. But we know that our Lord did not think that diseases or manias or persecutions were of God's sending. He attributes them to the powers of evil or to the world. He is said to have referred to the hour of His own trial and execution as "Satanic," "the hour of darkness," "the coming of the prince of this world." The chief burden of the world as He knew it consisted, as it now consists, in the active wrongdoing of those who have power to oppress, in the neglect of new light by the religious, in the indifference of the multitude to the suffering of others; yet these, with all their terrible results upon the needy and the innocent, He distinctly did not believe to be of God's providing, but to be the work of the powers of evil. In this view of life He either fell below or rose above the best thought of His own day. In His recognition of a great force of evil inimical to God, He either descended to the level of the vulgar mind, which had developed a Dualism along the line of the superstitions of early animistic ages, or with keen intuitive vision He saw further into the true character of God's providence than any of His religious contemporaries had yet seen.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 178

If we have any true report of the sayings of Jesus, we see that He was deeply impressed with the sequence He observed in natural processes - the inevitable results of sowing the right or the wrong seed, the inevitable sequences in that most variable of all things - the weather, the inevitable results to be expected from the corporate condition of the public mind and public activity, which He called "the signs of the times"; and it is evident that He believed that beyond this earth the souls of the dead were subject to the same inevitable sequence. "Satan," "the devil," "the devils," and the souls of men after death figure in His speech as subject to the same laws of cause and effect. The house that is built upon the sand falls. As long as a man remains unforgiving he remains unforgiven, akin only to wrath within and without. In the parables of the tares, the drag net, the sheep and the goats, we have what may well have been pictures of that instinctive separation which is seen by those who can see to be always taking place between those who have the elements of heaven in their hearts and those who are inwardly developing hell. Dives, who could be benevolent only to the brethren of his father's house, the members of his own family, of his own class, perhaps of his own nation, belongs to the latter class.

The calamities of life are, in the end and in the bulk, the same for all. There is no special judgment upon the Galilean worshippers whom Pilate slew, or upon those crushed under the Tower of Siloam. There is no attempt to explain the problem of evil; all that is explained is the way of escape. The work of God in man's salvation, physical and spiritual, is always waiting upon man's faith, in order to be made manifest, but men are not born blind as a punishment for sin.

We shall all probably admit that the disastrous results of sin are most clearly seen by those who

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 179

are endowed with the clearest spiritual insight. The common mind often fails to observe the true incidence and extent of these evil consequences, but I personally, believe that our Lord, with supreme spiritual insight, saw more clearly than we can the appalling thoroughness of the working of the law of sin and death, and that in so seeing He could never feel anything but intense pity for the sinner qua sinner, that He did not, as a matter of fact, desire to add to these consequences by the pain of any other or further punishment. If this be so, we must each decide for ourselves what attitude toward the sinful soul we believe to be compatible with the love of God.

THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE

"The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus makes us free from the law of sin and death." What is this law, and in what sense may we believe that it is summed up and mediated to us in our Lord Jesus Christ?

We can see, as far back as we have any knowledge of the history of the world, that a law of righteousness and life has always prevented, environed, and limited the processes of evil. Blight, disease and transgression of natural law have always been dogged, surrounded and assuaged by a tendency to revert to law abiding and health and good development. In the remote past animal affections sprang up thicker and stronger than animal antagonisms. If it had not been so, death would have swept the globe. The young and the tender could never have lived if mere competition had held the sceptre. Parental devotion cradled animal life, and love triumphed over the forces of death. Humanity sprang into development full of sin but also full of goodness, beset behind and before with the attractive results of a good life. Everywhere we see the choice between good and evil left to man, and victory dependent on his initiative. God's omnipotence does not consist in

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 180

making man a pawn and forcing him to goodness; but visions of justice and dreams of wisdom have haunted our prophets and heroes in all ages, and everywhere we see that the spirit of life manifests itself abundantly in health and happiness and social virtues, and in sober steady human goodness, wherever and whenever humanity has followed the natural laws of its own healthy development.

