THE PROPOSED PRAYER-GAUGE.

PROFESSOR TYNDALL should hardly have given the sanction of his deservedly respected name to the unworthy piece of literary irony,—for such we unhesitatingly deem it,—in which an anonymous writer in the Contemporary Review proposes gravely to the believers in Prayer to make an attempt at quantita- tive measurement of God's accessibility to prayer,—i.e., at a physical determination of the value of special Providences. If the physicists are as accurate as they are apt to be arrogant, they should at least know how to respect the religious feelings of the believers they despise, and not attempt to poke fun at them in the shape of thinly-veiled scoffs at their most profound and intimate faiths. We are aware, indeed, that some of the readers of this elaborate sarcasm have attributed it to a believer and not a dis- believer in the power of prayer. We will give in a moment our reasons for feeling confident that this is impossible, but a single

monopolists. The purchase clauses were struck out ; the duty of framing the regulations for constant service was trans- ferred from the Board of Works to the Companies themselves ; the old levels of supply were retained, and the daily analysis in imminent danger, the writer says, " It is one of the ad- of water was abandoned. In this form the Bill became law a vantages of rank and gentle birth in England that special twelvemonth ago, and, subject to its restrictive provisions, prayers are made for such every week at least, in most London was promised a constant supply of water. Churches throughout the country " :— few will doubt that

Aging delay, however, ensued. Before a constant supply the author has here been unable to repress the sneer of which his could be demanded from the Companies, it was necessary that whole paper is an elaborate embodiment, nor that his democratic the regulations already mentioned as to fittings, &c., should bias in this case combined for the moment with his sceptical feel- be sanctioned by the Board of Trade. The regulations as ing to sharpen the sting of his sentence : yet as a matter of fact, framed by the Companies had first to be submitted to the we imagine the truth to be quite otherwise. In most churches one Metropolitan authorities, and the objections of the latter—the hears prayers for the sick poor every Sunday, while the reserve of Board of Works and the Corporation of the City—against the rich usually prevents their asking the prayers of the congre- them had to be received and considered. On examination it gation, even where they are not sceptical as to their value.

What Mr. Tyndall's friend affects to wish is this,—that special prayers should be continually offered by all the believers in prayer who will consent to join during three or five years, under the Act the constant supply could not be insisted upon, for the recovery of the patients of a single hospital, without if within two months after the service of the requisition depriving "one single child of man" of what the writer " had almost called his natural inheritance in the prayers of Christen- trict were not provided with the fittings specified in the regu- dom." He would then compare the average duration of sickness and the average rates of mortality in that hospital, with the same very costly and troublesome, the Companies could always hope ratesfor the same class of diseases in other not specially dis- to evade a compulsory constant service, while by reserving to themselves the power of fixing the size of the communication- I tinguished hospitals, and regard the shortening of the average sentence of the paper to which Professor Tyndall has lent his sanction will probably suffice to convince most of our readers of its true nature. Speaking of the special prayers for sick people

.time of sickness, if any, and the diminution of the death-rate, if any, as a residuary phenomenon due to the special prayer-power

concentrated on that institution. We describe this ironical pro- posal with something of reluctance and disgust, for we confess that we do not think subjects of this kind suitable for efforts of literary sarcasm. If sceptics like to state their doubts and their pity for others' unreasonable faith openly, we have nothing but approval to express. So, and so only, can the doubters come to understand the believers and the believers the doubters. But the instinct of the trapper, and the policy of the ambuscade, cannot be applied to subjects of this kind without indefinitely increasing the estrangements and.bitter alienations of our religious and irreligious worlds.

And now we will justify the line we have taken about this in- sidious challenge, by stating why the author's proposal seems to

us, what a certain number of simple religious people will very likely not find it, a covert sneer ; and not the frank challenge of a

cultivated inquirer. What Christians believe for the most part, is that God answers, sometimes in one way and sometimes in another, those prayers which really come from the depth of the heart,—prayers which cannot but be accompanied by a deep effort of submission to his higher will ;—and when we say that he answers them, we mean that he makes a real answer, whether in the way of pitiful denial, or tender assent, or assent in some different and deeper sense than that of the request itself, which is manifest to the heart of him who offered the prayer. But we should be much surprised to learn that any man who had really given up his mind

to thoughts of this kind at all, had ever regarded his prayer as a sort of petty dictation to God, the effect of which might be

measured, like a constituent's pressure on his representative in Parliament, by the influence it exerted on the issue. You pray, if you pray in the spirit of Christ at all, not for a specific external end, but because it is a deep relief to pour out your heart to God in

the frankest way possible to limited human nature, and in the hope that if your wish is not granted, your want may be. Sup-

pose you pray for the recovery of a mortally sick friend, who dies.

What your prayer really consists of, is the confession of the blank you fear for yourself, and still more, perhaps, for others, of your dread of losing the moral help and sympathy so essential to you, of the yearning that this trouble may not come on those whom it threatens. And is not that prayer as much answered by the sub- stitution of other and possibly more potent moral influences for those which are lost, as by the recovery of the threatened life itself ? Yet answer to prayer' in the sense of the " conciliatory "

writer in the Contemporary, as Professor Tyndall flatteringly terms him, could mean but one thing,—that the specific life threatened should be restored.

