Let
him pray now that never prayed before,
And
him that prayed before but pray the more.
The nearer we are driven to the God of
Christ, the more we are forced on paradox when we begin to speak. I have been
led to allude to this more than once. The magnalia dei are not those
great simplicities of life on which some orders of genius lay a touch so tender
and sure; but they are the great reconciliations in which life's tragic
collisions come to lie "quiet, happy and supprest." Such are the peaceful
paradoxes (the paradox at last of grace and nature in the Cross) which make the
world of prayer such a strange and difficult land to the lucid and rational
interpreters of life. It is as miraculous as it is real that the holy and the
guilty should live together in such habitual communion as the life of prayer.
And it is another paradox that combines the vast power of prayer for the active
soul, whether single or social, with the same soul's shyness and aloofness in
prayer.
There is a tendency to lose the true balance and
adjustment here. When all goes well we are apt to overdo the aloofness that
goes with spiritual engagement, and so to sacrifice some of its power and
blessing for the soul. Prayer which becomes too private may become too remote,
and is apt to become weak. (Just as when it is too intimate it becomes really
unworthy, and may become absurd even to spiritual men; it does so in the
trivialities associated sometimes with the answer to prayer.) It is neither
seemly nor healthy to be nothing but shy about the greatest powers in life. If
we felt them as we should, and if we had their true vitality in us, we could
not be so reserved about them. Some churches suffer much from extempore prayer,
but perhaps those suffer more that exclude it. It at least gives a public
consecration to prayer private and personal, which prayer, from the nature of
it, must be extempore and "occasional." The bane of extempore prayer is that it
is confused with prayer unprepared; and the greatest preparation for prayer is
to pray. The leader of prayer should be a man of prayer--so long as prayer does
not become for him a luxury which really unfits him for liturgy, and private
devotion does not indispose him for public worship. Delicacy and propriety in
prayer are too dearly bought if they are there at the cost of its ruling power
in life, private and public, and of its prevailing power with God.
It is one of the uses of our present dreadful
adversity[4] that we are driven to bring the
great two-handed engine of prayer frankly to the fore. There is probably a
greater volume of personal prayer to-day than for generations we have had in
this somewhat silent people, and there is less embarrassment in owning it. One
hears tales of the humour in the trenches, but not so much of the prayer which
appears, from accounts, to be at least equally and visibly there. And it is not
the prayer of fear, either at home or abroad, but of seriousness, of a new
moral exaltation, or at least deepening, a new sense of realities which are
clouded by the sunshine of normal life. How can we but pray when we send, or
our hearts go out to those who send, the dearest to the noble peril, or lose
them in a noble death; or when we melt to those who are cast into unspeakable
anxiety by the indirect effects of such a war upon mind or estate? We are
helpless then unless we can pray. Or how can we but pray as we regain, under
the very hand and pressure of God, the sense of judgment which was slipping
from our easy and amiable creed? Above the aircraft we hear the wings of the
judgment angel; their wind is on our faces; how should we not pray? We now
discuss with each other our prayers as we have seldom done before; and we do it
for our practical guidance, and not merely our theological satisfaction. We ask
our neighbours' judgment if we may pray for victory when we can be so little
sure as we are in the increased complexity of modern issues that all the right
is on one side; or when our enemy is a great nation to which the Christianity
and the culture of the world owe an unspeakable debt, whether for reformation
or illumination. And if Christian faith and prayer is a supernatural, and
therefore an international rivalries and tutelary gods?
Truly the course of events has been the answer to
this question easier than at first. We are driven by events to believe that a
great moral blindness has befallen Germany; that its God, ceasing to be
Christian, has become but Semitic; that it has lost the sense of the great
imponderables; that the idolatry of the State has barrack-bound the conscience
of the Church and stilled that witness of the kingdom of God which beards kings
and even beheads them. We are forced to think that the cause of righteousness
has passed from its hands with the passing from them of humanity, with the
submersion of the idea of God's kingdom in nationality or the cult of race,
with the worship of force, mammon, fright, and ruthlessness, with the growth of
national cynicism in moral things, and with the culture of a withering,
self-searing hate which is the nemesis of mortal sin, and which even God cannot
use as He can use anger, but must surely judge. This people has sinned against
its own soul, and abjured the kingdom of God. That settles our prayer for
victory. We must pray for the side more valuable for the kingdom of God--much
as we have to confess.
