BV 220 .K4 igiT 
 
 ^1923^^' Gillian Wirt, 1837- 
 
 Does prayer avail? 
 
IN PREPARATION 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 WAS CHRIST DIVINE? 
 
 The present volume, the second 
 in the series of which man's 
 TOMORROW is the first, will 
 soon be followed by a third in 
 answer to the above question, 
 all three closely conjoined in 
 certain essential elements and 
 in mode of treatment, and 
 together constituting a discus- 
 sion along new lines of a single 
 unified, three-fold theme. 
 
 SHERMAN, FRENCH ^ COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS BOSTON 
 
FEB 21 191: 
 ^^^, — 1 
 
 AL "0^ 
 
 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 BY y 
 
 WILLIAM W. KINSLEY 
 
 Author of " Man's Tomorrow," " Views on Vexed 
 Questions," "Old Faiths and New Facts," etc. 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 SHERMAN, FRENCH ^ COMPANY 
 
 1911 
 
Copyright, 1911 
 Sherman, French &> Company 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 The Bible unmistakably teaches that God both 
 can and does interfere in our behalf, that his in- 
 terference often is a direct result of our asking, 
 that all reasonable prayers offered in a right spirit 
 are certain of favorable answer. The requests 
 may be as varied as the healthful and intelligent 
 longings of human hearts. 
 
 Some scientists smile at what they style the 
 childish credulity of the Christian's creed. Our 
 investigations, say they, have disclosed a universal 
 reign of unchangeable law, not only In the pro- 
 duction of material, but even of mental phenom- 
 ena. We have found that within the walls of 
 every particle of matter there Is lodged a force; 
 that these forces are of sixty-four or more differ- 
 ent kinds, and their differences In nature and effect 
 make all the differences In the substances about 
 us ; that they bear to each other certain unalter- 
 ably fisied relations and exert over each other un- 
 alterably fixed influences. These relations we have 
 been able by our experiments to reduce to mathe- 
 matical formula. We have found that these 
 forces never manifest themselves unless certain 
 conditions are fulfilled, and that, when they are, 
 the forces invariably appear and act always in 
 precisely the same way. It is also claimed, that, 
 as far back as we can peer into the past, this 
 
 1 
 
2 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 same order has prevailed ; that this rock-ribbed, 
 wave-washed, verdure-clad, densely populated 
 earth of ours has come up out of chaotic fire-mist 
 by the operations of none other than these very 
 forces which at the first were hidden within it ; that 
 the earth has developed from its unorganized 
 primordial state into its present complexity with 
 as regular gradations of growth as those through 
 which the oak passes in pushing up from out the 
 walls of the acorn its sinewy stem with outreaching 
 boughs and waving pennons ; that the earth itself 
 is an organism as truly as the tree, has like com- 
 plemental parts, has had a germinal beginning, 
 has been, and still is, incarnating under pre-estab- 
 lished laws of evolution, point by point, age after 
 age, a certain, set ideal under the guidance of a 
 central germ-power, divinely commissioned it may 
 be, but commissioned even as to the details of its 
 finest microscopic work, untold millions of years 
 ago. 
 
 How idle, then, it is, they claim, for weak, 
 blind children of a day to presume to break in on 
 this grand order of the universe ! Go out into 
 nature, they tell us, and you will find that not a 
 single one of her laws is ever abrogated, that from 
 their control not the least thing is for an instant 
 released. Gravity holds in its grasp not only the 
 ponderous suns with their whirling satellites, but 
 every infinitesimal mote that floats in the air. 
 The force shut up within the walls of an atom of 
 carbon is never dislodged, and never loses a single 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 3 
 
 characteristic. Manacle it with fetters of frost, 
 immerse it in the white heat of a furnace, smite 
 it with a trip-hammer on the face of an anvil, 
 hurl it into the chemical embrace of an affinitive 
 element, do what jou will with it, it will reappear 
 identically the same atom informed by precisely 
 the same mysterious force. This speck of matter 
 defies all powers of earth or sky to batter in its 
 walls and drive out its occupant. Every force, 
 the world over, says that only those who find its 
 secret and meet the conditions can command its 
 services. Do you want bread? Here are the 
 seed, the soil, the air, the shower, and the sun- 
 beam. Matter and force are at your bidding, but 
 their laws are inexorable. Rays of light will 
 travel ninety-five millions of miles to serve you ; 
 the atmosphere will gather its clouds from the 
 ocean and float them across a continent to pour 
 their treasures at your feet; the mountains will 
 furnish you millstones, and the running brooks 
 will turn them. The forests that grew a hundred 
 thousand years ago you may find packed away in 
 beds of anthracite, waiting to heat your ovens so 
 soon as your dough is ready for the baking. 
 Not a force in nature but will serve the veriest 
 outcast if he will comply with the conditions ; not 
 one, even the humblest, will condescend to move 
 so much as a hair's-breadth even for the Czar of 
 all the Russias, unless he does. The prayerless 
 sinner and the praying saint meet here on a com- 
 mon level. It is thoroughly unscientific and ab- 
 
4 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 surd to claim that the all-wise Creator has been 
 or can be induced to change his plans by the im- 
 portunate pleadings of a little creature to whom 
 he has given a brief existence on one of the ob- 
 scure satelhtes of one of the million suns that 
 make up one of the nebulous clusters with which 
 the heavens are swarming. What greater pre- 
 sumption can be imagined? Has the Almighty 
 so sadly blundered in his plans that this little 
 creature can discover to him their defects, and in- 
 duce him to change at this late day, when every- 
 thing is so intimately interlinked and interde- 
 pendent that an interference in one part may 
 demand a reconstruction throughout the whole in 
 order to avoid widespread confusion and ruin? 
 Can God spare any special thought now for such 
 infinitesimal interests so long as the concerns of 
 this vast swinging universe are upon him? He 
 has laid down broad general plans. We cannot 
 reasonably expect him to listen to our baby prattle 
 about the petty details of our vanishing lives. If 
 we thrust our hands into the fire, live in a malari- 
 ous district, are capsized in mid-ocean, we must 
 suffer the natural consequences, and look about us, 
 as best we can, for a more congenial environment. 
 Such, in brief, is the attitude assumed at the 
 present day by a majority of scientists on this, 
 one of the most vital and perplexing of questions. 
 This their creed is, as I think can be clearly 
 shown, a most mischievous mixture of truth and 
 error. The spirit of cold speculative scepticism 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 6 
 
 pervading it is making rapid inroads upon all 
 classes in society. How many even of those who 
 have been gathered into the fold of the church 
 have fallen under the blighting spell of this genius 
 of modem materialistic thought! How many 
 prayers are simply the outbreathings of a rev- 
 erential fear, or are a mere dead formalism, or 
 the results of sheer habit! How many are little 
 else than agonized longings accompanied with no 
 joyous expectation! How few, very few, are of- 
 fered with the same confident assurance of results 
 as inspires the farmer when he sows his fields, or 
 the telegraphic operator when with his key he 
 closes the electric circuit and sends his messages 
 over the long leagues of ocean cable! 
 
 My pui'pose at present is to show : — 
 
 1st. That phenomena and the producing forces 
 with their laws or modes of working, brought to 
 light by scientific investigations in the fields of 
 physics and of metaphysics, harmonize perfectly 
 with the Scripture view of prayer, and abound in 
 suggestions of how God can interfere in nature 
 without destroying any force or abrogating a 
 single law. 
 
 2nd. That, as a fact, he has thus actually in- 
 terfered again and again. 
 
 3rd. That it is not only not presumptuous, but 
 most natural and reasonable, for us to expect that 
 he will interfere for us, insignificant though we 
 may seem to be. 
 
 4th. That he will interfere because we ask him. 
 
6 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 doing for us what otherwise he would not have 
 done. 
 
 5th. And lastly, that he will not in a single 
 instance withhold any real blessing which is asked 
 for in the right spirit, and the bestowal of which 
 lies within the compass of his power. 
 
 1st. How can God answer prayer without de- 
 stroying any force or abrogating any law? In 
 my own experience, real light on this point first 
 came from the perusal of Dr. Bushnell's " Nature 
 and the Supernatural." His mode of treatment 
 has long since passed out of memory, but a 
 thought-germ was lodged in my mind which has 
 since grown into a deep-rooted conviction. As, 
 however, I have followed out these lines of 
 thought, it has been a constant source of surprise 
 that so many of the scientists, while they have 
 with tireless patience and keenest insight unrav- 
 eled much of the infinite intricacy that attends 
 the interplay of nature's forces, unearthing so 
 many secrets and becoming masters in so many 
 fields of inquiry, have seemingly lost sight of that 
 most interesting and important of all facts, that 
 everywhere ample provision has been made for the 
 efficient interference of direct will power. One 
 would think that they could not have failed to 
 discover it, for there is hardly a waking moment 
 in the lives of any of us when we are not conscious 
 that we actually exercise volitions, and that these 
 volitions effect changes, and sometimes most im- 
 portant ones, in the world about us. How our 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 7. 
 
 wills are thus linked with matter, it would prob- 
 ably puzzle the wisest to explain; but that they 
 actually are, is a fact aU must admit. And so I 
 surmise it is not the fact, but the deep significance 
 of the fact, that has so strangely escaped the 
 notice of so many of our savants of science. 
 
 Sir Oliver Lodge, F. R. S., strangely stands 
 almost alone among eminent scientists in open 
 recognition and advocacy of this directive power 
 of the will over the forces of nature. In his work 
 on " Science and Immortality " he expresses the ut- 
 most astonishment that Professor Tyndall should 
 have overlooked or ignored this when he wrote in 
 his " Fragments of Science " that " the principle of 
 the conservation of energy teaches us that the 
 Italian wind gliding over the crest of the Matter- 
 horn is as firmly ruled as the earth in its orbital 
 revolution around the sun, and that the fall of its 
 vapor into clouds is exactly as much a matter of 
 necessity as the return of the seasons. The dis- 
 persion, therefore, of the slightest mist by the 
 special volition of the Eternal would be as much 
 a miracle as the rolling of the Rhone over the 
 Grimsel precipices, and science asserts that with- 
 out the disturbance of a natural law quite as seri- 
 ous as the stoppage of an eclipse, or the rolling 
 of the St. Lawrence up the Falls of Niagara, no 
 act of humiliation, individual or national, could 
 call one shower from heaven or deflect toward us 
 a single beam of the sun." In this same paper, 
 in the same connection, Professor Tyndall afiirms, 
 
8 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 " we have ceased to propitiate the powers of 
 nature, as, in Protestant Countries, at least, it is 
 conceded that the age of miracles is past." " The 
 idea of direct personal volition mixing itself in 
 the economy of nature is retreating more and 
 more." 
 
 Over my body, in many particulars, my will 
 exercises direct control. I, for instance, order 
 my hand lifted. The mandate instantly flashes 
 from the brain down the motor nerves to the very 
 muscles in waiting, and their fibers at once begin 
 to shorten. I exercise this directive will power 
 against the force of gravity, temporarily over- 
 powering but not destroying it, for it still con- 
 tinues to pull the hand down with the same might 
 as before. This overbalancing of one force by 
 another is taking place everywhere throughout 
 nature. For illustration, take a tumbler of water. 
 If it were not for the cohesive attraction between 
 the particles of glass being stronger than the 
 gravity, the sides would crumble into dust, and 
 sink with the water to the lowest attainable level. 
 Gravity has not been destroyed, but simply mas- 
 tered by a stronger antagonist. Remove a part 
 of the heat from the water, and it will become a 
 crystallized solid, showing that until now the heat 
 force has been holding the crystalline in check. 
 Lower still further the temperature, and the sides 
 of the tumbler will burst in pieces, the crystalline 
 force overcoming the cohesive. Raise the tem- 
 perature, and the water will change to steam, an(i 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 9 
 
 a repellence between the particles will appear, the 
 heat driving them asunder, despite all that co- 
 hesion and gravitation can do. 
 
 Over the world outside the body, the control of 
 our wills, though mostly indirect, is equally 
 potent, and yet nature is not thrown into confu- 
 sion, not a single force destroyed, not a law abro- 
 gated. Our volitions are simply supernatural, 
 not contranatural. Our wills act indirectly by 
 complying with the conditions that unfetter 
 nature's forces. The scientists have established 
 beyond question the fact that there is not a single 
 one of these forces that is not wholly inoperative 
 unless certain conditions are fulfilled, and just as 
 soon as they are, the force begins to work its 
 wonders. Scientists have even gone further, dis- 
 covering in very many instances precisely what 
 those conditions are, and thus placed it within our 
 reach to utilize those forces in the arts of life. 
 
 Back of our will power, acting as its guide, 
 there now exists, thanks to these explorers, a well- 
 informed intelligence, and we have become mas- 
 ters of nature by simply understanding and com- 
 plying with her laws. For instance, we want 
 homes for ourselves and our little ones, and so 
 we cast about and find abundance of crude ma- 
 terial, — sand and clay, metal and slate, rock and 
 standing trees and running water. Our wills de- 
 cree that these shall be transformed into cemented 
 walls of brick and stone, framed timbers, tessel- 
 lated floors, frescoed ceilings, plate-glass windows, 
 
10 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 roofs and mantels, furnaces and swinging doors, 
 and step by step, under the directive power of the 
 mind, the wondrous change is wrought. We even 
 make our wills felt in the domains of vegetable 
 and animal life, improving old varieties and de- 
 veloping new ones among fruits and flowers and 
 domesticated animals, enriching and seeding our 
 soils, and multiplying our flocks and herds to meet 
 our ever-growing wants. 
 