The antidote to disease is the abundant life that causes the human generations to revert to health when any evil conditions that have caused disease are removed; and the antidote to sin is not pain, but the spirit of goodness and righteousness which manifests itself whenever man, weary of transgression, seeks to follow the law of his higher nature. All the good that man has enjoyed, all the good that he has achieved, all the effort after righteousness that he has transmitted to his descendants, every healthy and happy or noble impulse of human nature, comes from his cooperation with the Spirit of God; for the law of the spirit of life is that so far as man does cooperate with the Spirit of God that broods over humanity, righteousness triumphs over sin, and life over death.

In the life of Jesus of Nazareth we see as in a pure crystal the whole world drama of the law of righteousness and life overcoming the law of sin and death. In the confusion of good and evil in the world it needed a supreme degree of spiritual insight to discern what human goodness really consisted in, and what was sin; but in the precepts of the Christ we see collected the whole secret of man's real well being and true power, the way of life which will make the individual life secure upon the rock of salvation, the way of social life which can alone bring a lasting and universal goodwill to the sons of men. In His example we see that the love which must animate the life of true power, must persist in face of all possible animosity and discouragement, in the face of torture and death, and even the sense of desertion by the God of love.

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 181

In His resurrection we see that the spiritual power of the life of love is not bounded by this life; the splendid outburst of the power of the risen Christ that was seen in the joy, the power and the rapid multiplication of the early Church and the final Christianizing of Europe, is material evidence to us, who are material creatures, that the law of the spirit of life, as exemplified in the ardent love of Christ, does indeed triumph over the law of sin and death. It remains true that Christendom has only half believed the precepts of Christ, with disastrous results. But the collapse of our present civilization as the direct consequence of the survival of unchristian standards of national and international morality is revealing to greater numbers of men that it is only by abiding in the law of the spirit of life and love in Christ Jesus that men can be made free from the hideous law of sin and death, and only under this law can the individual build his house in security and the nations of the world find peace.

Do we see in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ anything to suggest to us that sin and its awful results can be undone by any other force in earth or heaven than the working of goodness in the soul that has sinned?

We have been considering the case of the human soul deeply involved in the world's sin and choosing at every moment between two paths, that of repentance and forgiveness and life, and that of non repentance which we have seen to be the path of death. We have seen that repentance is the glimpse of a higher life, a desire for this life, and a stir and a spring of the mind toward its discovery and attainment. This attitude of the mind is itself prayer, perhaps unconscious, perhaps consciously addressed to God's attribute of wisdom rather than to His personal love, but in any case it is a prayer of faith, for it brings to man the help of the Spirit of Life. In the normal man, however, repentance is combined with the pain of self disapproval, and an ardent cry to

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 182

God for forgiveness and help to reform. Our question is, What in actuality does this pain of self disapproval, this cry for Divine forgiveness, accomplish?

Can God put away the consequences of sin, and, if so, by what process is this accomplished? As far as the evidence of this life is concerned, it is obvious that pain does not cancel sin, that nothing but the righteousness of the sinner cancels his sin, nothing but turning round and being good can save the sin deformed soul. The results of being good are as inevitable as the results of sin, and they are stronger and of quicker growth. What then is forgiveness?

WHAT IS FORGIVENESS

If language means anything, if we have any true record of our Lord's teaching, He certainly taught that the prayer of repentance brings a full and free remission of sins by the forgiveness of the Father in heaven. What did remission involve?

Most people will agree in thinking of forgiveness as a restoration to some relation which existed before the offence was committed. Forgiveness is not the overlooking of an offence, or indifference to it. It is often the best way for us to overlook offences, but that is not forgiveness. Again, forgiveness cannot be the remission of penalty, because friend can forgive friend, child can forgive father, wife can forgive husband, when there has been no thought of inflicting penalty. A penalty may have been proposed for any offence, and, as a consequence of forgiveness, may be remitted, but that is an accident, not of the essence of forgiveness. The natural reaction against an offence in any normal person is a change of relation toward the offender; forgiveness is the restoration of the former, or normal, relation.

What is humanity's natural relation to God? Is it described in that line of the pagan poet endorsed by St. Paul ^- "In Him we live and move and exist" ?

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 183

Is it described in the poem of Eden? Did the author of the Twenty-third Psalm describe it under the figure of sheep in the pastures of the shepherd? Did our Lord describe it when He spoke of the abundant life lived by birds and flowers, carefree in the provision made for them by God? Is it suggested in the figure of baptism, in which the washing away of worldly stains leaves the life open to God's grace? Is it shown forth in the Eucharist, in which the soul feeds upon the Divine life?

