On Rational and Errational Prayer. A SERMON, PREACHED AT ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LANGHAM REV. CHARLES VOYSEY. 1. CORINTHIANS XIV., 15. "I will pray with the spirit and I will pray with the understanding also." The episode of the "Bible-Christians at Lymington has brought into public notice once more the great controversy on Prayer; and I think it is quite worth while to re-open this question, to reconnoitre our own position and to observe what difficulties may lie yet before us. The letter of the Hon. Auberon Herbert in the Times of the 2nd January, which I have read to you this morning, expresses with remarkable clearness and force the position which many of us hold in regard to prayer; and I believe we welcome it as a very timely comment on one of the most important features of the case before us. We must first observe that the use of prayer as practised and believed in by the Bible-Christians is unquestionably supported by the Bible, especially by the New Testament. We find direct precepts and promises such as these: “Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you; for every one that asketh receiveth, he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." Again, "Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, believing, ye shall receive." "If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that ye shall Rev. C. Voysey's sermons are to be obtained at St. George's Hall, every Sunday morning, or from the Author (by post), Camden House, Dulwich, S.E. Price one penny, postage a halfpenny. ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven." "Ask and ye shall receive that your joy may be full." These words of Christ are followed by similar injunctions and promises in the Epistles. Moreover, God is compared, in a parable, to an unjust judge who can be teased into compliance by importunity. How any believer in the inspiration of the New Testament can deliberately ignore these precepts and promises is a perfect marvel of inconsistency! But I pass on to notice the kind of prayer which is thus enjoined, which the Bible-Christians practise, and which Mr. Herbert calls superstitious. To quote his words: "In the class superstitious, or in other words, that which has no reasonable foundation, I place every attempt to persuade God to arrest or modify what are called the great natural laws, or to act upon His will so as to alter His intentions in regard either of men or things, souls or bodies." These words, I feel sure, will receive almost universal assent among us, since they expose the superstitious or irrational motive from which such prayer springs. To desire God" to arrest or to modify any one of the great natural laws" is to desire a miracle, which in itself is an irrational expectation, and, if at any time gratified, would plunge us into a state of miserable uncertainty and insecurity. It is, moreover, an act of the mind involving a direct censure on the natural order and constitution of things; as much as to say, "God has not provided for this particular emergency, and unless He acts promptly to remedy the defects of His system, there will be a catastrophe." No greater reproach could well be cast on God's order than to desire to have it altered or modified. The objection, then, to this kind of prayer is an eminently moral and pious one. It is reverence for God and for the right, which makes us shrink from such prayer as impiety, as finding fault with God's order in nature, and, therefore, as a form of unconscious blasphemy. Those who pray such prayers join hands with the atheists whom they profess to condemn, and so place themselves in the category of those who murmur against God. Closely akin to this prayer for miracle is the prayer offered up in order" to act upon God's will, so as to alter His intentions." This is, again, both irrational and impious. Irrational, because Reason at least teaches us that if there be a God, His wisdom must be infinitely greater than our own. It is irrational to suppose that he needs any suggestion or correction of His designs by our finite minds. It is irrational to expect that anything we could say or do would influence His mind or affect His conduct. But it is also impious to desire to alter the will of God. As Reason speaks for God's wisdom, so do our hearts and consciences speak for His goodness and assure us that He must be infinitely more good, kind, tender and loving than the best of men. Assuming that He has a will and has already laid His plans and formed His intentions (and it is only on such an assumption that men ever pray at all) it is an act of unconscious impiety to try to move His will, to dictate to Him the smallest deviation from His purpose. To those who really believe in His wisdom and goodness transcending our highest conceptions, it seems both presumption and impiety to pray after this manner. Let not the orthodox then reproach us with irreligion for holding more rational views of prayer. It is more religion, and not less of it, that makes us revolt against their beliefs and practices. I believe I can answer for every one of us, that if we thought we could effect the working of a miracle on our own behalf; or could change the mind of God, causing Him to deviate by a hair's breadth from His original purpose toward us, we would never breathe another prayer, nor suffer even a silent sigh of petition to escape our breasts. We believe in prayer, we practise prayer, we find in prayer one of the most sacred and indispensable of our earthly joys; but we would never pray again if we were compelled to pray after this irrational and impious manner; if we hoped by it to interrupt for one