 The processes by which our wills enforce their 
 decrees may be a little tedious, but the ends are 
 reached, the course of nature is seriously broken 
 in upon, results attained which otherwise nature 
 never would have attempted, yet no disorder has 
 anywhere ensued. What marvelous eff'ects have 
 been produced by this intelligent will power of 
 man, cunningly directing to its own uses the ever- 
 waiting elemental and vital forces ! How many 
 rivers have been bridged, beds of rivers shifted or 
 tunneled, mountains discrowned or their rocky 
 centers pierced to open highways for the world's 
 commerce! The very lightnings have been tamed 
 into flying Mercurys to carry the thought-mes- 
 sages of this busy-brained master, the oceans 
 whitened with his sail, the continents covered with 
 his networks of railways and canals, barren wastes 
 changed into vineyards and palm-groves and 
 orange-orchards, the unshapely quarries of gran- 
 ite and of marble transformed into palaces and 
 statue-crowned temples to body forth his ripest 
 culture and most holy thought. 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 11 
 
 The influence of the human will has had even 
 a wider circuit assigned it. Many of us have 
 known instances of weak wills being overawed by 
 stronger ones, and the domination being so abso- 
 lute as for the time being to actually blot out 
 every distinctive trace of personality and suspend 
 individual responsibility. Not one of us but has 
 felt, time and again, the indirect power of an- 
 other's will reaching us through channels of argu- 
 ment, persuasive kindling of the fancy, eloquent 
 appeal, shrewd suggestion, or show of apprecia- 
 tive sympathy. There are a thousand avenues to 
 the heart, a thousand ways to arouse the con- 
 science, inflame passion, fill the chambers of the 
 soul with dread alarms, and these are discovered 
 and utilized by positive and aggressive souls 
 athirst for wealth, power, or prestige. Society 
 has its born leaders. Individuality and responsi- 
 ble free choice are with the vast majority still 
 retained, but it is through these multiform influ- 
 ences of personal character that the life of the 
 world's subtile social organism is, under pre-estab- 
 lished spiritual laws, regulated and maintained. 
 
 Until recent years this was the utmost limit of 
 conception entertained by the most advanced in- 
 vestigators, of the outreaching of our spiritual 
 powers, — that of a direct control over the muscu- 
 lar tissues of the body and of an indirect over 
 the physical forces in the world outside. But new 
 light has come. It has been discovered that the 
 will can make its direct mandates felt even beyond 
 
12 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 the boundaries of the body and to a most astonish- 
 ing extent. How this is done is still as profound 
 a mystery as how at the first it causes the muscles 
 to contract, but the fact has, by painstaking care 
 on the part of the Society for Psychical Research, 
 in guarding against deception or mistake, been 
 placed at last beyond all controversy. Ponderous 
 bodies have repeatedly been lifted and moved about 
 by it and wonderful feats of skill performed with- 
 out any discoverable physical contact, purely 
 through some occult psychic force. Scientists at 
 the first stoutly discredited the alleged phenom- 
 ena, being so wholly out of the ordinary and the 
 probable, and so often mixed with fraud, but be- 
 ing persistently repeated under the strictest safe- 
 guards they have now quite generally pronounced 
 them genuine, though yet widely differing in 
 their interpretations. Flammarion, the celebrated 
 French astronomer, unhesitatingly asserts that the 
 phenomenon of levitation has been absolutely 
 proved, though he cannot explain it. Careful ex- 
 periments in his own house, under his own eye, 
 under his own prescribed conditions, have proved 
 it. More astounding still, it has been equally 
 well established that strong personal magnetic cur- 
 rents flow out from us, frequently over wide 
 spaces, impressing, telepathically, the subtile 
 power of our presence on each other beyond the 
 ken and without the aid of any of our bodily 
 senses, — soul seemingly touching soul even when 
 continents intervene. Sir Oliver Lodge, Camille 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 13 
 
 Flamraarion, F. W. H. Myers and many others 
 of international fame among scientists have, with- 
 out reservation, declared this to have been defi- 
 nitely established. Gifts, both of them, certainly 
 ours, and of priceless value, though placed, as yet, 
 tantalizingly just beyond our reach to utilize here 
 and now, gifts held in reser\'e seemingly as a 
 promise and a prophecy of some freer, larger life 
 beyond. 
 
 Thus we see that to the touch of the human 
 will all nature is plastic, that every facility has 
 seemingly been provided for its efficient interfer- 
 ence. Think you that, in a world where so many 
 doors have been so invitingly left open for the 
 will of the creature to enter and occupy, the will 
 of the Creator has been studiously excluded? 
 Can science, which has so conclusively proved the 
 one, consistently deny the other? Is it not rather 
 forced to assert that, so far as God's will has 
 greater innate power and is guided by a pro- 
 founder knowledge, it has proportionately greater 
 facilities for effecting its purposes and, at the 
 same time, leaving every force and law, both in 
 the material and mental kingdoms, equally undis- 
 turbed ? 
 
 Before the birth of science a radical misconcep- 
 tion of the true nature of miracles was entertained, 
 and seems still very generally to prevail, and has 
 largely provoked the attacks made on the Bible 
 record. There is little doubt that scattered 
 through the Bible there is much of allegory and 
 
14 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 legend, of tribal tradition, myth and folk-lore, of 
 apologue, parable and Oriental poetic extrava- 
 ganza, and yet while it is not my present purpose 
 to sift out the wild growths of the imagination 
 from the plain, sober facts of history, or to stand 
 sponsor for all, or any, of the Instances of miracle- 
 working recorded in its pages, it is my purpose 
 to show how it was possible for God, if he so 
 chose for reasons which seemed good to him, to 
 directly and effectively interfere in many such like 
 ways as those narrated, in behalf of his helpless 
 and suffering children, without destroying any 
 force, setting aside any law, or disturbing in any 
 way the predetermined plan of his creation. The 
 question of the nature and degree of the inspira- 
 tion of the Scriptures, and of the extent of their 
 inerrancy, is wholly beside the present discussion. 
 Its settlement is not essential to it, and need not 
 now be considered. 
 
 Precisely how God's will sets free, or holds in 
 check, nature's forces is no more of a mystery 
 than how our own wills come Into touch with, and 
 dominate over them. There is no more of a devi- 
 ation from nature's laws in the one case than in 
 the other. Both volitions are, as far as we can 
 discover, essentially the same. If the scientist 
 can by his own will put out his hand and stop the 
 spinning of a top, what reason has he for thinking 
 that God's will cannot check the whirling of a 
 world. Has he any evidence that his will Is more 
 closely linked with matter than God's.? With our 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 15 
 
 yet extremely meagre knowledge of nature's laws 
 and forces we have very inadequate means of de- 
 termining precisely what is beyond the ready 
 reach of a will so masterful and so wise as we are 
 warranted in believing God's to be. 
 
 The turning of water to wine and the feeding 
 of five thousand with the five loaves and few fishes, 
 though they involve something more than simply 
 the overmastering of one force by another, and 
 are at first more difficult of apprehension and be- 
 lief, and lie more exposed to the adverse criticism 
 of scientists, yet, after a careful scrutiny, will 
 be found, after all, remarkably analogous in many 
 respects to achievements of the human will, and no 
 more contranatural, or improbable, or wrapped in 
 a profounder mystery. There is no necessity for 
 thinking that in these or kindred acts any new 
 matter or force was brought into existence. The 
 wine and the miraculously provided cakes and 
 fishes differed in no respect in their elemental 
 atoms, or in the combinations of these atoms, from 
 products which nature, assisted and guided by 
 man, had for centuries before been manufactur- 
 ing. There was no call for any new matter, as 
 it was already at hand in vast abundance. Chris- 
 tians need not claim this. Indeed, neither need 
 they claim that, when, as it is recorded, in the 
 beginning God created the heavens and the earth, 
 he brought forth something out of nothing, as 
 too many unthinkingly believe. Scientists may 
 well pronounce such a notion absurd. An 
 
16 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 achievement like that would transcend even divine 
 power, for it involves a contradiction, an impossi- 
 bility. Something cannot come out of nothing. 
 It is nowhere revealed that there ever was a time 
 when matter did not exist. The beginning spoken 
 of in Genesis need have reference only to the 
 present order of things, the present processes of 
 evolution through which the burning and non- 
 burning balls of matter have been made to people 
 space. Although this history may reach back over 
 what to us are inconceivable periods, yet there 
 unquestionably was a time when not a single sun 
 or satellite anywhere existed, when matter must 
 have been in some other radically different form. 
 Further than this we need not go. If it was not 
 originally a part of God, and is not now to be 
 considered as an emanation from him, it must In 
 our thought take rank as an equally self-existent 
 and eternal entity. The fact is, the more pro- 
 longed and profound our study Into Its nature, 
 the more impenetrable appears the mystery that 
 shrouds it, for at first we can little realize that the 
 substance we see and taste and handle is revealed to 
 us simply by the eflPect produced upon our sense- 
 nerves by forces that lie hidden behind It, so that 
 we, when further advanced in our reflections, are 
 led to query whether, after all, it is not the pres- 
 ence of force that Is revealed to our conscious- 
 ness rather than that of matter as the medium of 
 force, and whether it is not of the existence simply 
 of force that we have any certain knowledge. 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? IT 
 
 As I have said, we need not Infer that in these 
 miracle-workings any new substance was brought 
 into being, but only new methods adopted, or 
 hitherto unused forces liberated, or greater direct 
 power employed by a sovereign will in carrying 
 out its decrees. The human will had before this 
 accomplishment the same ends in other ways, for 
 how else can we explain the presence of the wine 
 already drunk at the wedding feast, or the bread 
 and fish in the baskets of Christ's disciples before 
 he miraculously multiplied them? But the hu- 
 man will had been compelled to resort to tedious 
 and, for the most part, indirect methods to ac- 
 complish what the Divine will wrought without 
 delay, and apparently by direct impressment. I 
 say " apparently," for it is quite possible that 
 the methods employed were still indirect, though 
 not accompanied with any noticeable delay. We 
 ourselves are continually shortening the processes 
 we employ in carrying out our purposes. By a 
 more perfect knowledge of nature's laws we be- 
 come more complete masters of her forces. What 
 giant strides have we already made in this direc- 
 tion, especially during the nineteenth century! 
 It is difficult for us to realize the nature and ex- 
 tent of our recent victories over matter. With 
 what blank amazement would Washington and his 
 companions be filled were they now, without know- 
 ing what had taken place, to return to the coun- 
 try they fought to save ! For since Washington 
 closed his eyes to earth, there have come the 
 
18 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 steamship, the locomotive, the wire strung and the 
 wireless telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, 
 the flying machine and thousands of shortening 
 processes. In his day, yes, and forty years later, 
 to cross the American continent was a task of 
 many weary months. Now we make the trip in 
 less than a week. The news of Waterloo was 
 three days reaching England, but the tidings of 
 the last bombardment of Alexandria, though half- 
 way round the globe, took only as many minutes. 
 The thunder of the first gun had hardly died away 
 along the banks of the Nile before the air was 
 throbbing with its echo on the banks of the 
 Thames. We have also of late, through our 
 telephones, succeeded in holding easy converse 
 with each other, though separated by leagues of 
 distance, even in actually distinguishing the pe- 
 culiar intonations of each other's voices. At what 
 time these discoveries of new forces and how to 
 unfetter them shall reach their limit, who would 
 be bold enough to predict? and yet not until 
 science has won its final triumph over nature 
 should devotees of science be unwilling to con- 
 cede that it is clearly possible that Bible miracles 
 were the work of Nature's forces simply guided 
 by a will thoroughly conversant with Nature's 
 laws, which were within the reach of the directive 
 power of the will of a man if illumined by the in- 
 sight of a God. But even if these miracles were 
 performed by direct will-power, still we can point 
 to constantly recurring instances in which pre- 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 19 
 
 cisely analogous effects are produced both in the 
 vegetable and animal kingdoms, as well as in the 
 higher realm of the human will. Scientific 
 treatises call our attention not only to an inorganic, 
 but also to an organic, chemistry, and assure us 
 that the vital forces, working through complex 
 animal and vegetable organisms, effect combina- 
 tions of elements which outside of their labora- 
 tories or the laboratories of man are never pro- 
 duced, and are marked by extreme instability, 
 readily decomposing under the influence of heat or 
 fermentation, so soon as their influence is with- 
 drawn. Those mysterious forces lodged inside the 
 walls of seeds prove themselves the masters of other 
 forces equally mysterious lodged inside the walls 
 of atoms. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitro- 
 gen never would have congregated into such 
 chemical groups, or arranged themselves along 
 such lines of symmetry^, or climbed to such dizzy 
 heights, directly against the steady pull of grav- 
 ity, were they not working under compulsion ; and 
 so soon as they escape from the thrall of their 
 taskmasters, their old individuality comes back to 
 them, their old modes of combining, their old 
 circles of association return, and the unstable 
 organic compounds are torn down into the more 
 stable, original, inorganic ones. Here we witness 
 one great class of Nature's forces — the atomic 
 — lorded over for a time by another and superior 
 class. As we are daily witnesses of these facts, 
 we never think of questioning them. 
 