We cannot believe in God and believe less than this. The church, implicitly if not always explicitly, teaches that man only truly lives when he lives in God, that the Divine strength is the proper food of his soul. If this be so, God's forgiveness is an inflow of goodness into the forgiven soul. The sin of humanity is the abnormal thing, the barrier raised against the Divine life. Repentance tears away the barrier on man's side; God's forgiveness is the restoration of the spirit of goodness in the heart.

The problems that arise about the justice or possibility of forgiveness seem to arise from notions of man as independent, from an isolated conception of God, and also from the idea of something static in human relations that is not consonant with the constant change caused by growth and development. It is argued, for example, that if one man injure another, the deed must carry everlasting consequence. But if repentance enable the offender to do his victim a greater good than he did injury, that also carries everlasting consequence; and what is important is that, through the process both souls are in constant growth and development reacting to one another. They are neither of them the same souls at the end as at the beginning. The result of the first injury cannot be called good, because if the offender had been from the first a benefactor instead of an offender, a greater good would have resulted; but the result of the offence plus the greater benefaction may be much better than if the relation between the two men had been one of mere neglect, the absence of either good or evil.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 184

This much is often admitted when injury and benefaction are material, and when it is possible to confer the benefaction on the person injured; but when the injury is spiritual, not material, or when it is impossible to benefit materially those whom we have injured, it is argued that there can be no reparation. But if other postulates of the Christian religion are true, human souls have access to one another through the Divine Spirit. It is probable that they react to one another under the influence of the Spirit, whether they know it or not, and that the influences set at work by the offender's prayer of repentance bring to the injured a good incalculably greater than the harm of the injury. Nothing is irrevocable except the loss of the prayer and thanksgiving on behalf of his fellow-creatures which ought to have been going on all the time, before the repentance took place.

If penalty could in any way cancel offence; if the offender, as time passes, remains the same man who committed the offence; and if forgiveness were mere remission of penalty; then forgiveness between man and man, and also between God and man, would be unjust. But these are large assumptions. We have not the slightest evidence that anything but benefaction cancels offence. We have every evidence that no human soul remains in the same relation to God or man for even an hour. And if we believe that human souls react on one another through the medium of the Divine Spirit, we have good reason to hope that if the prayer of repentance be hearty and entire, it will enable the Divine Spirit to invade the victim's soul and cause in him a good disposition that will more than counterbalance the offence, even when no material reparation can be made.

Into what depth of reality, unplumbed by our material minds, do our Lord's words about forgiveness lead us?

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 185

His insistence on the necessity of a forgiving spirit in the forgiven is distinctive of Christianity. His constant coupling of it with God's forgiveness can hardly be explained if there was not some necessary connection, or if the two together were not necessary to the saving of the soul, and hence of the world. Forgiveness is so difficult to man that it implies all lesser graces of neighbourliness. But if God's forgiveness of man does not mean an inflow of the Holy Spirit, how could it imply in man the power to forgive? It is man's responsibility to use and foster the new influx of goodness in his soul, but the influx must be a great reality or the two things - man's forgiveness of man and God's forgiveness of man-would not be interdependent.

"For if you forgive men their trespasses, then your heavenly Father will forgive you: but if you do not forgive men, your heavenly Father will not forgive you." ¹

And this is illustrated by the parable of the two debtors, where the potentate is represented as essaying forgiveness which is shown to be impossible unless it produces a forgiving spirit in the forgiven.² The two taken together seem to teach that the forgiving disposition is the proof of the soul being Divinely forgiven. For our Lord often speaks of God's action as future when it is evidently past and only the outward proof or human consciousness of the action is in the future. It is worthy of note how often He couples forgiveness and fresh grace. Therefore I tell you that many as her sins are, they are forgiven, for her love is great. Whereas he to whom little is forgiven has but little love."³ It would appear that those whose little love shows them to have received little forgiveness are still bearing the miserable results of their own hardness. More love would show that more of God's forgiveness had flowed into the soul. Again, we have forgiveness coupled with heightened physical vitality:

¹ Matt. vi. 14-15

² Matt. xviii. 23-244

³ Luke vii. 47.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 186

"Which is easier, to tell the paralytic, Your sins are forgiven, or to tell him, Rise, lift your pallet and walk?"¹ Here the inflow of God's Spirit in forgiveness is manifested in elevation of the bodily health. Then again, in Mark iii. 28-29, and Matt. xii. 31-32, it is shown that where the soul is closed to the influence of the Holy Spirit of goodness by the blasphemy which calls good evil, forgiveness is for ever impossible.

