[ p. 75 ]
Peesoxal religion is drawn like an ellipse around two foci: communion with God and service to man. The second involves problems varied and difficult, from casual individual relationships to the League of [Nations, but, after all, the underlying principle of human service is easy to see. Communion with God, however, alike in principle and practice, is for many a perplexing matter, and even among professing Christians prayer is often a confused problem or a formal observance rather than a sustaining help.
The’ effect of this upon vital religion must be serious, for prayer, when it is real, is the innermost way in which any one who believes in God makes earnest business of his faith. It is possible to believe in God as the man upon the street believes in the Rings of Saturn. His confidence in their existence, while he supposes it to be well-founded, is second-hand and the evidence, were he to state it, would be confused [ p. 76 ] and unconvincing and, anyway, he does not propose to do anything about them or because of them. That multitudes believe in God with similar inconsequence is clear. On the whole they agree with Xapoleon that somebody must have made the constellations. They may have poetic hours congenial to faith in God when like Walt Whitman they walk out into the mystical, moist, night air and from time to time look up in perfect silence at the stars. Perhaps they take occasional excursions into philosophy and return vaguely convinced that for some reason or other mechanistic naturalism will not work, that it is too simple to explain this vast, evolving universe, and that God, or something like him, must be at the heart of creation. Or perhaps they are natural traditionalists and stick to faith in God against all comers because they were taught it by their fathers before them.
There are many ways in which an inoperative faith in God, without effective influence on the one who holds it, may thus exist in multitudes of minds and give the impression of wide-spread religion. But that is not religion. Religion has not arrived until faith in God has [ p. 77 ] been translated into action, and the most intimate and inward action which emerges when faith in God is real is prayer. That is the soul getting into contact with the God in whom it believes. That is man’s spirit making earnest with its confidence that it comes from Spirit and can hold communion with him. As Professor William James put it, a man dealing with his own inward life at its best “becomes conscious that this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.” A man who has no more faith than a grain of mustard seed but who makes that use of it is much more essenthJly religious than a prayerless philosopher who can argue the whole case for theism from Dan to Beersheba.
There are many obstacles which commonly h^bit tins adventure of the soul in praying, [ p. 78 ] most of which are not philosophical but intimately personal. People, for example, do not commo^y begin to pray (however much they say prayers) until they rather desperately need to. An English friend who was in the thick of the bad business on the Flanders front tells me that one night behind the lines he had to listen to an astronomer sent out by the British War Office to tell the men about the stars, their constellations, and relative positions, so that soldiers lost at night might guide themselves by the heavens. My friend was frankly bored. Astronomy seemed to him an alien and abstruse affair with no bearing on the mud and death with whidi they were concerned. One night, however, reconnoitering in Ko Man’s Land, his men were discovered by the enemy, were fired upon, became wnfused, ran at random, lay down, and then tried to creep home. But where was home? Then my friend remembered the stars. He desperately needed them. In dismay he saw by means of them that his men had been creeping toward the enemy. The stars, he says, were very real to him that night when he got his last man safely back.
[ p. 79 ]
Reality in praying is commonly subject to the same condition of urgent need. Communion with God, which through many years has seemed a pious superfluity, may suddenly become a real necessity. A man discovers what all wise men sometime must discover, that life is not simply effort, output, attack, the aggressive impact of oneself upon the world. He finds that strong living is impossible vnthout inward resources to fall back upon. Like a closely beleaguered city of the olden time, he is undone unless he can discover a fountain of living water somewhere within him. Then he may %ht upon the secret of prayer. The transformation wrought in those who do is often marvelous. They do more than believe in God. They actually achieve contact with the MORE, in a real fashion get on board of it and save themselves.
There are some who are fortunate enough to reach this experience before desperate crisis drives them to it. They recognize before they are whipped into seeing it that the destinies of [ p. 80 ] personality lie in the world within rather than in the world without. That, after all, is the insight essential to real praying, and because this generation in the Western world largely lacks it and is obsessed with the external universe and what can be done with that, prayer has become unreal to multitudes.
For prayer is a poor reliance if one is mainly intent on managing the external world. That is not the realm where praying operates. Prayer will not alter the weather nor harness the latent powers of the universe to drive our cars and light our houses; and as long as the major interest of men is centered in an area where prayer is not effective, it is boimd to be neglected and to seem unreal.