20 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 Further than that, we see the products of vege- 
 tive-vital forces taken possession of by animal- 
 vital, and grouped into still more strange and 
 higher compounds, and the chemic compelled to 
 play a part still more foreign to their first estate. 
 We know that this, too, is a case of compulsion, 
 for the very moment vitality ceases, disintegra- 
 tion begins. These nitrogenous combinations are 
 the very embodiment of instability. 
 
 We are daily witnesses of more startling won- 
 ders still. They form part of our personal ex- 
 periences. We find that we can by sheer will- 
 power compel even these higher forces of animal 
 vitality, and through them the lower, to do our 
 bidding. The late Dr. Carpenter, the foremost 
 physiologist of his day, called especial attention 
 to this fact, asserting that thus we can greatly 
 add to the acuteness of any of our bodily senses, 
 can actually compel the nourishing blood to flow 
 to any part of the system and infuse new vigor. 
 The experiences of artisans and artists, astron- 
 omers and microscopists, experts and specialists 
 in every class of work, deaf-mutes and the blind, 
 abundantly confirm this. There are few of us 
 who have not found by actual experience that by 
 calling up certain thoughts we can turn the cheek 
 pale or crimson it with blushes, flood the eyes with 
 tears or make them merrily twinkle or flash with 
 angry fire, cause the heart to violently throb or 
 intermit its beats, throw the blood to the brain, 
 make the knees quake, the skin perspire, the whole 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 21 
 
 body tremble with intensity of emotion. The 
 control which persons of cultivated histrionic 
 powers have over the body to make it the vehicle of 
 thought can be appreciated only by those who 
 have witnessed the masters as they have entranced 
 their audiences, and who have themselves been 
 thrilled and spirit-bound under the spell of their 
 enchantments. 
 
 If the vegetative forces can thus dominate 
 over the atomic, the animal over the vegetative, 
 and the will of man over all, what valid objection 
 can science urge to the Christian's creed that 
 God's will can by direct impressment effect com- 
 binations in the elements which Nature's forces 
 indirectly and uncompelled bring about by slower 
 processes according to the terms of their divine 
 commission? Why may not God's will have as 
 immediate and complete a sovereignty over the 
 earth or the universe, as we over these complicate 
 bodies of ours, which our spirits permeate through 
 and through by their informing presence? And 
 why may not his sovereignty be inconceivably 
 more immediate and complete, and still retain in 
 its relationship its marked analogy to the char- 
 acteristics of force which science has herself re- 
 corded? Why may not the Divine will not only 
 make bread, wine, and fish directly out of the sur- 
 rounding elements, but heal lepers, restore the 
 blind, or even raise the dead, and still do no more 
 violence to Nature's systems of law than the hu- 
 man will is doing every day? There are multi- 
 
22 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 tudes of well-authenticated instances in which 
 persons have by simple determination checked for 
 considerable periods the inroads of disease and 
 even permanently broken its power. So startling 
 have been the effects of the will and of the imagi- 
 nation over these susceptible bodily organisms 
 various cults have come to the front of late and 
 gained great prominence numbering their adher- 
 ents by the thousands who, afflicted with certain 
 functional nervous disorders, have without the use 
 of drugs genuinely and permanently regained 
 their lost health. 
 
 Though they are widely apart in many of 
 their tenets, one embracing negations which im- 
 press every one outside their circle as the very 
 height of absurdity, denying alike the existence of 
 matter, pain, disease and death, all agree in the 
 curative force of faith, and all gain access through 
 the selfsame charm of mental suggestion to that 
 most marvelously gifted, most mysteriously sub- 
 merged part of the soul, the subconscious self, to 
 the nature and therapeutic, creative and concep- 
 tive powers of which I will hereafter call special 
 attention. 
 
 It was the aid of this very same sub-conscious 
 self Christ is supposed to have invoked in per- 
 forming many of his acts of healing, the exer- 
 cise of faith being strictly enjoined, while in many 
 he undoubtedly transcended human achievement, 
 though in no single instance are we necessitated 
 to believe that he violated any law, destroyed any 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 23 
 
 force, or in the least infringed upon the universal 
 order. 
 
 Psychic cures, under varying forms and names 
 can be traced back to the very dawn of history. 
 Five hundred years before Christ at the ancient 
 Greek Shrine at Epidaurus, multitudes of sick 
 were restored without medical assistance through 
 what was claimed to be the miracle-working of 
 the demigod JEsculapius. The temple-sleep en- 
 joined closely resembled the hypnotic trance of 
 to-day, and the same mental suggestion was 
 drafted into service. Priests in the early time 
 claimed the sole prerogative of healing and a 
 kindled faith was their prime curative agency. 
 Only during the last three or four centuries have 
 the study of anatomy, the careful diagnosis of 
 disease and medical treatment been in vogue. 
 
 The Puritans rightly claimed that solely by the 
 King's touch, though they could not explain how, 
 cures were wrought in cases of scrofula. 
 Through the middle ages and down even to our 
 own time in Catholic countries, the common people, 
 being possessed of a seemingly inexhaustible su- 
 perstition and credulity, have reverenced without 
 reserve relics however absurd and spurious, if 
 vouched for and blessed by the priests, and by the 
 exercise of this unwavering faith have actually 
 been cured of many of their diseases. 
 
 Pilgrimages to cathedrals and holy shrines have 
 not been without avail. The famous shrines of 
 the Virgin at Lourdes in France and of Saint 
 
U DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 Anne de Beaupre at Quebec, and the cathedral 
 of Saint Paul and Saint Helen at Treves in 
 Prussia, where is still exhibited what is claimed to 
 be the seamless coat of Christ, and many other 
 consecrated places in different countries, are 
 thronged with eagerly expectant and rejoicing 
 multitudes even now, on whom the miracle of heal- 
 ing either is about to be, or has already been, 
 marvelously wrought. 
 
 Over three hundred thousand still visit Lourdes 
 every year. These cases of cure are attested by 
 the highest medical authorities, showing that faith 
 even though ignorantly based on lies and ab- 
 surdities, does wondrously modify the vital func- 
 tions of these nerve-thrilled bodies of ours. 
 
 Liberal, progressive members of the medical 
 profession are at last questioning whether drugs 
 and other external agencies do much more in many 
 cases than remove the obstructions that clog the 
 free play of the vital forces within, and in their 
 treatment of functional diseases of obscure nerv- 
 ous origin, the fruit, many if not most of them 
 of disorganizing thoughts that have been suf- 
 fered to find lodgment, they are wisely making 
 overtures to modern psychotherapy as a helpful 
 ally. 
 
 Some writers and thinkers have doubtless over- 
 rated the curative energy of this subconscious 
 self, but they certainly have made no mistake, 
 except in the extent to which such cures can be 
 carried. Sudden fright, worriment in financial 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 25 
 
 difficulties, brooding over loss of friends, anger, 
 jealousy, remorse, chagrin, discouragement, alien- 
 ation, loneliness and longing, — all have their 
 depressing effect on the body, closing up the chan- 
 nels, causing accumulation of bile in the blood, 
 hindering the normal workings of the liver, and 
 obstructing in various ways the free flow of the 
 life forces, and if not checked in time will lead 
 to serious illness, if not to positive brain-lesion. 
 Anger in a mother has been known to poison a 
 nursing child, violent paroxysms of rage or fright 
 to cause jaundice and apoplexy. The ex- 
 perience of Stanley, during his search for Liv- 
 ingston through the Dark Continent is familiar 
 to all, how during the hours of a single night 
 agonizing thoughts turned his hair as white as 
 enow. 
 
 A noted American writer and medical graduate 
 says, " Every thought tends to reproduce itself, 
 and ghastly mental pictures of disease, sensuality 
 and vice of all sorts, produce scrofula and leprosy 
 in the soul which reproduces them in the body. 
 Anger changes the chemical properties of the 
 saliva to a poison dangerous to life. It is well 
 known that sudden and violent emotions have not 
 only weakened the heart in a few hours but have 
 caused death and insanity. It has been discovered 
 by scientists that there is a chemical difference 
 between that sudden, cold exudation of a person 
 under a deep sense of guilt and the ordinary 
 perspiration ; and the state of the mind can some- 
 
26 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 times be determined by chemical analysis of the 
 perspiration of a criminal which, when brought 
 into contact with selenic acid produces a distinc- 
 tive pink color." 
 
 Stigmatization, that strange experience whose 
 recurrence during several of the past centuries is 
 a matter of record, at first thought to be miracu- 
 lous as a special mark of Divine favor for ex- 
 ceptional saintliness, but now diagnosed by cold 
 medical science as a neurotic phenomenon of 
 hysteria, most strikingly illustrates the power of 
 thought on the human body. There have been 
 two noted cases of it in recent years. One, the 
 case of Louise Lateau of Belgium who died 1883. 
 On a Friday following recovery from a severe 
 illness this woman discovered blood flowing from 
 her side; on the next Friday, from her feet; on 
 the next from her back and palms of her hands; 
 in four weeks, marks of thorns on her forehead 
 moist with blood. She had fits of ecstasy and 
 during vision enacted the events of the Passion, 
 extending her limbs in the form of a Cross. 
 
 Another similar case occurred in America In 
 1891, that of a Mrs. Stuckenborg. Besides the 
 above phenomena, a Cross appeared in her fore- 
 head, also on her chest, and the outlines of a 
 heart and the letters I. H. S. on her right shoul- 
 der. 
 
 These cases were thoroughly investigated by 
 professional and scientific men and pronounced to 
 be undeniably genuine. Hawthorne made telling 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 27 
 
 use of this class of phenomena when he wrote his 
 " Scarlet Letter." 
 
 Glad surprise, large and unlooked-for success, 
 the return of long absent loved ones, their rescue 
 from danger or illness, appreciative sympathetic 
 recognition of merit, fruition of long-deferred 
 hopes, the stir of patriotic or religious fervor, 
 — all have their medicinal influence, their exhilara- 
 ting, uplifting power. Thoughts sudden and 
 startling have often brought sickness or banished 
 it, brought death even in the midst of healthful 
 life, or lengthened life's lease for those apparently 
 passing within the shadow. If impalpable 
 thought is clothed with such recuperative and 
 destructive power, and if between the Creator and 
 his creatures there are open avenues of communi- 
 cation as there evidently must be, avenues more 
 open and numerous than between man and man, 
 what valid objection can be urged to the belief 
 that God, with his infinitude of knowledge of the 
 structure of the human frame and the laws regu- 
 lating its processes, and with his intimate and 
 accurate acquaintance with its ever-varying en- 
 vironment, can by turning the currents of thought 
 by means of timely suggestions, by firing the 
 fancy, rousing the conscience, raising the hope, 
 occasioning and confirming the purpose, and, by 
 the even more mighty magnetism of such posi- 
 tive and such sympathetic personality as his must 
 be, summon health or sickness, life or death, when 
 and where he chooses? 
 
28 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 Thus the Christian's creed that God can an- 
 swer prayer if he so desires, if in his wisdom it 
 seems best, that there are multitudinous ways in 
 which he may indirectly or directly carry out 
 the mandates of his will without destroying any 
 force or abrogating any law, finds in the dis- 
 coveries of modern science most abundant con- 
 firmatory and illustrative facts. It is only in 
 the ill-founded theories and misinterpretations of 
 some of the devotees of science that its claims 
 have been denied. Christianity will some day 
 summon science to the bar of the world's judg- 
 ment as her strongest witness and most helpful 
 ally. 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 II 
 
 But, query our doubting Thomases, suppose 
 you can thus show that scientific discoveries war- 
 rant a behef in the possibihty of God's effectively 
 interfering in the course of nature and in the 
 affairs of men, have they not also suggested and 
 finally confirmed the opinion that, in point of fact, 
 he never has; that, from the very first, matter 
 contained the promise and the potency of all life; 
 that the world is simply an immense organism 
 which has reached its present complex perfect- 
 ness through inherent forces working under fixed 
 laws of evolution; that the stages of its growth 
 have been as regular and predetermined as those 
 of a tree; that its social amenities, its arts and 
 literatures, its ripened civilizations, have finally 
 evolved out of the original amorphic fire-mist 
 through precisely the same regular gradations of 
 growth as those out of which the rich grape- 
 cluster or the golden-sphered russet has come to 
 crown the long energizings of the germ-force that 
 at the first lay hidden within the walls of the seed? 
 We return to this query ci most decided negative 
 answer, and will endeavor to establish, as the 
 second point in our present argument, that God 
 has actually interfered again and again; that his 
 interferences have not been confined to any one 
 age, but have been present in all ages; that his 
 9.9 
 
30 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 will, by its creating and modifying power, has 
 extended to all classes of phenomena; that his 
 mandates are still being issued; and that their 
 results, as asserted by recognized leaders in phi- 
 losophy and in science, are present with us to-day. 
 
