Article December 19, 1914 Issue

It is only necessary to read the daily papers, all over the...

The Christian Science Monitor

It is only necessary to read the daily papers, all over the world, in order to discover that the war is uprooting many of those beliefs which the prophet Isaiah might have termed the idols of the human race. One of those beliefs is that of the orthodox concept of prayer. For centuries men have regarded prayer as a direct petition of the individual to an omniscient being. The idea has its roots in the remotest antiquity, and bound up with it is the whole gamut of those horrible superstitions with respect to the propitiation of the malignant deities. Sarcasm and eloquence have been hurled against this delusion alike in vain. "Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando," wrote Virgil, in the century before the birth of Jesus the Christ,—"Give up hoping that by prayer the decisions of the gods can be altered,"—while in the century after the crucifixion Lucian, in the "Dialogues of the Gods," exerted his unrivaled power of raillery for the purpose of destroying the same legend. Christianity conquered. Zeus and Diana went the way of Baal or Isis. But the idea of prayer as petition instead of assimilation endured, so that even as noble a man as Hugh Latimer could say, "Wherefore I pray you all to pray with me unto God, and that in your petition you desire that these two things He vouchsafe to grant us!"

Latimer himself would have been the very first to admit the omniscience of God. Yet it never seems to have occurred to him that there was anything irrational in doing that thing which Mrs. Eddy questions, on page 2 of Science and Health, when she demands: "Can we inform the infinite Mind of anything He does not already comprehend? Do we expect to change perfection?" Nevertheless, every time finite human intelligence petitions omniscient perfection to grant its desires, it assumes the possibility, it even calculates the probability, of being able to inform infinite wisdom or influence divine perfection, instead of realizing that it is human ignorance which must be lost in spiritual knowledge, and the human will which must disappear in obedience to Principle.

The simple truth is that it is the human will which, being human, is insistent in its desires. It bases its prayers on a material sense of right and wrong, of which it commonly constitutes itself the arbitrary judge. "My country, right or wrong," is, consciously or unconsciously, the usual underlying current of all prayers in time of war. There is a remarkable instance of what this ultimates in, in the famous passage in which Lord Macaulay describes the camp service of the allies on the morning of Blenheim: "The English chaplains read the prayers at the head of the English regiments. The Calvinistic chaplains of the Dutch army, with heads on which the hand of the bishop had never been laid, poured forth their supplications in front of their countrymen. In the mean time, the Danes might listen to their Lutheran ministers; the Capuchins might encourage the Austrian squadrons, and pray to the Virgin for a blessing on the arms of the Holy Roman Empire." In a word, here were men whose religious views were anathema one to another, petitioning God to assist them in jointly slaughtering men, in some instances of views identical with their own, all indifferent to the fact that a precisely similar scene was no doubt being enacted on the other side of the field. What prayer could have secured triumph for these arms but the prayer for the Mind of Christ, which would have brought them "in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

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