This practical obsession of our time in mastering the external forces to do our bidding — as though wealth and worth in human living were attainable by that chiefly or alone — is responsible for more than the decline of prayer. All spiritual values suffer. The American who remarked that Chicago had not yet had time for culture but that when she did get around to it she would make it hum, was characteristically modern. Yet, after all, culture [ p. 81 ] cannot be made to hum. It rises out of deep fountams in the soul of a generation. It is begotten of the Spirit in the hearts and minds of those who love loveliness; and art, music, literature, drama, education, as well as religion, will lag, falter, give ugliness instead of beauty, imtil we learn once more the ancient lesson that the world without is but the setting for the world within, where humanity’s real fortunes lie.
We are fooled by obviousness and size. The world without has visibility, dimension, measurement. The world within is unseen, impalpable. That deceives us. We think the big is marvelous. Athens was less than half the size of Buffalo, but Athens at her best did care about the world within. Seers like Plato taught the people that one real world alone earists, the iimer world of ideas and ideals, of whidi the outer world is but the shadow; and Alliens left to history a spiritual heritage unexhausted yet.
Palestine is smaller than Vermont, but at her best Palestine cared about the inner world, from psalmists who sang, “All that is within me, bless his holy nane,” to him who said, “The [ p. 82 ] kingdom of God is within you,” and we stil! are spiritual pensioners upon that little place we call the Holy Land. In the long run this is the kind of greatness that mankind cares most to remember. We crucially need a revival of it in our generation. And when that comes, prayer will come back again. For prayer in its true meaning is one of the great indispensables of a rich and fruitful inner life.
While it is true, however, that the inhibitions which keep people from effective praying are more likely to be personal and practical than philosophical, the intellectual difficulties are real. Most children with a devout religious background are taught to pray to a very human God. Their imaginations of him are naive and picturesque. “Has God a skin?” I was asked by a six-year-old. When in surprise I denied the gross suggestion, she broke into laughter and her explanation of her merriment was ready on demand, “to think how funny God must look without one!” Almost all children who think of God at aU begin with [ p. 83 ] some such naiVe anthropomorphism. Even in our adult hymns and prayers the old imagery of a flat earth with an encircling heaven still is kept for poetic purposes and God is addressed as though he were a few miles above us in the sky. This picturesque trellis for the religious imagination to train itself upon easily becomes part of the child’s working idea of life. God is thought of as an individual, picturable in some form or other, whose major dwelling is the sky. Sometimes the pictures are very crude; sometimes the imagination soars, as with one lad of five who on his first sight of the starlit sky saw the figure of Deity clearly outlined in the constellations.
To a God so concretely conceived the child begins to pray. He asks for anything he wants. He tries experiments in achieving his purposes by request and checks up his apparent successes and his failures. On into adolescence, with varying degrees of earnestness, this habit of praying often goes, accompanied by an idea of God which, gradually sublimated and exalted, loses its grosser features, but wln<& still retains its picture of Deity, off somewhere, who mysteriously hears us when we cry.
[ p. 84 ]
Then comes the crash. The youth is introduced into a vivid imderstanding of our new universe with its unimaginable distances and its reign of law. The habitation above us where the gods once dwelt is demolished utterly; we look clean through it into abysmal space. On the bewildered imagination, robbed of its old frameworks and supports, the truth dawns that the anthropomorphic God long believed and prayed to never made Betelgeuse and Antares, that this universe is too vast to have been created in the first place or sustained now by the Deity of childhood’s imagination. The youth’s prayers begin to ring hollow. He has lost his old imagination of the God to whom he prays. He finds himself talking into vacancy. For him there is no longer any God there, or a God grown so vague and misty that prayer directed to him is a travesty upon the word.
For many people this is the end of praying save in some crisis when they pray instinctively as they might do any irrational and hectic thing. Others, however, having found real value m the habit, refuse to surrender so easily a cherished help. They shift their basis. They [ p. 85 ] leave God largely out of the matter and interpret praying as self-communion. They retreat into their owm souls and exercise themselves -in meditation and aspiration. They encourage the ascendency of their own spiritual life by maintaining seasons of quiet and receptivity when they are hospitably open-doored to the highest that they know. They do find help. But often, when the need is urgent and the crisis sharp, they are oppressed by the isolation in which their self-communion is carried on. Their performance becomes attempted self-hypnotism. They are not tapping hidden resources of Spirit; they are going through spiritual gymnastic exercises to increase their own muscle. They miss the Great Companion of their early prayers. At least wMi that they could obey the injunction of IBpictetus the Stoic: “When you have shut ■the doors and made a darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone; for you are npt idone, but God is within.”