 We fully appreciate the array of learning we 
 are called to confront in maintaining this posi- 
 tion. 
 
 La Place, a supposed tower of strength in 
 mathematical astronomy, seizing upon the sug- 
 gestions of Sir William Herschel, propounded 
 what is now known as the Nebular Hypothesis. 
 In this he claims it possible that the worlds origi- 
 nated in a vastly diffused homogeneous fire-mist, 
 which, on cooling and condensing into irregular 
 flocculi, were thus thrown into a spiral motion until 
 the whole mass was finally in a whirl; that from 
 this mass rings were successively disengaged and 
 condensed about nuclei into suns from which rings 
 were again broken and condensed into planets, 
 and from these still other rings were formed into 
 moons. Following out this vast conception, and 
 harmonizing with it, other scientists equally emi- 
 nent have further asserted that out from this mat- 
 ter thus separated, solidified and grouped into 
 systems there have been evolved by natural laws 
 through successive grades of progression not only 
 all the varient three score and more elemental 
 atoms of the inorganic world, but also all the 
 multiform manifestations of vegetable and animal 
 life, — tracing human genealogy back to infusoria 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 31 
 
 and claiming that these at the first were but the 
 spontaneous product of chemical action, molec- 
 ular force being thus declared sufficient to account 
 for the evolution of a molten mass into a peopled 
 world. 
 
 Herbert Spencer in his " First Principles " ex- 
 pressly states that " those modes of the unknow- 
 able which we call motion, light, heat and chemical 
 affinity are alike transformable into each other and 
 into those which we distinguish as sensation, emo- 
 tion and thought, solar heat being the final source 
 of the force manifested in society," thus affirming 
 not only that all the multiform varieties in inor- 
 ganic nature but the still greater diversities in the 
 higher realms of life have been evolved from strict 
 homogeneity. 
 
 Professor Huxley in his paper on the " Phys- 
 ical Basis of Life " holds that protoplasm, con- 
 sisting of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen 
 in complex chemical union, is the very matter and 
 basis of all life. Professor Tyndall in his chapter 
 on " Vitality " near the close of his " Fragments 
 of Science " remarks, " Are the forces of organic 
 matter diff'erent in kind from those of inorganic? 
 The philosophy of the present day negatives the 
 question. It is the compounding in the organic 
 world of forces belonging equally to the inorganic 
 that constitutes the mystery and the miracle of 
 vitality. The tendency indeed, of modem science 
 is to break down the wall of partition between the 
 organic and the inorganic, and to reduce both to 
 
S2 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 the operation of forces which are the same in kind 
 but whose combinations differ only in complexity." 
 
 Professor Haeckel, the most distinguished and 
 strenuous advocate of Darwinism in Germany, 
 claims that in the present state of physiological 
 knowledge the idea of a Life-Giver has become 
 unscientific; that the admission of one primordial 
 form is sufficient, and that that was a moner, con- 
 sisting principally of carbon in the form of the 
 white of an egg, of a chemical nature solely, and 
 that this moner is the product of self-generation. 
 
 Professor Tyndall claimed that were our planet 
 carved from the sun and set spinning around its 
 axis and in its orbit as now, the consequence of its 
 refrigeration would be the development of organic 
 forces. " In an amorphous drop of water," he 
 says, *' lie latent all the marvels of crystalline 
 force, and who will set limits to the possible play 
 of molecules in a cooling planet? ^ 
 
 This is substantially the ground taken by 
 Spencer, Huxley, Bain and many others of the 
 evolution school. 
 
 These combined theories, essentially atheistic, 
 rest, however, on a most insecure foundation, in- 
 deed encounter a host of incontrovertible facts 
 which they are utterly inadequate to explain. 
 
 It may be admitted that at the first matter was 
 formless, motionless, structureless and rayless. 
 On this there is now no controversy among the 
 different schools of thought. Moses and Herbert 
 Spencer, the creationist and the evolutionist, the 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 33 
 
 dates of whose writings are separated by three 
 thousand years, on this point clasp hands. 
 
 The belief is also as universal that this absolute 
 simplicity of form and of nature has, after the 
 lapse of ages, been converted into an almost in- 
 finite complexity, and that the cardinal changes 
 have occurred in a certain order of sequence ; but 
 in answering the question as to how these changes 
 have been effected, these schools of thought at 
 once part company. 
 
 Those who affirm that in this unfolding there 
 are no evidences of the active presence of an in- 
 telligent personal will-power are confronted by 
 seemingly insuperable objections which science it- 
 self has furnished. Science discloses a law of 
 inertia so far-reaching that not a single particle 
 of matter in all the wide universe can set itself in 
 motion. It also discloses that there is not a 
 single particle that is now at rest. Whence that 
 mighty initial impulse that thrilled through space 
 and is still felt after the lapse of untold ages 
 peopling the heavens with whirling worlds? 
 Science also discloses that matter once supposed 
 to be homogeneous is now made up of sixty-four 
 or more different kinds of atoms, each inclosing 
 within its walls, as we have already remarked, a 
 force peculiar to itself, working under absolutely 
 fixed conditions which no skilled chemist has ever 
 succeeded in dislodging, or destroying, or chang- 
 ing in the minutest particular; each having all 
 the characteristics of a manufactured article as 
 
84 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 affirmed by Herschel, Faraday and Clerk Max- 
 well, and removed completely beyond the reach 
 of nature's power or man's device to make or mar, 
 alter or destroy. Out of these, through their 
 mathematically exact chemical combinations, the 
 whole inorganic world has been built. If there 
 was once a time, as every evolutionist not only 
 concedes, but stoutly contends, when every atom 
 was precisely like every other, and not a single one 
 had the faintest touch of attractive or repellent 
 or affinitive force, through what instrumentality 
 in some far past did these elemental forces, these 
 individualized somethings, find birth and an abid- 
 ing place within infinitesimal and indestructible 
 walls of matter? We find on them no traces of 
 development and no marks of decay. They are 
 none other than God's immortals. Over the na- 
 ture of their being, as well as over the cradle of 
 their birth, there has been thrown a veil of mys- 
 tery through whose closely woven meshes there 
 comes no ray of revealing light to the anxiously 
 peering eyes of science, and whose hiding folds 
 no hand on earth has power to lift, except the 
 reverent hand of faith. 
 
 Professor Tyndall acknowledges that of forces 
 proper, the essential causes, science has no knowl- 
 edge and concerning their nature and ways of 
 working it can safely make no statement, that 
 these forces are not mutually convertible modes 
 of motion, the different manifestations of some 
 one force (the law of conservation having been 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 35 
 
 mistakenly affirmed of them rather than of ener- 
 gies their phenomena), but are distinct spiritual 
 entities possessed of an indestructible identity. 
 His argument on this point, in which, controvert- 
 ing the generally received opinion, he cites the 
 attraction of gravitation which increases and 
 diminishes inversely as the square of the distance, 
 and also atomic repulsion, has never been answered 
 and is apparently unanswerable. Professor 
 Faraday, in his remarks on the " Conservation of 
 Force " says, that the commonly received idea of 
 gravity appears to ignore entirely the principle, 
 
 — indeed, to be in direct opposition to it. 
 Skilled specialists, after repeated trials to dem- 
 onstrate that vitality may spring through spon- 
 taneous generation from dead matter, now 
 candidly confess that all their efforts have thug 
 far proved unavailing. 
 
 Huxley admits that " nobody has yet built up 
 inorganic matter into living, organized proteine," 
 
 — that " chemistry is an enormous distance from 
 that goal," — that " the chasm between the living 
 and the non-living the present state of knowledge 
 cannot bridge." 
 
 Huxley gives a very interesting history of the 
 utterly futile attempts of chemists to build this 
 bridge. Dr. Bastian with tireless zeal has worked 
 to this end, and thought he reached it, but in every 
 one of his experiments there has been detected some 
 fatal flaw. The declaration that no life springs 
 except from some living germ has stood the most 
 
36 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 crucial test of science. The lamented Agassiz af- 
 firmed this in his last lecture. Carpenter, Huxley, 
 Tyndall, all the leading scientists, with refreshing 
 candor, reaffirm it to-day. 
 
 With equal unanimity the world's savants point 
 us to a fire period during which not only all the 
 oceans and the soils, but the very beds of oceans, all 
 the mines of metal and quarries of rock that form 
 the earth, were once but drifting clouds of burn- 
 ing ether in whose fierce heat the hardiest germ 
 would instantly shrivel and disintegrate. Whence, 
 then, those first eggs out of which sprang the 
 progenitors of those countless multitudes of living 
 organisms that have from age to age so peopled 
 our planet? 
 
 The secret of the egg, its nature and its origin, 
 quite as seriously puzzles and confounds the evolu- 
 tionist as does that of the elemental atom. Within 
 its walls there hifles a wonder-working fairy. 
 Though not secure from intrusion, as is the 
 oxygen or the carbon force, she as successfully 
 eludes the prying eyes of mortals and is wrapped 
 in as deep a mystery as to what she is or whence 
 she came. With the lenses and mirrors of his 
 microscope, the scientist tries to look through the 
 curtained windows of her palace. Baffled in that 
 he presumes with subtile chemistry to bolt un- 
 bidden into her very presence, but the sprite, 
 warned by the first footfall of the intruder, passes 
 with viewless feet through some secret postern 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 37 
 
 gate into the unknown beyond, and never comes 
 back again. After this he compounds in his 
 laboratory the like chemical ingredients of which 
 he has found the egg composed, and in precisely 
 the same propoi-tions, and then exposes this, his 
 skillfully built protoplasm, to a carefully adjusted 
 heat. Weeks pass, but no life. For a third time 
 he finds himself facing failure. At last with 
 humbled pride he accepts the truth that germinal 
 force is not some property inherent in matter, but 
 rather an organizing impulse introduced from 
 without, separable at any time from the mass over 
 which for a season it is made dominant, the 
 product of a personal creative will whose im- 
 palpable thought it is commissioned to incarnate 
 into living form. 
 
 Dr. Carpenter, late President of the Royal 
 Society of England and member of the French 
 Academy, in his paper on the " Correlation of 
 Physical and Vital Forces " states that " the best 
 physiologists of the present day separate into a 
 distinct category vital phenomena, claiming them 
 to differ in kind altogether from those of physics 
 or chemistry." They are produced by what he 
 styles germinal capacity, an inherent hereditary 
 power within the germ, an agency whose office 
 it is simply to direct in the use of light, heat, 
 electricity, and the other elemental energies, and 
 thus by their help build up matter into an organ- 
 ism answering to an ideal given it. The vital force 
 
38 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 is held not to supply a single particle of energy 
 but only to turn into its own individual channel 
 a portion of what it finds outside. 
 
 Again, between not only the four primordial 
 divisions of the animal kingdom and also the 
 classes, orders and genera, but even the one hun- 
 dred and thirty thousand different species, it has 
 been demonstrated, after a century of most pains- 
 taking exploration and experiment, there have 
 been great gulfs fixed which no natural, delegated 
 force has power to pass. Within certain lines it 
 has been discovered that species can be modified 
 into varieties through climatic or dietetic influences 
 or cross-breeding, but changes thus effected are 
 found quite unstable, the parental types reappear- 
 ing through the law of atavism when in new 
 surroundings or removed from the culturing care 
 of man. But, however, when an attempt is made 
 to develop absolutely new, distinct species out of 
 old ones, naturalists encounter in the law of the 
 sterility of hybrids an uplifted iron hand, and 
 hear a stem voice, saying, " Thus far, but no 
 farther." That voice they are rapidly learning 
 to recognize as the commanding voice of God. 
 
 Although the origin of species is a matter still 
 in dispute among scientists, yet the theory of its 
 being the result of direct Divine interference is 
 championed by many advocates of profound learn- 
 ing and of international repute. The late Duke 
 of Argyll who has won for himself front rank by 
 his deep research and lucid expositions, while not 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 39 
 
 positively claiming such a conclusion, yet leaves 
 upon the minds of all who read his volume en- 
 titled " Organic Evolution," the profound convic- 
 tion that such was his real belief, that in his 
 opinion such a solution of the problem was not 
 only the most natural but well nigh the inevitable 
 one. He says, " If mutations of species have oc- 
 curred they must have been under some conditions 
 and under some law of which we have no example, 
 and can form no conception. Species have been 
 quite as stable throughout all geological ages as 
 they are at present. They continue till they die 
 and then are often suddenly replaced by new forms 
 and new patterns, all as definite and as persistent 
 as before. How this takes place no man as yet 
 can tell. The new species never seem to be mere 
 haphazard variations from pre-existing forms. 
 They never have the least appearance of the law- 
 less mixtures of hybridism. On the contrary, the 
 new forms are always as sharply defined as the old, 
 differing from them by characteristics which are 
 as well marked and as constant as all the pred- 
 ecessors in the wonderful procession of organic 
 Hfe." 
 