It would seem from all this that virtue goes out into the soul with forgiveness, that God's action in remitting sin, and the renewal of goodness in man, and the outflow of God's grace to the saving of the world, are only three aspects of one thing; that love, and the will to forgive, and the discrimination of spiritual values, and heightened physical vitality, are all imparted to the soul with forgiveness.

We often fail to observe this in our daily experience because we have such conventional, and sometimes quite false, notions of what God's grace in our souls produces. We often concern ourselves legally with certain symptoms of sin, instead of with its disease at the root of the soul, whereas the disease may be healed before its symptomatic habits are cured, and some symptoms we think important may not be so. Not long ago a good woman lamented to a friend that, although for many years she had prayed for patience and self control to do certain things she did not like, she felt no nearer this grace than at the beginning. "But," said the friend, "what always surprises me is, how you grow to enjoy doing things for your neighbours - things that any one else would consider disagreeable duties. The things you say you hate to do, and keep forgetting to do, appear to me to be silly peccadilloes that are as well left undone." The words of this careless friend brought a sudden revelation of God's love to the poor woman. She perceived that God had given her something far higher and more fundamental than she had looked for. The grace of God's forgiveness had been working in

¹ Luke v. 20-24.

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 187

her quite unobserved; when she recognized it, great liberation of spirit was the result. This simple story illustrates many more complex difficulties. The grace of God's forgiveness is surely doing for each of us something much greater, more fundamental and more joyful than we, even at our best, can understand. It is only by the prayer of repentance that we can begin justly to understand and love the heavenly Father. If there is joy in heaven over the repentance of each sinner, ought there not to be in our constant prayer of repentance a strain of joy in sympathy with the exultation in heaven ?

SUMMARY

Sin in contrast to God's will for man is like disease in contrast to health, like discord in contrast to harmony. As is ugliness to beauty, dirt to cleanliness, error to truth, so is sin to righteousness. It is a violation of the law of our being, a violation which throws the whole order of life into disorder, and sets up a wrong standard of values for the man, the community and the race. We are all partakers in it, to some extent freely and consciously, to a larger extent unconsciously and perforce. The, crucifixion of Jesus Christ is the measure of as much as we can understand of the nature of sin. As that foul and stupid crime, committed in the name of law and religion, stands out in contrast to the intelligent devotion men might have yielded to Him, we see in it, as in a mirror, the hideous distortion of the sinful mind which sees good as evil and evil as good.

Repentance consists of three parts - vision, self condemnation and inspiration.

1. A fresh vision of God's will as the true vocation of the soul. This may be at a crisis of life - a vision of righteousness covering all life's activities; or it may be at any moment - a fresh vision of righteousness in some particular.
2. A loathing of the old way, which in contrast to the new is seen to be as a filthy garment or disease, which the soul perceives to be abhorrent to God and longs to cast off.
3. A turning of the whole heart to God with the instinctive faith that He is able and willing to inspire the soul to cast off the loathsome thing and step forward to the new.

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 188

The Cross which, as understood by the Christian, is the measure of the evil nature of sin, is also the measure of the righteousness which, in repentance, he sees to be his vocation; for as Jesus Christ bore the Cross rather than renounce his faith in God's reconstitution of earth and the accomplishment of man's salvation, so there must be no limit to what the soul may be called to do and dare for the accomplishment of its own vocation.

The soul, seeing afresh its glorious vocation, eager to be rid of its sin, turning to God for release, finds that all things bear testimony to the law of sin and death; that its sin has produced shameful results within its own very texture, in the habits of the brain and nerve of the body it fashions, in the evidences of havoc, moral and material, wrought by its sin on its environment. If its repentance be only partial, that is, if it be mixed with remorse, so that faith in God's power and willingness to help does not spring into full fruition, it tarries long in the melancholy region of the law of sin and death, perceiving little else than the inevitable ill-result, and moral and physical destructiveness, of sin, in whose shackles and filthy folds it finds itself. In this region of thought the inevitable anguish that sin brings upon the guilty is interpreted as expiatory, and the suffering sin brings upon the innocent is valued for its anguish and not on account of the love it often attests.

