All religion is founded on prayer, and in
prayer it has its test and measure. To be religious is to pray, to be
irreligious is to be incapable of prayer. The theory of religion is really the
philosophy of prayer; and the best theology is compressed prayer. The true
theology is warm, and it steams upward into prayer. Prayer is access to
whatever we deem God, and if there is no such access there is no religion; for
it is not religion to resign ourselves to be crushed by a brute power so that
we can no more remonstrate than resist. It is in prayer that our real idea of
God appears, and in prayer that our real relation to God shows itself. On the
first levels of our religion we go to our God for help and boon in the
junctures of our natural life; but, as we rise to supernatural religion, gifts
becomes less to us than the Giver; they are not such as feed our egoism. We
forget ourselves in a godly sort; and what we court and what we receive in our
prayer is not simply a boon but communion--or if a boon, it is the boon which
Christians call the Holy Spirit, and which means, above all else, communion
with God. But lest communion subside into mere meditation it must concentrate
in prayer. We must keep acquiring by such effort the grace so freely given.
There is truly a subconscious communion, and a godliness that forgets God well,
in the hourly life of taxing action and duty; but it must rise to seasons of
colloquy, when our action is wholly with the Father, and the business even of
His kingdom turns into heart converse, where the yoke is easy and the burden
light. Duty is then absorbed in love--the deep, active union of souls outwardly
distinct. Their connection is not external and (as we might say) inorganic; it
is inward, organic, and reciprocal. There is not only action but interplay, not
only need and gift but trust and love. The boon is the Giver Himself, and its
answer is the self of the receiver. Cor ad cor loquitor. All the asking
and having goes on in a warm atmosphere, where soul passes into soul without
fusion, person is lost in person without losing personality, and thought about
prayer becomes thought in prayer. The greatest, deepest, truest thought of God
is generated in prayer, where right thought has its essential condition in a
right will. The state and act of true prayer contains the very substance and
summit of Christian truth, which is always there in solution, and becomes
increasingly explicit and conscious. To grow in grace is to become more
understanding in prayer. We make for the core of Christian reality and the
source of Christian power.
Our atonement with God is the pregnant be-all and
end-all of Christian peace and life; and what is that atonement but the head
and front of the Saviour's perpetual intercession, of the outpouring of His
sin-laden soul unto death? Unto death! That is to say, it is its outpouring
utterly. So that His entire self-emptying and His perfect and prevailing prayer
is one. In this intercession our best prayer, broken, soiled, and feeble as it
is, is caught up and made prayer indeed and power with God. This intercession
prays for our very prayer, and atones for the sin in it. This is praying in the
Holy Ghost, which is not necessarily a matter either of intensity or elation.
This is praying "for Christ's sake." If it be true that the whole Trinity is in
the gospel of our salvation, it is also true that all theology lies hidden in
the prayer which is our chief answer to the gospel. And the bane of so much
theology, old and new, is that it has been denuded of prayer and prepared in a
vacuum.
Prayer draws on our whole personality; and not
only so, but on the whole God.And it draws on a God who really comes home
nowhere else. God is here, not as a mere presence as He is in Nature, nor is He
a mere pressure as He closes in upon us in the sobering of life. We do not face
Him in mere meditation, nor do we cultivate Him as life's most valuable asset.
But He is here as our Lover, our Seeker, our Visitant, our Interlocutor; He is
our Saviour, our Truth, our Power, nay, our Spiritual World. In this supreme
exercise of our personality He is at once our Respondent and our Spiritual
Universe. Nothing but the experience of prayer can solve paradoxes like these.
On every other level they are absurd. But here deep answers deep. God becomes
the living truth of our most memorable and shaping experience, not its object
only but its essence. He who speaks to us also hears in us, because He opens
our inward ear (Rom. viii. 15; Gal. iv. 6). And yet He is Another, who so fully
lives in us as to give us but the more fully to ourselves. So that our prayer
is a soliloquy with God, a monologue a deux.
There is no such engine for the growth and
command of the moral soul, single, or social, as prayer. Here, above all, he
who will do shall know. It is the great organ of Christian knowledge and
growth. It plants us at the very centre of our own personality, which gives the
soul the true perspective of itself; it sets us also at the very centre of the
world in God, which gives us the true hierarchy of things. Nothing, therefore,
develops such "inwardness" and yet such self-knowledge and self-control.
Private prayer, when it is made a serious business, when it is formed prayer,
when we pray audibly in our chamber, or when we write our prayers, guided
always by the day's record, the passion of piety, and above all the truths of
Scripture, is worth more for our true and grave and individual spirituality
than gatherings of greater unction may be. Bible searching and searching prayer
go hand in hand. What we receive from God in the Book's message we return to
Him with interest in prayer. Nothing puts us in living contact with God but
prayer, however facile our mere religion may be. And therefore nothing does so
much for our originality, so much to make us our own true selves, to stir up
all that is in us to be, and hallow all we are. In life it is not hard work; it
is faculty, insight, gift, talent, genius. And what genius does in the natural
world prayer does in the spiritual. Nothing can give us so much power and
vision. It opens a fountain perpetual and huminous at the centre of our
personality, where we are sustained because we are created anew and not simply
refreshed. For here the springs of life continually rise. And here also the eye
discerns a new world because it has second sight. It sees two worlds at once.