 While he informs us that Herbert Spencer ad- 
 mits that no man has ev°r yet seen a new species 
 bom by ordinary generation, he adds that the long 
 ages of Palaeontology give absolutely no clue, 
 but that " in the Jurassic rocks composed of un- 
 disturbed deposits thirteen hundred feet thick, 
 formed through the lapse of unnumbered ages, 
 
40 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 no less than eighteen hundred and fifty new species 
 have been counted, all suddenly appearing, all 
 lasting for a time and then superceded by newer 
 ones, that these medals of creation, struck each of 
 them by a new die, do not imperceptibly merge 
 into each other." 
 
 The origin of bodily organs is another of Na- 
 ture's many secrets to which evolution theories 
 furnish no key. These organs are found on ex- 
 amination to be contrivances of the most compli- 
 cated character, combining often into a single 
 group hundreds of closely correlated parts so 
 nicely adjusted, so absolutely interdependent in 
 many instances, that the absence of any one would 
 not only seriously cripple the others, but render 
 them totally inoperative, hopelessly defeating 
 the purpose of the mechanism. These parts being 
 thus unquestionably complemental one to the other 
 and incapable of performing any useful office un- 
 less combined, their origin and present combination 
 can be accounted for only as a projection into 
 physical fact of an ideal previously conceived and 
 matured by some organizing mind. It seems ab- 
 surd to suppose that each part could have been 
 originated independently, without any reference 
 to the others, and slowly developed, in its own 
 time and way, out of some minute, indefinite, 
 fortuitous variations, either through the influence 
 of its environment or through some internal blind 
 force, into its present perfected and permanent 
 form, and then that they all, through some chance 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 41 
 
 circumstance, should have fallen into each other's 
 company, and have proved so exactly suited and 
 so absolutely essential each to each as to become 
 at last thus inseparably associated in close cor- 
 porate work. 
 
 In the interior of the ear there is an immense 
 number of minute, rod-like bodies, termed Fibres 
 of Corti, having the appearance of a keyboard. 
 Each fibre is connected with a filament of the 
 auditory nerve. These shreds of the nerve are 
 strings and the fibres are the keys that strike 
 them. This is believed to be a keyboard in func- 
 tion as well as appearance, and through it not only 
 melody but even harmony of sounds finds an 
 avenue to the brain. Here, as Sir George Mivart 
 suggests, is an anticipatory contrivance, for our 
 progenitors had no wants in their simple modes 
 of hfe which could possibly call into play an in- 
 strument of such unlimited resources of sym- 
 phony ; an instrument that has proved itself ca- 
 pable of interpreting to privileged multitudes the 
 pathos and the rapture of a Beethoven and a 
 Mendelssohn. 
 
 In the human eye there have been discovered 
 by anatomists upwards of eight hundred distinct 
 contrivances. Seven matched socket bones, a self- 
 adjusting curtain with its delicate fringe of hair, 
 a projecting eyebrow, six outer muscles of the 
 ball, one of them geared through a pulley, oil 
 and tear glands with an accompanying waste 
 pipe, a hard, transparent, elastic cornea set in the 
 
42 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 white sclerotica, an expanding and contracting 
 pupil, an aqueous, a crystalline and a vitreous 
 humor, an inward net work of nerves, — such are 
 some of the more noticeable points of an instru- 
 ment, which, in the ingenuity of its adjustments 
 eclipses any invention of any human genius of 
 any era. Note but one of its contrivances. By 
 this its possessor can both thread a needle and 
 sight a star. The sclerotic and choroid coats are 
 filled with minute muscles which can flatten and 
 press back towards the retina the crystalline 
 humor and by the same movement change also the 
 form and refracting power of the vitreous humor 
 in which the lens lies. A reverse process can be 
 effected with equal ease. Thus the ends which are 
 clumsily, painfully, imperfectly attained by the 
 apparatus of the astronomer and the microscopist 
 are here secured without spherical aberration in- 
 stantly and by simple volition. 
 
 It would seem impossible to account for the 
 development of such a complicated instrument by 
 means of a natural selection, according to the Dar- 
 winian theory, from among minute, indefinite, for- 
 tuitous variations, that selection being guided sim- 
 ply by the urgent demands of a struggle for life, 
 for the Instrument in order to be of any advantage 
 in this struggle must have a concurrence of parts 
 predicating a multitude of initial concurrent de- 
 partures from the parental type. 
 
 Only on this concurrence comes the gift of 
 sight, and the very fact that such an end has 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 43 
 
 been attained by such complicated means at the 
 very outset before any selection can possibly take 
 place, furnishes, it would seem, a complete answer 
 to this theory. Even the simplest eyes, those that 
 are fixed and angular and of least focal power, 
 furnish us this argument in its full force, for 
 not one of them is so simple but that even it is 
 the resultant of simultaneous and corresponding 
 growths of different parts, each of an independent 
 origin and development, and each utterly useless 
 until conjoined with the others in a symmetrical 
 whole. Also at each advance step in compass and 
 complexity the same difficulties confront the evo- 
 lutionist, for each is made up of an entirely sep- 
 arate set of concurrent changes. It is a very 
 significant fact that the trilobites, one of the oldest 
 of fossil forms, to all appearance coming sud- 
 denly upon the scene, without as yet any dis- 
 covered ancestry, possessed fully developed organs 
 of sight. 
 
 In the face of such facts how can Professor 
 Haeckel, the distinguished German exponent of 
 Darwinism, insist that " the history of evolution 
 convinces us that the highly purposive and ad- 
 mirably constituted sense-organs, like all other 
 organs, have developed without premeditated aim." 
 
 Exploring parties of geologists, naturalists, 
 and anatomists, after having with inexhaustible 
 patience, with trained powers of observation, with 
 most ingenious instruments of research, ransacked 
 the rock record of earth's crust down through 
 
44 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 even the Silurian strata to the very dawn of be- 
 ing, and having examined the present occupants 
 of every continent and sea, now testify in the 
 name of science that nowhere among extinct 
 species or living ones have there come to light 
 any facts proving that there were any such proc- 
 esses as evolutionists so boldly announce to have 
 taken place in introducing the different gradations 
 of sentient life on this planet. 
 
 The same is true of the many curious instances 
 of mimicries in nature, and indeed of all phe- 
 nomena of correlated growth. 
 
 Materialistic expounders of the universe also 
 find themselves confronted on every side by the ever 
 recurring phenomena of instinct and are at their 
 wits' end to account for that perfect poise and mas- 
 tery of body exhibited by some animals directly 
 after birth, for that accurate intuitive knowledge of 
 perspective, that minute familiarity with first 
 witnessed scenes, that unrivaled ingenuity of de- 
 sign and flawless finish in mechanical execution 
 of works performed without experience or a guid- 
 ing model or the aid of instruction, that instan- 
 taneous grasp of the most occult principles in 
 natural philosophy and profound acquaintance 
 with the laws of chemical and vital action, and 
 especially that far glance of prophecy on the 
 accuracy of which depend the lives not only of 
 individuals, but even of entire species. Theorists 
 who cling to a naturalistic explanation denomi- 
 nate instinct a lapsed intelligence, affirming that 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 45 
 
 it is the accumulated wisdom of past generations 
 acquired through painful and protracted ex- 
 perience and handed down under the laws of 
 heredity in the form of fixed habits and of con- 
 stitutional mental bent. But scientific investi- 
 gations in natural history have brought to light 
 thousands of facts to which such an explanation 
 is wholly inapplicable, which fairly laugh these 
 theorists down. 
 
 The solitary wasp brings to the mouth of a 
 pit which she has dug with her mandibles and into 
 which she has dropped an egg, a given number of 
 small grubs so stung that their bodies, while 
 smitten with paralysis, have just enough life left 
 to keep them from decaj; until there shall issue 
 from the egg the worm whose hungry maw they 
 are fated to fill. This solitary mother wasp, with 
 absolutely no experience or observation of her 
 own or of others to guide her, acts as if she knew 
 positively not only that a worm would some day 
 be hatched from her egg but precisely when that 
 day would come ; that this worm would not have 
 the faculty to care for itself and that she would 
 never live to care for it ; that grub-meat though 
 unpalatable to her would be keenly relished by 
 it, that a given number of grubs would suffice 
 for its needs ; and that thej^, shot through with her 
 subtle poison, would lie dormant till it came. 
 
 The same acute discrimination may be observed 
 in all insects in selecting for their egg deposits 
 such surroundings as will most surely conduce to 
 
46 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 the hatching and subsequent maintenance of their 
 young, although the conditions of their offspring's 
 life are In most marked contrast to their own. 
 One will choose a particular kind of leaf, another 
 the skin of a certain living animal, still another 
 that of a certain dead one. 
 
 Guided by this parental instinct birds set out 
 on their migratory journeys across entire conti- 
 nents, over pathless deserts and seas. Salmon ex- 
 change salt water for fresh, following far inland 
 the courses of the rivers, at times shooting up 
 steep waterfalls of great height and swiftness ; 
 the herring travel to the south, while the mackerel 
 seek the colder currents of nothern climes. Is it 
 possible that these animals, untaught and inex- 
 perienced, are so deeply versed in biological lore 
 that they are enabled, by their own judgment, to 
 determine unerringly the precise conditions fitted 
 for the development of the embryo in the egg? 
 And is it also possible for them to know in what 
 localities they will find those conditions fulfilled, 
 or for them to thread their way thither for the 
 first time, without a guide, over prairies and sand- 
 plains and tumbling ocean billows.? 
 
 The spider that builds its tiny diving-bell, an- 
 chors it with strong cable to the river bottom, 
 and distends its walls with air pressed from en- 
 tangling meshes of web on its abdomen, and then, 
 within this Its royal pavilion, that shines through 
 the water like a globe of woven silver, rears with 
 watchful wisdom, amid seemingly most hostile sur- 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 47 
 
 roundings, its brood of hungry children, Is an- 
 other one out of the vast multitude of living 
 witnesses that testify to a direct divine informing 
 of the mental life below the human, the Impulsive 
 promptings of instinct being followed blindly by 
 those creatures which stand thus in imperative 
 need of Its guiding wisdom. As well accredit an 
 Intelligent self-conscious purpose to those par- 
 ticles of matter which, when the time Is ripe, ar- 
 range themselves with such promptness and 
 precision along the lines of symmetry which form 
 the faces of crystals or the exquisite patterns of 
 flowers, as to ascribe to these lower orders of 
 sentient being the knowledge, the invention, and 
 the prescience which their works display. 
 
 There are other species of spiders, widely 
 differentiated from this, yet exhibiting equally 
 marvelous skill and prescience and Intimate ac- 
 quaintance with Nature's laws ; some of which, 
 while never spreading a snare, weave and securely 
 anchor a single cable In order to effect a safe 
 recovery after springing on their prey ; others 
 fashioning a sumptuous underground retreat, 
 water tight, with plastered walls hung with most 
 delicate silk tapestry, and with entrance guarded 
 by a bevel-edged door rwung on a spring hinge 
 to make It self-shutting and secure against being 
 crushed In by the heavy tread of any one who 
 might chance that way ; and still others which, 
 having spun out of their own bodies veritable 
 aeroplanes, boldly cut loose from the earth and 
 
48 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 navigate the air whenever they choose to change 
 their habitat. And there are many kinds of bees 
 and ants, and other httle denizens on the planet, 
 that in their wonder-working bear equally unim- 
 peachable witness to a Divine informing; but I 
 will pass them by as they are more or less familiar 
 to all, and will call especial attention to the start- 
 ling case of the gall fly because of the profound 
 significance of its history and its important bear- 
 ing on the question at issue. Its convinc- 
 ing testimony has been hitherto strangely over- 
 looked. 
 
 It starts out in life a worm, and a very tiny 
 one at that, with nothing to do but eat and grow. 
 It finds within ready reach the right kind of food 
 prepared and stored away for it long before it 
 was born. But as the monotonous hours creep 
 by a wonderful metamorphosis takes place. 
 Wings lift up out of its smooth skin, legs grow, 
 its mouth changes, and, last of all, on the under 
 side of the abdomen a long slender ovipositor ap- 
 pears spirally rolled up and lodged in a groove 
 ready for use, terminating in most curiously fash- 
 ioned tools fitted for tasks so various and so in- 
 tricate that entomologists though prying into 
 their secrets for a hundred years have discovered 
 as yet only a part of them. After it reaches 
 maturity and itself enters upon the duties of 
 motherhood, it seems to know at once what instru- 
 ments have been given it and precisely how to use 
 them, for, spreading its wings, it soon alights on 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 49 
 
 the rough rind of an oak and begins at once to 
 bore and rasp and brush and in many queer ways 
 to irritate the tissues of the tree, and after this 
 elaborate preparation it pours in and around the 
 minute hole it has made in some branch an acrid 
 concoction that has been compounded in the hid- 
 den laboratory of its own organism, and then 
 deposits out of sight a minute egg, — that still 
 unsolved mystery of the universe — and, flying 
 away, leaves it to its fate. 
 
 Is it culpable carelessness for this mother gall 
 fly to thus concern herself no further about the 
 future happenings of that infinitesimal germ of 
 life which has been so guardedly wrapped up with 
 a deftness far surpassing that of the fancied 
 fingers of fairies? Is she not rather blindly fol- 
 lowing the guidance of a wisdom and a kindly care 
 not her own? Watch the result. 
 
