Editorial March 14, 1908 Issue

PRAYER AND LAW

Annie M. Knott

We frequently hear it said that prayer can never change God's laws, which are unalterable (a proposition to which Christian Scientists would readily assent), and some earnest Christians do not hesitate to say that prayer which is not in harmony with law is responsible for leading many into agnosticism, because such prayer is not answered. There is, therefore, on the part of many a strong tendency to limit the scope of prayer to the uplifting of the moral nature; a tendency which is most unfortunate, as any attempt to rear barriers between man and God is disastrous to faith and understanding, and not at all in harmony with either the teaching or the practice of Christ Jesus, whose mighty works showed the availability of divine Truth for all human need. All dogmatic statements respecting law which are based upon the assumption that God, who is admitted to be Spirit, governs the universe by material law, present a marked inconsistency between the divine purpose and the means supposedly employed in carrying it out.

As a matter of fact theologians have been driven to various expedients in their efforts to reconcile spiritual being and material law. Speaking of this, Horace Bushnell said, "God has, in fact, erected another and higher system ... a system not under the law of cause and effect, but ruled and marshaled under other kinds of laws." Here we have a glimpse of the truth taught in Christian Science, that God's law must be spiritual. But Christian Science does not stop at this point; it goes farther and declares that spiritual law is the only law, and that there is never any conflict in its infinitely varied manifestations, since they all spring from the same source, viz., divine intelligence, and all point to the same end, the perfection of man and the universe.

It should be remembered that the world's best thinkers have not ventured to dogmatize on the question of law. Drummond says of so-called natural laws, "What these laws are in themselves is not agreed. That they have any absolute existence even is far from certain." Christian Science declares that all law exists for man's good; for his protection, never for his destruction; that God never made a law of disease or death, and it proves this by demonstrating what Paul terms the "law of the spirit of life," which annuls the asserted "law of sin and death."

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