Hence, the paradoxes I spoke of. Here we learn to read the work of Christ which
commands the world unseen. And we learn to read even the strategy of Providence
in the affairs of the world. To pray to the Doer must help us to understand
what is done. Prayer, as our greatest work, breeds in us the flair for the
greatest work of God, the instinct of His kingdom and the sense of His track in
Time.
Here, too, we acquire that spiritual veracity
which we so constantly tend to lose; because we are in contact with the living
and eternal reality. Our very love is preserved from dissimulation, which is a
great danger when we love men and court their love. Prayer is a greater school
and discipline of divine love than the service of man is. But not if it is cut
off from it.
And no less also is it the school of repentance,
which so easily can grow morbid. We are taught to be not only true to reality,
but sincere with ourselves. We cannot touch God thus without having a light no
less searching than saving shed upon our own hearts; and we are thus protected
from Pharisaism in our judgment of either self or friend or foe--especially at
present of our foe. No companion of God can war in His name against man without
much self-searching and self-humiliation, however reserved. But here humility
turns into moral strength.
Here we are also regathered in soul from the
fancies that bewilder us and the distractions that dissolve us into the dust of
the world. We are collected into peace and power and sound judgment, and we
have a heart for any fate, because we rest in the Lord whose judgments are
salvation. What gives us our true stay gives us our true self; and it protects
us from the elations and despairs which alternate in ourselves by bringing home
to us a Saviour who is more to us than we are to ourselves. We become patient
with ourselves because we realize the patience of God. We get rid of illusions
about ourselves and the world because our intimacy is with the real God, and we
know that we truly are just what we are before Him. We thus have a great peace,
because in prayer, as the crowning act of faith, we lay hold of the grace of
God the Saviour. Prayer alone prevents our receiving God's grace in vain. Which
means that it establishes the soul of a man or a people, creates the moral
personality day by day, spreads outward the new heart through society, and goes
to make a new ethos in mankind. We come out with a courage and a humanity we
had not when we went in, even though our old earth remove, and our familiar
hills are cast into the depth of the sea. The true Church is thus co-extensive
with the community of true prayer.
It is another paradox that combines the vast
power of prayer both on the lone soul and on the moral life, personal and
social, with the soul's shyness and aloofness in prayer. Kant (whose genius in
this respect reflected his race) has had an influence upon scientific thought
and its efficiency far greater than upon religion, though he is well named the
philosopher of Protestantism. He represent (again like his race) intellectual
power and a certain stiff moral insight, but not spiritual atmosphere,
delicacy, or flexibility, which is rather the Catholic tradition.
Intellectualism always tends to more force than finish, and always starves or
perverts ethic. And nowhere in Kant's work does this limitation find such
expression as in his treatment of prayer, unless it be in his lack of any
misgivings about treating it at all with his equipment or the equipment of his
age. Even his successors know better now--just as we in England have learned to
find in Milton powers and harmonies hidden from the too great sagacity of Dr.
Johnson or his time. Kant, then, speaks of prayer thus. If we found a man (he
says) given to talking to himself we should begin to suspect him of some
tendency to mental aberration. Yet the personality of such a man is a very real
thing. It is a thing we can be more sure of than we can of the personality of
God, who, if He is more than a conclusion for intellectual thought, is not more
than a postulate for moral. No doubt in time of crisis it is an instinct to
pray which even cultivated people do not, and need not, lose. But if any such
person were surprised even in the attitude of private prayer, to say nothing of
its exercise, he would be ashamed. He would think he had been discovered doing
something unworthy of his intelligence, and would feel about it as educated
people do when found out to be yielding to a superstition about the number
thirteen.
A thinker of more sympathy and delicacy would
have spoken less bluntly. Practical experience would have taught him
discrimination. He would have realized the difference between shame and
shyness, between confusion at an unworthy thing and confusion at a thing too
fine and sacred for exposure. And had his age allowed him to have more
knowledge and taste in history, and especially the history of religion, he
would have gone, not to the cowardice of the ordinary cultivated man, but to
the power and thoroughness of the great saints or captains of the race--to
Paul, to Thomas a Kempis, to Cromwell with his troops, or Gustavus Adolphus
with his. I do but humbly allude to Gethsemane. But Kant belonged to a time
which had not realized, as even our science does now, the final power of the
subtler forces, and the overwhelming effect in the long run of the impalpable
and elusive influences of life. Much might be written about the effect of
prayer on the great history of the world.