 That mysterious liquid with which this Insig- 
 nificant insect saturates the tree's tough fibres 
 seems to possess talismanic power, thrilling with 
 a new strange impulse the heart of the old oak, 
 quickening into activity latent architectural 
 capabilities of the possession of which there has 
 not until now been the slightest Intimation. The 
 oak at once sets about building for the egg 
 of this strange intruder the most elaborate, com- 
 plex, perfectly sheltered nest It would seem pos- 
 sible to devise. It consists of a round ball encased 
 In a leather-like covering through which not a 
 drop of moisture can penetrate, and hung out In 
 
50 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 the light from the chosen branch by fastenings 
 so secure and by a cord so strong no blast of wind 
 can wrench it from its moorings. If you will 
 cut open that ball you will find it to contain a 
 central cell held in place by numberless radiating 
 fibrous threads, and, thus embedded in granular 
 pith, removed from out the reach of frost and 
 all hostile forces ; and in that cell, hard and smooth 
 within and spacious enough for the newcomer 
 to grow in, you will find the very egg this raother- 
 fly had inserted into the old oak and left to its 
 fostering care. 
 
 Not only has the oak been entrusted with this 
 strange commission but the willow and the rose 
 bush, the coriander and the Indian tamarisk as 
 well, for they prove equally as prompt and as able 
 to respond to the nesting needs of the favored fly. 
 Each follows out its own architectural plans, but 
 each builds to the same end. Galls hang about 
 the catkins like bunches of grapes. They crop 
 out from the roots capacious enough to comfort- 
 ably house a thronging colony. Some galls have 
 a prickly covering; some resemble artichokes; 
 some, lumps of dried garden soil, as those on the 
 tamarisk ; some are like delicately tinted wax ap- 
 ples, as the famous apples of Sodom referred to 
 in the ancient classics as found hanging from 
 the boughs of dwarfed oaks in the desolate region 
 of the Dead Sea. You may find them on grasses, 
 and along the stalks of various sorts of grain. 
 They are widely distributed and from their valu- 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 51 
 
 able dyeing properties have become important 
 articles of a world-wide commerce. 
 
 These facts which I have here but very briefly 
 cited, have undergone scientific scrutiny until now 
 no well-informed person thinks of controverting 
 them. They can be readily verified by any careful 
 observer, and they are but a single group out 
 of a vast multitude of corresponding and equally 
 suggestive facts recorded in the books of natu- 
 ralists. But their full significance seems largely 
 to have been overlooked even by the most thought- 
 ful interpreters of nature. 
 
 To only a single phase of their meaning do I 
 purpose at present to direct attention. It re- 
 lates to that oft mooted question of whether there 
 are any unmistakable evidences of the exercise of 
 special Divine will power to provide for the needs 
 of any of the multiform varieties of sentient life 
 that people this planet. 
 
 Note in the first place, how absolutely out of 
 the ordinary is this phenomenon. Wound the oak 
 or the willow, or the rose-bush in any other way, 
 and pour into the wound any other kind of liquid, 
 and the result will be, if the liquid be not poison- 
 ous, simply that the sap will flow out heedlessly 
 until the curative forc3s of the tree heal the in- 
 cision and the surrounding fibres are hardened 
 into a knot. If an insect or an egg is caught in 
 the flow it is ruthlessly swept along or embedded 
 in its viscid current and its life smothered or 
 crushed. If the tree is poisoned the deposited 
 
5% DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 egg may be saved from disaster by the arresting 
 of plant growth immediately about it, as in the 
 case of the locust sting. Let any innocuous 
 foreign substance be lodged among the tissues 
 and they will simply tighten about it with an in- 
 tensified grip that never lets go, the substance be- 
 coming overgrown and imprisoned until the tree 
 dies and the disintegrating chemical forces step 
 in and tear down the walls of the palace which the 
 life force had, cell upon cell, with such infinite 
 patience and matchless skill built for itself out of 
 the air and sunlight and the soil and the dew. 
 Unless the gall-fly chances that way, the oak and 
 the willow and the rose-bush and the tamarisk 
 will go on year in and year out multiplying their 
 branches in the same old way, putting on and off 
 their coverings of leaves and maturing each their 
 peculiar flower and fruit, and die at last with- 
 out showing the least sign that power had ever 
 been given them to execute any other commis- 
 sion. 
 
 With this single exception the energizing of 
 every vegetive force is directed throughout the 
 plant's entire history exclusively, either toward 
 the conservation of its own life, or the perpetu- 
 ation of its own species, — a case of self-seeking, 
 pure and simple. Here, on the other hand, in 
 most marked contrast is a case of altruism without 
 one trace of self-seeking in it, the strange benef- 
 icence reaching over even into the boundaries of 
 an entirely diff^erent kingdom. 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 55 
 
 Note, in the second place, the exhaustive 
 knowledge of the present environment and sure 
 prescience of the future needs of the new life, 
 and the supreme mastery over all environing 
 forces. How this architectural task is accom- 
 plished and by what device the egg reaches and 
 keeps its ultimate central vantage-ground are, 
 and probably will ever remain, among nature's 
 insolvable mysteries. The plans and specifica- 
 tions for the building and best methods for carry- 
 ing on the work were undoubtedly thought out to 
 their minutest detail by the Infinite, Organizing 
 Intelligence, and the skill needed for their suc- 
 cessful execution was imparted and then held in 
 reserve until just this emergency should arise, or 
 else the specific Impulse and the skill are the direct, 
 instantaneous output of a Divine will. At all 
 events there is no evidence of any slow, evolu- 
 tionary process, of any gradual increase and 
 refinement of power from crude, embryonic be- 
 ginnings to final perfectness, wrought out, bit 
 by bit, by successive exigencies extending over a 
 long lapse of time. 
 
 Exactly how that strange concoction, with 
 which the gall-fly saturates the woody fibres of 
 the oak, suddenly awakens into Intense activity 
 these slumbering, undreamed of capabilities of the 
 vegetlve force and incite it to the accomplishment 
 of a purpose so utterly foreign to its own neces- 
 sities, what ingredient there is in it that imparts 
 this magical power it would be futile for us to 
 
54. DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 attempt to conjecture. But we can see that the 
 same Intelligence that planned the growth of the 
 gall as a nesting place for the egg and the off- 
 spring of the fly, also planned the compounding 
 of that potent fluid, equipped the fly with its 
 working outfit, taught it how and where to inject 
 this liquid, and established that deep correlation 
 between the forces resident in entirely separate 
 kingdoms whereby this exceptional service is se- 
 cured in the life processes of nature. 
 
 How far-reaching, how complicate the plan ! 
 What infinite painstaking ! What profundity of 
 knowledge! What perfection of skill! The oak 
 and the fly, what are they but blind instruments, 
 unconsciously carrying out the purposes of a 
 special, Divine beneficence.? Let those theorists, 
 who decry any belief in a special providence, ex- 
 plain, if they can, this circle of correlated phe- 
 nomena on any other hypothesis. 
 
 But over the question of the advent and dis- 
 tinctive attributes of man the battle of the schools 
 has been most hotly contested, calling into action 
 on both sides every reserve force of scholarship 
 and mental acumen, as the issues at stake tran- 
 scend every other, involving not only the founda- 
 tions of theistic faith, but even the very evidences 
 of an endless life. 
 
 The extensive scientific investigations which 
 have grown out of this heated controversy have 
 brought to light a vast array of most interesting 
 and significant facts tg which the extreme evolu- 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 55 
 
 tionist and the equally extreme creationist have 
 both gone for corroborative proofs of their the- 
 ories, and neither of them gone in vain. 
 
 Man in his body, in his instincts, and in his 
 mental traits, bears many very striking re- 
 semblances to the brute tribes, suggesting some 
 closer tie than the strict creationist is yet ready 
 to admit; although out of the lines of affinity 
 with the numerous ape and lemuroid species that 
 are by scientists classed with man in the sub- 
 orders of primates, there could be constructed, 
 as a distinguished writer has remarked, " only a 
 net-work and not a ladder." There have also 
 been found in man equally marked differences, 
 suggesting, on the other hand, that in effecting the 
 changes there were actively present higher forces 
 than mechanical or chemical or even vital, and 
 that there was introduced, as in the case of the 
 atom and the egg, an absolutely new ingredient, 
 of which there was no germ even, anywhere ex- 
 isting. 
 
 In man we miss the brute's great teeth and 
 claws, we note fewer instincts, a lessened speed, a 
 weakened muscle, a blunted sense, a back laid bare, 
 a skin left tender; divergencies which would de- 
 note marked degeneracy were they not most 
 strangely accompanied by a vastly increased mass 
 and multiplied convolution of brain. Here ap- 
 pears that same deep correlation on which the 
 parts of a bodily organ are built, bearing the same 
 emphatic testimony to the prior existence, the 
 
56 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 personal presence, and the plastic power of some 
 intelligent, organizing will. 
 
 At the same time that the changes occurred in 
 the body, corresponding ones must have reached 
 the brain, for the one change without the other, 
 as Darwin confesses, would have been a serious 
 hindrance in the struggle for life, and, if his 
 theory be true, could not have long survived. As 
 in the formation of the eye and ear, modifications 
 occurring at different starting-points, and each 
 developing along an independent line, must have 
 united in a concert of action before they could 
 be of any advantage; so independent, synchro- 
 nous, and corresponding changes must have taken 
 place in both the body and brain of the brute 
 to have produced the man, even waiving the ques- 
 tion of his being distinctively endowed with a 
 moral, accountable nature. Selection from mi- 
 nute indefinite variations, such as Darwin supposes, 
 could have here played no part. Would creation 
 be a misnomer for such a circle of changes.'' 
 Brutes, though thus men's progenitors, could have 
 sustained to them no closer relation than the soil 
 to the flowers which open out from it their tinted 
 and perfumed petals. 
 
 To be sure, there is here no change in the 
 material ingredients. Neither is there any, when 
 out of the soil a flower unfolds its tinted petals 
 and fills the air with its fragrance ; but as the soil, 
 the moisture, and the sunlight have no power to 
 thus combine into this marvel of grace and color 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 57 
 
 and sweetness until the directive force of some 
 buried germ thrills them with its talismanic touch, 
 so neither in the body of the brute nor in the 
 nature of its environment dwells there any power 
 known to science capable of producing such a 
 circle of complemental changes, physical and 
 vital, as mark the advent of man. 
 
 Furthermore, science in its explorations in the 
 higher realm of thought has brought to light a 
 class of phenomena so entirely novel as to indicate 
 that there has taken place something more than a 
 mere modification of the four forces, mechanic, 
 atomic, vital and instinctive, which have been suc- 
 cessively set at work In the world, that an abso- 
 lutely new force has been ushered in, a force pos- 
 sessing characteristics so fundamentally different 
 from all others that they can in no sense be re- 
 garded as its progenitors, and a force not only 
 of a uniqueness so complete as to thus preclude 
 any suggestion of kinship, but of a uniqueness 
 so peculiar that it becomes a travesty on scientific 
 interpretation to explain it simply as an unfold- 
 ing under the universal law of evolution of another 
 one of the hidden, inherent properties of matter. 
 And this new force, known as a self-conscious and 
 a responsibly sovereign ego, is apparently the 
 exclusive Inheritance of man. Is his distinctive 
 
 t feature, lifts him completely up out of the Iott 
 
 ' plane of brute being. 
 
 In the mental life below the human there are 
 semblances of self-conscious, deliberative thought. 
 
58 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 of moral discernment and responsible free-will; 
 and instances of this nature are so many and so 
 striking, the belief is prevalent, not only in scien- 
 tific but even in religious circles, that we differ 
 from the brutes only in having a clearer thought, 
 a deeper discernment, a wider freedom ; but there 
 are now advanced investigators of the highest at- 
 tainments and of international celebrity who be- 
 lieve that those semblances are wholly delusive, 
 and that in this mysterious pantomimic life below 
 us there are no really reliable evidences of the 
 presence of a distinctive, self-conscious, spiritual 
 force constituting true personality. Animals 
 unquestionably possess in common with us blind 
 instinct, sensation, direct perception, association 
 of objects and ideas, automatic attention, involun- 
 tary memory, indeliberate volition, reproductive 
 imagination, sympathetic emotion and emotional 
 expression. Nearly, if not quite all of the phe- 
 nomena of their thought-life can come through 
 the exercise of just these low forms of mentality 
 and do not necessarily imply that they ever get 
 beyond the domain of the senses, that they have 
 any abstract, deliberative, introspective thought, 
 that their consciousness ever reaches up into con- 
 sciousness of self. Their mental states may be, and 
 probably are, simply passive ; their memories and 
 imaginations but prolonging and multiplying 
 their sense-perception through laws of association 
 and suggestion. 
 
 It is true there are some few phenomena that do 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 59 
 
 not seem susceptible of this explanation, but as 
 we find clearly within the charmed circle of in- 
 stinct, where there is uniformly nothing but blind 
 obedience to a God-given impulse, acts which to 
 ordinary observers show deliberation, design, pro- 
 found reasoning, even moral purpose on the part 
 of the animal, we naturally feel warranted in as- 
 suming that these occasional instances met with 
 apparently outside of this circle, and indicating 
 that animals at times really enter within the vesti- 
 bule, at least, of self-conscious life, are delusive, 
 that the real mental background to these unvoiced 
 acts may after all be God's, and not theirs. 
 