But beyond this, the proposal of Professor Tyndall's friend is of a very ambiguous character, for a deeper reason. He respectfully declines to attempt applying what he calls "the more rigidly logical and philosophical method" of comparing one ward in a hospital where the inmates had every care and help except inter- cessory prayer, with another where they had all these influences and the advantage of intercessory prayer as well; because, as he justly remarks, it would not be possible to keep religious people from offering up special prayers for the ward on which the experi-

ment of no prayer ought to be tried. In other words, we suppose he thinks it would be difficult to discover a spiritual equivalent for the process known as hermetically sealing a glass tube against the intrusion of any physical influence from without. He is obliged, therefore, to have recourse to the inductive method known as that of ' variations,' rather than that of 'differences.' He cannot wholly deduct the influence of prayer in any case, but he suggests that a special excess of its influence might be secured in a particular case, and that you might in this way secure an increase of the effect in proportion to the increase of the cause, if the cause be a vera causa at all. But he quite forgets that to have the true antecedent he wants in any sense in which most Christiana admit its efficacy, you must have for your antecedent a prayer that is the single expression of the heart, and not something which, while it seems to ask one thing, is really pointed at another, and which makes the recovery of the patients in a particular hospital a mere indirect mode of apply- ing a barometric gauge to the special providence of God. When an intimate friend asks a favour, not because he simply wants the thing he asks for, but wants to test his influence with the person whom be is soliciting, we all know that the whole condition of the request is changed, and that very often what the friend solicited would accede to in the former case, he would refuse as a deliberate abuse of personal influence in the latter case. No doubt Professor Tyndall's friend might reply that, in the Old Testament at least, we have instances,—notably Elijah's,—where prayer was pro- fessedly an invitation to God to give the world some means of judging of the influence which a particular person had with him— as a kind of sign that this person was really inspired by an omni- potent and omniscient Being. But whatever we may say of Elijah's proceeding, Christians are accustomed to think that they are forbidden to ask for signs as measures of their influence with God, and that it is to this morbid tendency that our Lord's words, even as to his own similar temptation, " Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God," specially apply. Certainly there is something simply revolting to the spirit of Christian prayer, in the proposal to gauge indirectly, by continuous prayer for a particular institu- tion's success, the divine susceptibility to prayer. How should we think of any one who prayed,—i.e., who ought to be pour- ing out the deepest longings of his soul,—for the restoration of certain persons to health, only to make a delicate experiment on the relation between the spiritual and physical forces of the uni- verse? Does it follow because in some sense God answers true prayer, he would. answer the demand for a scientifically scaled prayer- gauge? Even Elijah put his prayer for a sign openly. He asked for nothing desirable in itself, but solely for a physical sign that his God held the elements in his hands. But what Professor Tyndall's friend desires is that we shall cloak our request for a sign under a request for something which we suppose to be intrinsically desirable; that we shall approach God disguised with a sort of excuse on our lips, our object not being in itself the recovery of the patients of the particular institution, but the scientific deter- mination of our moral command of the fountains of divine mercy. Can it be well conceived that such a proposal could be made except in profound irony?

But Professor Tyndall and his friend will reply, " Well, then, you confess that the power of prayer is—for physical purposes, at all events—practically incalculable, since you resist, even with scorn, all attempts to test its limits ; and how can you expect physicists to believe in any physical cause whatever, which is admitted to have only incalculable effects ?" To which we should simply rejoin, "How, indeed ? But who ever thought before of convincing physicists, as physicists, of the reality of a power, which by the very nature of the case they could not as physicists appeal to, even if they were convinced of its existence?" A great ambition often produces a great career, but you cannot produce a great ambition by dwelling on the charms of a great career. A great love defies death, but you cannot get a great love simply by wishing for a force strong enough to defy death. So earnest prayer may have a mysterious power which it is quite im- possible to trace, even over physical events, but you cannot get earnest prayer simply from the intense desire to mould physical events to your will. Prayer is, if it is anything at all, communion with God ; and the very conditions of the case exclude this base experiment on the possible construction of a prayer-gauge. And free communion with God excludes, and necessarily excludes, the desire to dictate the answer. Its language is accommodated to the language of Isaiah,—" My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, saith the Lord ; for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." If Christians are not ashamed to pray sometimes for specific physical blessings, it is or ought to be, rather as the simplest expression of their anxieties, than as expecting that the divine response either must or ought to be the giving of the exact blessing, or the warding off the exact trouble, which they name. We believe prayer to be a true power, a power which alters the external course of the world as well as its internal course ; but we believe it on precisely the same kind of evidence on which every sane man believes that the passionate desires of individuals so often realise themselves, and that the hopes of multitudes create the great historic changes for which they cry. It seems to us far simpler to believe that those results take place through the Providence of God, than that they come to pass through the magic influence of human passion,—far simpler, because there are so many objects of desire which intense desire only throws into the greater distance, while with high moral and spiritual objects of desire, at all events, this is never so. But we should be as sincerely disgusted with such an experiment on God as Professor Tyndall's friend suggests, as he is probably delighted with himself for the invention of that triumphant dilemma into which, as he imagines, he has wedged the superstitious crowd whom ho desires to expose.