Between the two false ideas of prayer — clamorous petition to an anthropomorphic God and the inward endeavor to lift oneself by one’s own boot-straps — multitudes are to-day [ p. 86 ] uncertain and dissatisfied. Yet the way out is not difiScult. Prayer is not crying to a mysterious individual off somewhere; prayer is not boimcing the ball of one’s own aspiration against the wall of one’s own soul and catching it again; true prayer is fulfilling one of the major laws of the spiritual world and getting the appropriate consequences.
Just as around our bodies is the physical imiverse, in dependence upon which we live so that we create no power of our own, but assimilate it — eat it, drink it, absorb it — so around our spirits and in them is the Spiritual Universe. It is really there and it is as law-abiding as the physical cosmos with which the scientist deals. True prayer is fulfilling the conditions of our relationship with this Spiritual World. We cannot create inward power any more than we create our physical strength. We assimilate it. We fulfil the laws of its reception and it comes. So Spirit, which is God, surrounds our lives, impinges on them, is the condition of their existence, in whom “we live, and move, and have our being.” To see the truth of this is to believe in God ; to pray is to make earnest with it and avail ourselves of the resources of [ p. 87 ] strength waiting for those who fulfil the conditions and get the results.
Such an approach to prayer, as the fulfilling of spiritual law in one’s relationship with God, is bringing back the intelligent and fruitful practice of it to many who thought that they had lost it altogether. Such an approach saves us from the pious blasphemy of telling God what we think he should do, or reminding him of i^fts to be bestowed which he unhappily would otherwise forget. Such an approach saves us from the futile and dangerous extension of prayer to realms where it does not belong, as though praying, which is a law of the inner world of personal life and is demonstrably eflfective there, could be relied on to accomplish results beyond its own realm. Such an approach saves us also from the loneliness pf mere self-communion, for prayer is no more that than eating and drinking are; like them, praying is receptive fellowship with a real world by which we are surrounded and of which we are a part.
Nor does this view rob God of personal meaning, as though he were blind energy alone. [ p. 88 ] To be sure, God cannot be an individual to whom we cry. The clinging garments of antliropomorphism wiU long clothe our poetic language about God and, like the words ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset,’ carry over into a new day the imagery of an outgrown world-view. But there is no safety for religious faith among the intelligent until it is plainly recognized that the old astronomy has really gone and with it the old god of a local habitation, conceived in picturesque and individual terms. What we are manifestly dealing with is a vital universe surcharged with Creative Powar. Unless we surrender to mechanistic imtatralism, we cannot think of that Power in phpWl terms alone. That Power has issued in sjaritual life and in terms of spiritual life must be interpreted. There is more than a pmh in this orderly and evolving universe, as tbou^ it were being heaved up from below by blind forces; there is a puU also, as though ends were in view and goals being achieved. That far philosophy can go; religion goes farther. It commits itself to this Power in terras of friendship and good-will. It approaches the thought [ p. 89 ] of him by way of the best we know. It says with Lowell:
God is in all that liberates and lifts.
In all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles.
It finds God, not primarily without, but within, rising inwardly, as Jesus described it, like a living fountain. It trusts the Spirit by whom our spirits are inspired, and enters into conscious fellowship with him. That is prayer. At its best it dispenses with words and postures and becomes silent companionship with the Unseen. At its finest it ceases clamorous petition and becomes affirmation — ^the soul inwardly appropriating its heritage of fellowAip with the Highest and growing rich thereby.
Such prayer is not contrary to law; it is the 'fulfilling of law. Those who faithfully meet sMch inward conditions of spiritual life find perspective, power, achieve personality balanced and unified, build characters imigimiumous toward others and within themselves conscious of deep resources and reserves. Even Tyndall, the scientist, who notoriously denied what most Christians of his time [ p. 90 ] thought about prayer, said, “It is not my habit of mind to think otherwise than solemnly of the feeling which prompts prayer. . . . Often unreasonable, if not contemptible, in its purer forms prayer hints at disciplines which few of us can neglect without moral loss.”