 The belief that thus with the advent of man 
 there was introduced an entirely new force, a 
 spiritual, self-conscious, personal entity, seems to 
 find further warrant in the fact that he alone has 
 ever manifested a desire or shown a capacity for 
 progress, intentionally improving on the past. 
 Did animals really have souls in them, did they 
 possess truly reflective faculties like our own, the 
 developing influences of the tens of thousands of 
 years, that have one by one rolled round since 
 their life began, would have wrought in them an 
 advancement so marked that their mental status 
 would long since have been placed beyond all 
 controversy. 
 
 That this non-progresslveness is not rightly 
 chargeable to bodily imperfections is clearly 
 evinced in the wonder-workings of the ant, the 
 spider, and the bee. Apes have hands but they 
 
60 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 have never yet built a fire or replenished one, or 
 shaped a tool. 
 
 This belief finds still further warrant in the 
 fact that with brutes instinct reigns ; with man, 
 reason; that they have their thinking done for 
 them, he is forced to do his himself; that they 
 reach perfection, without effort, at a single bound ; 
 he, if at all, only after repeated and disheartening 
 failure; that with them the final purpose seems to 
 be simply to conserve the body, with him, to im- 
 prove the mind; that with them the supplying of 
 physical wants brings unbroken peace, a deep 
 content, the horizon of their thought shutting 
 closely down about the now and the near ; with 
 him there is ever a vague unrest, an unsatisfied 
 longing, an indefinable dread, angel-winged ex- 
 pectancies. 
 
 How can we account for God's pouring out such 
 wealth of inventive thought in care for brutes' 
 bodies and showing not the least concern, as far 
 as we can see, for preserving and developing any- 
 thing nobler, except on the ground that he has 
 planted in them no germs of anything nobler to 
 be developed, that he has never given them any 
 real, personal self to be conscious of, that with 
 them body is absolutely the very top of being.'' 
 
 While then there are strong suggestions, if not 
 positive evidences in nature of some mysterious 
 relationship between men and brutes, that rela- 
 tionship is certainly, as I have already suggested, 
 as remote as that existing between the flower and 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 61 
 
 the soil out of which it springs. The dull clod 
 has no magic gift of self -transfiguration but dis- 
 plays merely a capacity for a passive yielding 
 to the plastic touch of some newly arrived vital 
 force, when out of its well-nigh shapeless, scent- 
 less, colorless dust are wrought the queenly robes 
 and peerless perfume and richly crimson blush of 
 roses. 
 
 The Investigations of science bring the certain 
 knowledge of the direct action of the Divine will 
 still closer to us, even within the circle of our 
 own Individual experiences. Sir George Mlvart, 
 Fellow of the Royal Society, who stands In the 
 forefront of science, and Professor Rudolf 
 Schmid, President of the Theological Seminary 
 at Schonthal, Wurtemburg, who stands In the 
 forefront of philosophy, claim that self-conscious 
 and responsibly free spirits must be new and In- 
 dependent existences transcending nature, they 
 going so far as to state outright that each hu- 
 man soul is the result of a separate creative fiat 
 of the Almighty. 
 
 We might enforce this their position by re- 
 marking that out of the old nothing new can 
 come except new combination, and the soul Is be- 
 lieved to be an absolutely new element and not 
 simply a new form of an old one. This our self- 
 consciousness positively affirms, and we must Im- 
 plicitly rely on its testimony or our whole 
 foundation for any belief is hopelessly swept 
 away. It also says that each soul is an indlvis- 
 
62 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 ible unit, that there cannot be transmitted from 
 parent to child any portion of the ego. Re- 
 semblances may be, but nothing of the child's 
 spiritual entity has been or can be derived from 
 his progenitors. Human souls are God's direct 
 gift. To the fashioning of each one he has given 
 his personal attention. It is only its fleshly cover- 
 ings and its other material environment he has en- 
 trusted to the care of secondary causes. 
 
 Facts brought to light by modem scientific In- 
 vestigations and closely analyzed by modem 
 scientific methods, are thus daily difl^using and 
 deepening the belief among the candid and 
 thoughtful that the progress through the ages 
 from the simple to the complex, from amorphic 
 matter to a peopled world, has been something 
 more than a methodic, self-originated, and self- 
 sustained evolution of elements held hidden In 
 matter from all eternity, that absolutely new 
 forces have from time to time been introduced 
 from without through direct creative fiats of a 
 personal will, the old forces, inside their limitations 
 being, as the work progressed, utilized, when found 
 available, simply as avenues for ushering in the 
 new. 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 Ill 
 
 We now come to the third general division of 
 our theme, that God not only can effectively inter- 
 fere, either by direct or indirect methods, without 
 working any disorder, abrogating any law, or de- 
 stroying any force ; and that he not only has, in 
 fact, thus interfered again and again in all ages 
 and in countless matters of moment, but, further, 
 that it is not only not presumptuous, but most 
 natural and reasonable, for us to expect that he 
 will interfere for us individually, however insignif- 
 icant we may at present seem to be. 
 
 It is claimed by those who controvert this posi- 
 tion, that God has, as we have already remarked, 
 adopted broad, comprehensive plans, in which he 
 has regard for general interests, and not excep- 
 tional cases ; that in these plans he is as unyielding 
 as granite; that his interferences have been in the 
 nature of creative fiats, simply for completing these 
 wide-reaching original designs ; that he has no 
 time or thought for individual cases ; and that, if 
 any one of us would secure any of the benefits 
 of the present order, we must make these plans a 
 careful study, and adjust ourselves to them as best 
 we can, and not expect their author to break in 
 upon them and give his personal attention to our 
 private, insignificant interests. In other words, 
 we must rely on our own exertions for any modi- 
 
 63 
 
64 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 ficatlons of our environments, must master the 
 secrets of nature, comply with her laws, if we 
 would make her forces our servitors and become 
 masters of our circumstances. 
 
 There is apparent warrant for such a view. 
 It would seem as if the individual were indeed lost 
 sight of, — everything is on so vast a scale, every 
 part of this wonderful mechanism of a world is 
 so far-reaching in its results. The earth's whirl 
 on its axis brings day and night for all ; the in- 
 clination of its axis to the plane of its orbit and 
 its circuit round the sun determine the change of 
 seasons, the rise and fall of tides, the width of 
 zones, the force and direction of the great trade- 
 winds, the character and limitations of vegetable 
 growths, the nature and habitat of the fishes, the 
 birds and the beasts. The sun ceaselessly pours 
 out in every direction that mysterious influence 
 which we call light. It indifferently enters hovels 
 and marble halls. It comes through every open 
 doorway, every uncurtained window, every crack 
 and crevice. It purples the velvet petal of the 
 violet and fills it with fragrance, and afterward, 
 with seemingly heartless haste, rots that same 
 petal to shapeless, colorless, odorless dust again. 
 It kisses the sheltered valley into waving harvests, 
 and at the same time, with other of its rays, 
 scorches the sand wastes with death's desolation 
 and silence. At one time it darts in through the 
 pupil of the eye, and with exquisite art transfers 
 to the retina the outer glory and thrills the soul 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 65 
 
 with strange rapture ; at another, when the delicate 
 nerves are aflame with fever, it tortures with its 
 touch, and bhsters and blackens that very same 
 canvas it had with its swift pencil painted with 
 splendor. An atmosphere miles in thickness com- 
 pletely envelops the earth. It forces itself in 
 everywhere. All gills and spiracles and lungs 
 must breathe it, though sometimes it comes loaded 
 with poison, instead of balm. Now with gentlest 
 zephyr-touch it gratefully fans the cheek of an 
 invalid, anon with the swift sweep of a cyclone 
 it levels a forest or unroofs a city. Water is as 
 ominipresent as air. The air is indeed permeated 
 with it, as all substances, fluids and solids, have 
 their every particle encased in air. What Inter- 
 minable leagues of tossing billows, with their 
 glistening foam-caps breaking over the white- 
 winged sea-gulls of commerce as they hasten on 
 venturesome errands over the treacherous depths, 
 some to reach safe shelter, it may be, in distant 
 ports, some to fly wildly before an angry storm 
 and sink into the opening jaws of a hungry sea! 
 Fire, though not actually, yet potentially, is also 
 omnipresent. Even the ingredients of water itself 
 will burn, and in the fierce flame which their 
 chemical union kindles, the metals and the earths, 
 even fire-clay itself, will be consumed to ashes. 
 Forests, grasses and peat bogs, underlying beds of 
 coal, countless reservoirs of oil, are ready for the 
 torch. Angels and demons of combustion are all 
 about us. They stand in waiting on every hand, 
 
66 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 ready with their ruddy faces to beam kindliest 
 cheer from our furnaces and chimney comers and 
 swinging chandehers, or to blaze in mad fury amid 
 the crumbling walls and rafters of our homes. 
 They will cook for our tables, smelt our ores, 
 draw our trains of trade, turn the wheels in our 
 workshops, multiply our comforts a thousandfold, 
 or if we are not aware, will, as very fiends in their 
 wild work of a night, change our proud Chicagos 
 into smoldering ruins. In some far past the whole 
 earth was but a burning ball, and lava streams and 
 earthquakes and smoking craters tell us that the 
 primal fires still rage within. This elemental 
 force has been provided on a grand scale. The 
 economic scheme of which it forms a part embraces 
 the farthest fixed star in its infinitude of thought. 
 
 Electricity, the latest utilized force of nature, 
 has been found to bear the same stamp of uni- 
 versality and to stand toward us in this same 
 twofold relationship. It falls from the clouds in 
 death-dealing thunderbolts ; it also with deft 
 fingers renders invaluable service in the civilizing 
 arts of life. It becomes the winged Mercury of 
 the mind, carrying thought-messages across con- 
 tinents and under seas with well-nigh the swift- 
 ness of light. 
 
 As we thus study nature force by force, at- 
 tribute by attribute, and note this feature of 
 universality pervading all, this dual relationship 
 which each sustains of blessing or cursing, as 
 angel or devil, how powerful and painful the 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 67 
 
 questioning, whether, after all, It Is not too true 
 that exceptional cases, or individuals during ex- 
 ceptional crises, have failed to enter as factors 
 into the thought of God in the dispensations of 
 his providence ; whether individuals have not been 
 placed in the midst of the same possibilities ; and 
 whether it does not rest with each to bravely make 
 the best of his environment, and trust to his own 
 right arm and stout heart to carry him through! 
 And, besides, is not God's universe so wide, are 
 not his cares so multitudinous and complex, that 
 he has time to make only general classifications, 
 establish wide-reaching laws, delegate great 
 secondary causes, arrange his forces on a scale 
 graduated with mathematical precision, and set 
 them at work in grooves unalterably fixed? Is 
 he not necessitated to take simply a sweeping 
 glance, to contemplate In the mass the swarming 
 myriads of beings evolved from the dust as the 
 grand processes of life go on? Has he not 
 thought it sufficient to establish the great dynas- 
 ties of organized living creatures that through the 
 ages have seemed to rise and sink with the regu- 
 larity of the tides of the sea? We cannot even 
 number the massive worlds which he has set whirl- 
 ing through illimitable space, and which must 
 demand at least his general supervision and require 
 his constantly sustaining power. 
 
 At first glance we are apt to conclude, viewing 
 the subject from this standpoint, that there Is in- 
 deed no Individualizing in God's providences, no 
 
68 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 attention paid to detail, no more note taken of the 
 units that make up the mass than the farmer takes 
 of the separate kernels of wheat which he harvests 
 from his fields. Here moves by a cloud of locusts 
 dense enough to darken the sun ; an east wind 
 rises and greedy ocean billows swallow them up. 
 A volcano bursts, and a Herculaneum with its 
 thronging human life is swiftly buried in a grave 
 of ashes. There comes an earthquake shock, 
 and a Sodom sinks into the sea ; a steamboat dis- 
 aster, a railroad accident, a visitation of cholera, a 
 breaking out of fire, a caving in of a colliery, 
 a whirl of a cyclone, and scores and hundreds of 
 human lives perish in an hour. Is it probable 
 that the individual arrests the attention of the Al- 
 mighty in the great ongoings of his providence? 
 Have you and I, in our little corner, ever attracted 
 his attention, much more excited his interest? 
 Has his great heart ever beat in love for each one 
 of us? Has he ever called us by some dear name 
 and watched with tender solicitude the unfolding 
 of our powers, entered into sympathy when our 
 hearts have bled with bereavement, or been crushed 
 with failure, or made desolate by estrangement or 
 unfeeling neglect? How many hours in the hfe 
 history of every one of us are darkened by a sense 
 of utter loneliness ! How many times our hearts 
 cry out for the appreciative sympathy of a Divine 
 companionship ! Oh, for that comforting as- 
 surance which blessed Christ's sorrow-wrung heart 
 when he said, " And yet I am not alone, for the 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 69 
 
 Father is with me " ! Is it presumptuous for us 
 to think that that assurance may also be ours? 
 That it is not, I beHeve to be the unmistakable 
 teachings, not only of the Sacred Scriptures, but 
 of all animate and inanimate nature and of all 
 sound philosophy. 
 