But if repentance be complete, if mind and will leap forward to the new vision, and, spurning all that contrasts with it, seize by faith upon the goodness of God, it finds that its every tomorrow is not as

REPENTANCE AND HOPE     Page 189

yesterday; for in receiving God's forgiveness it receives the inflow of the divine Spirit of goodness or righteousness, which becomes its very self, and brings forth good results more quickly and more powerfully than its sins bring forth evil. All things become new, itself included, and evil is overcome of good. In its vital growth it not only leaves its sin behind but also the very self that sinned. Yet the truth is at first only apprehended by faith, for the change is the work of the divine Spirit, and therefore very fundamental, very deep; old habits of brain and nerve and of surface thoughts and feelings, may still operate. If the soul be not steady in its faith it may lose the glad inspiration of God's forgiveness and take again to tears, not knowing that the lion-like bad habits which it sees in its path have the death sentence already within them, and must soon die.

For this lack of faith there is for the heathen great excuse, but for the Christian none; for the Cross is the very seal and signature of God to His willingness to uplift and save, because in Jesus Christ we see one who, innocent and in anguish, bore all the extremity of man's sin directed against Himself, and yet felt nothing but the will to save and uplift; and in that we see such measure as we can understand of the suffering which God endures by reason of our sin and the efficacy of His love in this endurance to regenerate the repentant soul. And just as the Cross is a sign set by God to prove to us His willingness to forgive, so the reappearance of Jesus Christ and the great power with which His Spirit has ever upheld all simple souls that turn to Him is the sign to us of God's power to produce in us a new and fruitful life.

How strange to our modern ears sounds the ecstatic cry of the old Hebrew mystic, "O taste and see how gracious the Lord is"; and yet the meaning of this cry is the same as that with which our Lord began His ministry, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand; repent ye."

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 190

This page was intentionally left blank.

VI

PETITION: SOME THEORETICAL DIFFICULTIES

BY

EDWYN BEVAN

HON. FELLOW OF NEW COLLEGE_, OXFORD

AUTHOR OF

"THE HOUSE OF SELEUCUS,"

"JERUSALEM UNDER THE HIGH PRIESTS,"

"STOICS AND SCEPTICS," ETC.

SYNOPSIS

Page 192

PETITION: THEORETICAL DIFFICULTIES

One is conscious of a certain inner inhibition when one begins to discuss and argue about the theoretical difficulties of prayer. It is as if one had got on to the wrong plane. "That is not the way," one hears some one say, "that the saints talk about prayer, those for whom it is not a theory, but a continuous vital experience. Logic, argument, precise statement simply miss the real thing. You can never make prayer a reality to people, never make any one want to pray, by arguing about it." All that is true, and yet I feel that if argument does not take us into the sanctuary, it may perform a humbler function in clearing the threshold. While the saints lead men by the hand into the Holy of Holies, it may be something to be even a door keeper, or door sweeper, in the house of our God. Whilst no removing of intellectual difficulties can create the desire to pray, the desire to pray is often thwarted by intellectual difficulties.

Objections to prayer of an intellectual kind are a real factor of difficulty in many people's spiritual life. If one can set these in a clear light, see just what they amount to, and leave them less formidable obstacles than before, one will not perhaps have added any force or depth to any one's spiritual life, but may have secured it more unimpeded activity.

Page 193

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 194

And of course it is not only intellectual people who have intellectual difficulties. A great many of the difficulties of people untrained to think consist in more or less confused thinking. The same problems which the philosopher sets out in the technical language of metaphysics often in a crude or a dim way trouble children. I believe the intellectual difficulties connected with prayer are some of those which come up in the simplest minds.