moment the course of nature, to move the Divine Will or to alter His designs. The essence of the superstition we discard is not, then, in the mere form of prayer, but in the spirit in which we pray. The simple words "Give us this day our daily bread" may be used either in a rational spirit, or in a spirit wholly irrational. The Bible-Christian may repeat them, expecting that God will turn the stones at his feet into penny loaves, or perform some miracle to gratify his desire; he may sit still and look for ravens to bring him his daily food, as they are said to have fed Elijah-not an impossible, but still a highly improbable, method of sustenance. He may also pray for daily bread, when surrounding circumstances seem to say it is quite a hopeless expectation; and that the chances against his being fed are so great that he must remind God of his wants, or else he may be left starving. This is a specimen of the irrational spirit of prayer, though I should be sorry to be misunderstood to say it was intentionally wrong to pray thus. Every one has a right to act up to the light he possesses, and what may appear irrational and even impious to us, is not necessarily so in another person. But the prayer “Give us this day our daily bread" may be offered in a purely rational spirit. It is over and over again repeated by those who know and remember that no miracle will or can be wrought to give them bread; nor would they even desire to have it, if it were contrary to God's previous intentions. They feel a satisfaction in knowing that their bread, just as much as their hunger, is of God's ordering by the agency of natural circumstancenone the less from Him because the mediums are countless and the time occupied by their agency is of unthinkable duration. The prayer is to them a refreshing reminder that whether the daily bread comes, or whether it is withheld, is not due to mere blind chance, nor even ultimately traceable to the goodwill or malevolence of man, or to their own skill or mismanagement. It is a profound satisfaction to recognize in God the ultimate source of our destiny and the supreme ruler of our lives; and therefore to regard Him as the giver of our daily bread and of all needful things therein implied. It raises the tone of our lives to think of its blessings as God's own gifts to be used in his service; and if we do not by some regular habit or mental effort keep this thought in mind, we are very liable to look upon our daily bread as solely the result and reward of our own exertions and to drop out of sight the responsibilities which attach to it as a gift from God. And it is most true that prayer offered in this spirit even for temporal blessings enables one to bear with fortitude the time of trouble in which those blessings are withheld. I have really known poor people, whose bread was by no means "daily" but more intermittent than you or I should like to bear, say on the starving days "We must take what the Lord sends. We can bear it so long as it is not our fault, or kept back from us by those who did'nt ought." And these were not the people to look for miracle, nor to wish to alter God's mind. Whatever He wished, seemed best in their eyes. And though we, my friends, may be tolerably certain that it is God's will that we should not let our neighbours starve, or their little ones go hungry for a whole day, yet when such calamities fall, we may be equally sure that a far higher purpose than mere physical content is being wrought out, which we, perhaps, are too blind to see. The only solid objection to the latter kind of prayer which I know of, applies with equal force to every action of man's life. It may be said with some reason, "if everything is already ordered why pray at all? You admit you want no miracle, nor to change God's plans. Well then, leave prayer alone, for it can make no difference." This objection may also be brought against every exercise of what we call the human will. If everything is already ordered and we cannot make any difference to the result, why exert ourselves about anything whatever? If a thing is to be, I can neither accomplish it nor frustrate it by any act of my will. The contrast between necessity and freedom-between the necessity which is the most rational explanation, and the freedom of which we are actually conscious-pertains to every department of life and not only to the discussion about prayer. Till clearer light is shed on the problem, we shall do well to take no notice of it as it affects the practice of prayer. If everything be already ordered, as we cannot help believing; yet the term "everything" includes not merely the series of events but the nature, modification and action of the agents by which those events are wrought out. It is not only that certain events are ordered, but must and can only be accomplished by agencies alike ordered: and it is not irrational on these premisses to suppose that prayer, even according to the Bible notion, however fruitless of miracle, has its place in the economy of the world. To ask what good prayer can do is certainly to put a very pertinent question, but one which does not cover all the grounds of its reasonableness. We must agree with Mr. Auberon Herbert that it is by no means necessary, desirable or reasonable, to give up all kinds of prayer because we have renounced superstitious forms of it, and detected in its popular use a superstitious and irrational spirit. Those who would still pray after a reasonable manner will have but one great and simple desire lying at the bottom of their hearts and inspiring all their words. It is the desire to think, to do and to become all that our Father in Heaven |