It would more than repay much calamity if we were
moved and enlarged to a surer sense, a greater use, and a franker confession of
the power of prayer for life, character, and history. There is plenty of
discussion of the present situation, historic, ethical, or political, and much
of it is competent, and even deep. There is much speculation about the
situation after the War, at home and abroad. But its greatest result may be the
discredit of elegant, paltering, and feeble types of religion, the end of the
irreligious wits and fribbles, and the rise of a new moral seriousness and a
new spiritual realism. Many will be moved, in what seems the failure of
civilization, to a new reliance on the Church, and especially on the more
historic, ethical, and positive Churches, which have survived the paganism of
culture and which ride the waves of storm. Yet even these impressions can
evaporate unless they are fixed by action. And the action that fixes them in
their own kind is prayer--prayer which is really action. A religion of
prosperity grows dainty, petty, sentimental, and but pseudo-heroic. We unlearn
our fathers' creed that religion is, above all things, an act, that worship is
the greatest act of which man is capable, and that true worship culminates in
the supreme labour, and even sorrow, of real prayer. This is man at his utmost;
and it has for it near neighbours all the great things that men or nations do.
But when a nation must go to righteous war it embarks on one of the very
greatest acts of its life, especially if its very existence as a servant of
God's kingdom hang on it. A state of war is really the vast and prolonged act
of a corporate soul, with a number of minor acts organized into it. It is
capable of being offered to a God whose kingdom is a public campaign moving
through history, and coming by the faith, toil, peril, sacrifice, grief, and
glory of nations, as well as the hearts and souls. It is not possible to
separate moral acts so great and solemn as the act of prayer (especially common
and corporate prayer) and the act of war; nor to think them severed in the
movement, judgment, and purpose of the Eternal. And we are forced into paradox
again. The deeper we go down into the valley of decision the higher we must
rise (if we are to possess and command our souls) into the mount of prayer, and
we must hold up the hands of those whose chief concern is to prevail with God.
If we win we shall have a new sense of power amid all our loss and weakness;
but what we shall need most of all if the power to use that power, and to
protest us from our victory and its perilous sequels, whether of pride or
poverty. And if we do not win we shall need it more. There will be much to
sober us either way, more perhaps than ever before in our history.
But that is not all, and it is not enough. As
Christian people we need something to sanctify that very sobering and to do for
the new moral thoughtfulness itself what that does for the peace-bred levity of
the natural man. For such a purpose there is no agent like prayer--serious,
thinking, private prayer, or prayer in groups, in small, grave, congenial,
understanding groups--prayer with the historic sense, church-nurtured and
Bible-fed. Public prayer by all means, but, apart from liturgical form, the
more open the occasions and the larger the company the more hard it may be to
secure for such prayer the right circumstances or the right lead. Public
facility is apt to outstrip the real intimacy and depth with God. While on the
other hand, the prayer that freely rises and aptly flows in our audience of God
may be paralyzed in an audience of men. So that public prayer does not always
reflect the practice of private petition as the powerful factor it is in
Christian life and history. It does not always suggest a door opened in heaven,
the insight or fellowship of eternal yet historic powers in awful orbits. It
does not always do justice to our best private prayer, to private prayer made a
business and suffused with as much sacred mind as goes to the more secular side
even of the Christian life. Should ministers enlist? it is asked. But to live
in true and concrete prayer is to be a combatant in the War, as well as a
statesman after it, if statesmen ought to see the whole range of forces at
work. The saintly soldier still needs the soldier saint. Yet so much prayer has
ceased to be a matter of thought, will, or conflict, and religion therefore has
become so otiose, that it is not easy even for the Christian public to take
such a saying as more than a phrase. This is but one expression of a general
scepticism, both in the Church and out, about prayer, corporate or private, as
power with God, and therefore as momentous in the affairs of life and history.