The difficulties I mean are connected with prayer as petition, asking the Ruler of the Universe that something which we want may take place. There is one way of escape from these difficulties which I find people disposed to take nowadays and which seems to me quite illegitimate. It consists in ostensibly eliminating the petitionary element from prayer. "True prayer," it is said, "is not the offering of our desires to God; it is an act of acceptance of the Divine Will. We believe in prayer, but not in petitionary prayer." Petitionary prayer is treated as a concept belonging altogether to a lower stage of spiritual advance, a relic of the magic of primitive man, which ought to be cast off when we come to more mature conceptions of what God is and man is. This way of escape, as I have said, appears to me quite illegitimate.

Prayer is by the very definition of the term petitionary: what it means is asking that something we desire may take place. It is not, as is pointed out in Essay VIII. of this book, the whole of worship. Worship includes, besides prayer, acts of adoration and thanksgiving, and acts of acceptance of the Divine Will. Prayer is just the petitionary part of worship.¹ To speak of "petitionary prayer" is a redundant phrase; the adjective is not wanted. It is quite a conceivable position that we ought never to offer our desires to God, but only to perform the inner act of acceptance of His Will.

¹ The word "Prayer" is often used - in fact, it is so used in some places in this volume - as the equivalent of "communion with God" or "worship" as here defined. Modern custom allows this, perhaps, but to use "prayer" as "worship," while intending to exclude its petitionary sense, is in any case an abuse of words.

PETITION    Page 195

But a person who holds that position ought not to say, "I believe in prayer, but not in petitionary prayer," which is really a phrase without meaning: he ought to say, "I believe in worship, including acts of submission to God's Will, but not in prayer."

People shrink from saying this, because prayer has formed a regular part of the life of the saints throughout the ages, including the life of our Lord Himself. They have prayed, in the proper sense which that word bears in English, and which the corresponding words in Hebrew, Greek and Latin bear. They have offered their desires to God in the belief that through their doing so things which they desire will come about. People who say that that belongs only to a lower stage of spiritual advance find themselves in the questionable position of being superior to Christ. Could anything put the petitionary character of prayer more strongly than, "Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you," or than the parable of the importunate widow? And the precept of Christ is borne out by what we are told of His practice.

It must be admitted that prayer, the action of the child who goes to God and asks for what it wants, raises great difficulties as soon as you begin to think about it. I propose to discuss three of these obvious difficulties in this Essay.

FIRST DIFFICULTY: WILL GOD NOT GIVE ME WHAT IS GOOD WITHOUT MY ASKING HIM?

One difficulty connected with the idea of prayer is that it seems to suppose in God either a lesser knowledge than my own of what my good is, or an unwillingness to give me what is good for me, without my asking Him. I think the fallacy involved in this objection is that it speaks as if "my good" were something fixed and independent, a solid lump, as it were,

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 196

of some material substance, like a table or a chair, which is still the same however my mood may vary from one time or another. God holds this thing called "my good" in His hand and will bring it up to me quite independently of my spiritual attitude. But if "my good" is something essentially relative to my spiritual attitude, if what is good for me in one frame of mind and will, might not be good for me in another frame, then there is nothing unreasonable in supposing that many things which I desire would be good for me, if my being were directed deliberately towards God, as in prayer, and would not be good for me, if my being were turned away from God.

One may take the simple and obvious example of the deliverance, of oneself and someone else, from illness. It is clear that the effect of this happening upon one's inner life will be quite different according to what one's inner life has been up to that time. The deliverance would mean something different to a person to whom it came as a token of God's love and to a person who saw it only as a chance of the material world. For the first person it might be a good and for the second an evil. This does not, of course, mean that in every case the greatest good for a man praying to be relieved of an illness would be for him to be made well. In many spiritual histories a greater good for him would be his continuing to be ill. All that it is necessary to see is that cases are conceivable in which it would be spiritually good for a man to be made well if he had prayed, and spiritually bad for him if he had not prayed.

But, it may be said, my heart might surely be directed to God in an attitude of general receptivity, of readiness to accept whatever He gives as being the greatest good possible for me, without my preferring specific desires, which are necessarily determined by a dim and short view of my real needs. That is to say, it may be granted that "my good " has essential

PETITION     Page 197

reference to my spiritual attitude; but it may still be questioned whether "my good" has reference to that particular element in my spiritual attitude constituted by my desires. My desires are no guide at all as to what my good is, as God sees it.

What this view comes to is that pleasure is not part of the good. For it is quite certain that pleasure has close relation to my desires. Modern psychology, I believe, recognizes that while pleasure does not normally determine my desires in so far as I do not, as the old hedonists supposed, desire pleasure but some concrete object, my desires do determine pleasure, since pleasure results from my obtaining the particular thing I desire. If then my desires are no sort of guide as to what my good is, pleasure cannot be part of the good. This is a possible view. It is the view of extreme asceticism, and extreme asceticism has had a place in some forms of Christianity. On this view my good consists solely in my moral perfection, and God, whose will is to give me my good, is interested solely in my moral perfection and is indifferent to my pleasure and my desires. It would not be a reason for Him to give me anything, that it would make me happy, but only that it would make me better.

People who hold this view are driven by the moral difficulty to give up prayer as petition, except as petition for holiness. As I rose to higher spiritual levels, I should cease to ask anything of God except to be more completely conformed to His Will: to ask God for something I desire, something the possession of which, because I desire it, would make me happy, is to show that I am still on the lower levels of the spiritual life. Probably the people of whom we spoke at the outset, the people who say they have given up "petitionary prayer" altogether - do, as a rule, allow petition for holiness, since it comes to practically the same thing as the acceptance of God's Will, and the position we have

CONCERNING PRAYER     Page 198

just described as resulting from an ascetic principle of valuation is identical with their position. This position seems to me to have something of spiritual priggishness about it. I do not believe that pleasure is the whole of the good, not even that it is the principal part of the good. I believe that moral goodness is something of greater value than pleasure and that, where choice lies between them, to choose pleasure is to choose wrong. And yet I believe that pleasure is part of the good, that pleasure is intrinsically a good thing. And if so, then God, who, if He is perfect love, wills to give us all good, cares most indeed about our goodness, but is not indifferent to our pleasure, and that must mean He is not indifferent to our desires.

If pleasure is a good, then my desires are in some measure a true indication of what my good is. No further reason need be required for perfect Love to give me something than that I desire it. Of course, I may continually desire things which it would not be good for me to have because each thing I desire is, as a matter of fact, an element in a larger whole of accompaniments and consequences, and it may well be that though the pleasure involved in my attaining my desire is, taken by itself, a good thing, I should have to take so much evil into the bargain, in the accompaniments and consequences, that the total complex would be bad. A Love, which was also perfect Wisdom, might therefore very often withhold from me what I desired.

In certain cases a lifetime of frustrated desires, of pain and sorrow, might to the eyes of perfect Wisdom be an element in a larger whole, which, with that element, realized for me a richer good and a fuller joy than could be realized by any whole without it. It would therefore be quite true that my desires are very imperfect guides as to what my good is, but it does not follow that in all cases the accompaniments and consequences of what I desire would be evil and, when they are not definitely evil, or when the fulfilment of my desire would not prevent a greater good, than the gratification of it would be a positive good, and God could not withhold it from me without ceasing to be perfect Love.

PETITION     Page 199

Our Lord pointed to the relation of father and child in order to explain the proper relation of God and the individual man in prayer. We know that no father who cared for his child with any intelligence would grant all its desires. He would care more for his child's character than for its pleasure. Even apart from everything else, the granting of all his child's desires would destroy pleasure by satiety. And yet his child's desires would be a real concern to him. If he knew his child was longing to have a Noah's Ark but did not care for picture books, he would not deliberately buy it a picture book for its birthday present. A picture book would not be a good for it. Why. Simply because it did not desire it. Its good in such cases would not be something wholly apart from its desires, but would be actually constituted by its desires.

Now it seems to me that the view which conceives our relation to God after this analogy, a relation of happy domestic confidence and frank avowal of desires, is something much truer and more natural and wholesome than the ascetic view which supposes that on the higher level of spiritual life all desires are laid aside except the one desire to be conformed to God's will. It is true that in the intercourse of father and child, the desire of a child for a particular toy might be wholly selfish and its pleasure in getting the toy quite separated from any thought of its father. But what the ascetic view overlooks is that this interplay between the child and the father of desire and gratification may itself be the vehicle of a love which infinitely transcends in value the gifts given. The utterance of the desire, the action of giving in response, may be sacramental. A father would certainly be glad to find that his child cared more for pleasing him than