But momentous and effectual it must be. Other things being equal, a voluntary
and convinced army is worth more than a conscript one. So to know that we are
morally right means worlds for our shaping of the things that face us and must
be met; and we are never so morally right as in proficient prayer with the Holy
One and the Just. It has, therefore, a vast effect on the course of things if
we believe at all in their moral destiny. More it wrought by it than the too
wise world wots; and all the more as it is the prayer of a great soul or a
great Church. It is a power behind thrones, and it neutralizes, at the far end,
the visible might of armies and their victories. It settles at last whether
morality or machinery is to rule the world. If it lose battles, it wins in the
long historic campaign. Whereas, if we have no such action with God, we lose
delicacy of perception in the finer forces of affairs; we are out of touch and
understanding with the final control in things, the power that is working to
the top always; we become dense in regard to the subtle but supreme influences
that take the generals and chancellors by surprise; and we are at the mercy of
the sleepless action of the kingdom of evil on the world. It is a fatal thing
to under estimate the enemy; and it is in Christian prayer, seriously and amply
pursued, that the soul really learns to gauge evil's awful and superhuman power
in affairs. I am speaking not only of the single soul, perhaps at the moment
not chiefly, but of the soul and prayer of a society like the true Church or a
sobered people. The real power of prayer in history is not a fusillade of
praying units of whom Christ is the chief, but it is the corporate action of a
Saviour-Intercessor and His community, a volume and energy of prayer organized
in a Holy Spirit and in the Church the Spirit creates. The saints shall thus
judge the world and control life. Neither for the individual nor for the Church
is true prayer an enclave in life's larger and more actual course. It is not a
sacred enclosure, a lodge in some vast wilderness. That is the weak side of
pietism. But, however intimate, it is in the most organic and vital context of
affairs, private and public, if all things work together, deeply and afar, for
the deep and final kingdom of God. Its constant defeat of our egoism means the
victory of our social unity and its weal. For the egoist neither prays nor
loves. On the other hand, such prayer recalls us from a distraught altruism,
teeming with oddities, and frayed down to atomism by the variety of calls upon
it; because the prayer is the supreme energy of a loving will and believing
soul engaged with the Love that binds the earth, the sun, and all the stars. So
far it is from being the case that love to God has no sphere outside love to
man that our love to man perishes unless it is fed by the love that spends
itself on God in prayer, and is lifted thereby to a place and a sway not
historic only, but cosmic.
Our communion with God in Christ rose, and it
abides, in a crisis which shook not the earth only, but also heaven, in a
tragedy and victory more vast, awful, and pregnant than the greatest war in
history could be. Therefore the prayer which gives us an ever-deeper interest
and surer insight into that eternal moral crisis of the Cross gives us also
(though it might take generations) a footing that commands all the losses or
victories of earth, and a power that rules both spirit and conscience in the
clash and crash of worlds. As there is devoted thought which ploughs its way
into the command of Nature, there is thought, still more devoted, that prays
itself into that moral interior of the Cross, where the kingdom of God is
founded once for all on the last principle and power of the universe, and set
up, not indeed amid the wreck of civilization, but by its new birth and a
baptism so as by fire. Prayer of the right kind, with heart and soul and
strength and mind, unites any society in which it prevails with those last
powers of moral and social regeneration that settle history and that reside in
the creative grace of the Cross, which is God's true omnipotence in the world.
"O God, who showest Thine almighty power most chiefly in having mercy and
forgiving." Such speech as this may to some appear tall and rhetorical; but it
would have so seemed to no father of the church, ancient or modern, taking
apostolic measure of the place and moment of Christ in society, history, or the
universe.
If war is in any sense God's judgment on sin, and
if sin was destroyed by the judgment in Christ and on Him, let us pray with a
new depth and significance to-day, "O Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of
the world, grant us Thy peace. Send us the peace that honours in act and deed
that righteous and final judgment in Thy Cross of all historic things, and that
makes therein for Thy Kingdom on earth as in heaven. Give peace in our time, O
Lord, but, peace or war, Take the crown of this poor world."
[4] The First World War