 The Scriptures are full of this consoling revela- 
 tion. There is rarely a page not illuminated by 
 it. To teach it was one of the distinctive fea- 
 tures of Christ's ministry. How he delighted to 
 dwell on the brooding watchfulness of the Father ! 
 In reassuring his disciples he told them that God, 
 "who gave his personal attention to the clothing 
 of the grass and the lilies, and was not so great 
 or so busy as to overlook the fall of even a little 
 sparrow, surely would keep loving and sleepless 
 watch over them. Even the hairs of their heads, 
 he confidently assured them, were all numbered. 
 
 Such like disclosures, so many and so explicit, 
 throughout the books of the Bible, find most abun- 
 dant confirmation in the facts of science. The 
 geologist and the chemist, the botanist and the 
 naturalist, have in their separate departments 
 found phenomena which the Christian philosopher 
 may boldly claim as incontestable evidences of 
 God's sympathetic presence with his children. The 
 more deeply nature is searched, the more con- 
 vincing the proofs of God's infinite painstaking 
 for his creatures. His plans to these ends have 
 evidently been thought out in their minutest de- 
 tails. We are overwhelmed with astonishment as 
 
70 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 we see into what small concerns he has suffered 
 his thoughts to enter, and out of them by an in- 
 genuity of contriving possible only to a creator 
 of limitless resources has wrought results of far- 
 reaching import. No candid student of nature 
 can fail of becoming profoundly convinced that 
 there is absolutely nothing, however inconspic- 
 uous, that does not only embody a divine thought, 
 but in some way plays a part in carrying out the 
 promptings of a divine love. 
 
 If any one in his hours of depression is haunted 
 with the feeling that he is too insignificant to at- 
 tract God's personal attention, much more be the 
 object of his constant loving care, he will find 
 himself wonderfully reassured if he will lay down 
 the telescope and take up the microscope, for he 
 will soon see that the fault is all in himself, in 
 that he has had a far too meagre conception of 
 God's thought-range and breadth of sympathy. 
 Such an examination will disclose to him that, 
 as a positive fact, God has somehow found abun- 
 dant time, notwithstanding the multiplicity and 
 the magnitude of the interests of his vast universe, 
 to give his personal attention to the equipping 
 and provisioning of beings of infinitesimal mi- 
 nuteness. That mighty hand in whose hollow the 
 heavens are held, has also sufficient delicacy and 
 precision of touch to fashion the finely reticulated 
 wing of the ephemeron. The same art-concep- 
 tion and marvelous skill that paint the sunset and 
 bend the rainbow have touched with most brilliant 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 71 
 
 pigment each feather in the plumage of the fly. 
 The same musician who has also conceived the 
 grand organ harmonies of ocean billow and 
 thunderburst, has also adjusted, part to part, 
 with loving care, that sweetest of musical instru- 
 ments, the throat of the skylark, whose wild 
 rapture of song so thrilled the ethereally gifted 
 Shelley that he immortalized it in verse as the 
 blithe spirit-voice of the air. 
 
 God apparently shows not only the same in- 
 finitude of care, but the same keen personal delight, 
 in his works in the domain of the minute as in 
 that of the vast and the mighty. Look deeply 
 as we may into nature with our most powerful 
 artificial lenses, even to the very microscope- 
 limit, we can detect no hasty oversight, no cold 
 indifference, but exhaustlessness of patience and 
 lavishment of thought, and in every detail of 
 each work an absolute faultlessness of finish. 
 Illustrations of these comforting truths abound 
 all about us. The world is full of them, but I 
 have time to cite only two or three. 
 
 There is a class of microscopic animals, the 
 Diatomaceje, which have existed in such vast 
 numbers that entire mountains have been found 
 composed of their remains. The forms of their 
 infinitesimal shells when magnified are discovered 
 to be of most exquisite beauty and of every con- 
 ceivable pattern. " In the same drop of moisture 
 there may be some dozen or twenty forms, each 
 with its own distinctive pattern, all as constant as 
 
72 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 they are distinctive, yet all having apparently the 
 same habits and without any perceptible difference 
 of function." Neither sexual nor natural selec- 
 tion has, so far as we can discover, any governing 
 influence here. In these varied beauties are there 
 not evidences, which scientific theorists have so 
 far failed successfully to controvert, of God's giv- 
 ing his personal attention to the adornment of 
 the minutest of his creatures, to his conceiving 
 and embodying in innumerable faultless forms and 
 pleasing combinations of tints his conceptions of 
 beauty? How this infinite painstaking has bene- 
 fited these mysterious specks of life, we have no 
 means of determining. Perhaps they come and 
 go without having the faintest intimation of the 
 symmetries and colorings which the Divine Archi- 
 tect and Artist has, by the interposition of direct 
 will power, introduced into their calcareous palace 
 homes. We cannot prove that it was for their 
 especial benefit these patterns and paintings were 
 designed. Perhaps the ultimate purpose was the 
 aesthetic culture of inquiring human souls, or it 
 may be that other and even higher ends will come 
 to light in some after age. Certain it is such 
 painstaking implies a purpose, and whether we 
 can discover it or not, the fact brings with it, 
 to every thoughtful mind, with overwhelmingly 
 convincing force, that God is personally conver- 
 sant with, and has taken an active personal in- 
 terest in, the life-furnishings of creatures so 
 minute that their individual forms are to us ab- 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 73 
 
 solutely invisible without the aid of the micro- 
 scope, and so low in the scale of being that 
 naturalists are still divided in opinion as to whether 
 they are animals or plants. 
 
 The inorganic world equally abounds in illustra- 
 tive proofs of this same comforting truth. I will 
 select a single one. The luminous flame that has 
 brightened human homes through all civilized 
 centuries is an aeriform chemical combination of 
 hydrogen with oxygen and carbon. The dif- 
 ference in the degree of inflammability of the first 
 two gases is the cause of all the illuminating 
 properties of the flame, and yet that diff^erence 
 is so slight that the times of their ignition are 
 separated by a period absolutely imperceptible to 
 our unaided senses. The hydrogen takes fire a 
 very small fraction of a second before the carbon, 
 and as it unites with the oxygen of the air it 
 lets go its chemical hold on the carbon, which the 
 instant it is thus released changes from a gas to 
 a solid, so that into the colorless flame of hydrogen 
 is constantly being showered the finest carbonic 
 dust. These minute particles become little glow- 
 ing coals emitting a brilliant light just for an in- 
 stant and then, like the hydrogen, spring into 
 the chemical embrace of the all-devouring oxygen. 
 The infinite painstaking here displayed, the deli- 
 cate nicety of adjustment, the critical attention 
 to the minutest details, are no less astounding 
 than the world-embracing beneficence of the 
 results, 
 
74 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 The case of the little brown water-spider, to 
 which brief allusion has already been made, is the 
 only other illustration I shall have space to give 
 of God's personal, painstaking care over the mi- 
 nutest matters in his kingdom. In common with 
 the numerous species of this order of articulates 
 which abound in all parts of the world, this diminu- 
 tive creature has had given to it four pairs of 
 seven-j ointed legs, the last joint armed with two 
 hooks toothed like a comb, frontal poison-fed 
 claws, eight eyes and a multitude of spinnerets 
 from whose infinitesimal openings issues a gluti- 
 nous liquid which the Instant the air strikes it 
 hardens Into threads Invisible from their fineness 
 until they are massed together into a single, strong, 
 elastic cable. But it has furnishings and instinc- 
 tive Impulses peculiarly Its own. Its body has a 
 thick covering of hair which It has been taught to 
 most curiously utilize. Strange to say, this air- 
 breathing animal Is prompted to build its home and 
 rear Its little ones on the beds of streams, and the 
 devices by which It has been enabled to surmount 
 what to us would seem insuperable obstacles may 
 well fill us with admiring wonder. It weaves a 
 diving-bell, air-tight, mouth downward, and ties 
 it tightly to the bottom. Then coming to the 
 surface it covers Its hairy abdomen with fine web, 
 lies on its back until all the Interstices between 
 the hairs and the meshes of web are filled with air, 
 swims under the bell, presses out Into It the en- 
 tangled air, comes again to the surface, and re- 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 75 
 
 peats the process, until all the water at first in 
 the bell has been displaced, and the bell made 
 habitable. 
 
 In all this procedure the spider has unquestion- 
 ably been guided by him who equipped it. No 
 candid and appreciative observer can fail to note 
 this, for what, can it be imagined, first determined 
 it, supposing it to be following out its own think- 
 ing, thus to locate its nest under water, for it has 
 no gills fitting it for such a habitat, or how did 
 it study out so ingenious a method for making 
 such an undertaking possible? The inventor of 
 this bell must have known that air is lighter 
 than water, that it can be mechanically retained in 
 fine fabrics, and that when Introduced into an 
 inverted receiver it will crowd out the water, in- 
 stead of being absorbed by it. Has this spider 
 been so close a student of nature as to have dis- 
 covered these laws of physics, and Is it so gifted 
 an inventor as thus ingeniously to have applied 
 its knowledge, without either instruction or ex- 
 perience? This daintiest of palaces must have 
 been thought out in all its details before the spider 
 began spinning its first thread, for the weaver 
 shows no hesitancy and makes no mistake. It 
 must also have been the work of a single mind, 
 for its parts are so intimately correlated that the 
 absence of a single one would not simply obscure 
 the conception. It would totally destroy it. There 
 must be either perfection or flat failure. This 
 alternative was presented to the first spider of the 
 
76 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 species. I would like to show, had I time, how 
 this little creature is also equally blessed with 
 Divine guidance as to how and where it shall de- 
 posit its eggs, how enwrap them in clusters with 
 silken cocoons for protection and warmth, when 
 and how to release the tiny babies from their 
 coverings and transport and feed them when first 
 they come, as they are sure to do, in swarming 
 and hungry companies. 
 
 The equally marvelous prescience and skill dis- 
 played by all instinct guided creatures and their 
 equally marvelous equipment for their work, af- 
 ford us illustrative proofs without number of 
 God's most intimate acquaintance with, and loving 
 care for, the momentary interests of earth's speech- 
 less, soulless, perishing myriads. Neither their 
 implements nor their skill can be accounted for 
 as the slow outcome of stem experience, for their 
 instinctive promptings are followed blindly, and 
 their wisdom and skill antedate experience, and 
 are independent of the aids of instruction or of 
 any working model. To the progenitors at least 
 of every animal species, there has come a direct 
 divine impressment and informing. New wants 
 with correspondingly new implements and new in- 
 stinctive impulses issued from the creative will of 
 the Almighty. Provision was doubtless made at 
 the incoming of each species for the transmission, 
 through the laws of heredity, of such traits as 
 should constitute its distinctive endowment, and 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 77 
 
 thus a general supervision over each species in- 
 stituted. 
 
 But still more specific provision seems to have 
 been made to cover exceptional necessities, to an- 
 swer the demands of exceptional crises in the in- 
 dividual lives of the seemingly most insignificant. 
 There appears to have been left a certain latitude 
 of modification and amendment of instinctive 
 promptings. As I have already remarked, ani- 
 mals unquestionably possess, in common with us, 
 not only blindly followed instincts, but sense-per- 
 ception, association of objects and ideas, automatic 
 attention, involuntary memory, indeliberate voli- 
 tion, reproductive imagination, sympathetic emo- 
 tion, and emotional expression. Though the 
 phenomena of their thought-life may be classed 
 under these lov/er forms of mentality, though they 
 may never rise to deliberative, abstract, introver- 
 tive thinking, may never attain to self-conscious- 
 ness, having no self to be conscious of, may never 
 have the clear light of reason or ever exercise a 
 responsibly free choice, yet they do seem to have 
 had some means provided for supplementing in- 
 stinct in those peculiar emergencies for which no 
 general provision through instinct could be se- 
 cured. This clearly evidences to us that God's 
 providential care, even over the lowliest, extends 
 beyond the segregated mass that constitutes the 
 species to each separate individual In it, and even 
 to that Individual's exceptional needs. The think- 
 ing here displayed, though outside the circle of 
 
78 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 instinct proper, will still be found, on final anal- 
 ysis, to be God's, and not theirs. 
 
 To receive the full force of this comforting 
 truth, we must keep in mind that all this loving 
 care is taken for creatures of a day, who are here 
 hemmed in by simple sense, and who have promise 
 of no tomorrow; and we must also keep in mind, 
 what science has not only conclusively demon- 
 strated, but illumined and glorified by its extensive 
 researches, that man is a microcosm, the crown of 
 creation, the consummate flower of all the ages, 
 that it was for him this world was provided with 
 its mineral deposits, rock-quarries, and coal beds, 
 with its vast reservoirs of oil, its dense forests and 
 waving grain and grasses, with its flocks and herds, 
 with its mighty elemental forces, with its flower- 
 petals, its arching rainbows, and its painted skies. 
 
 It was to secure for him, nature's sccptcred 
 king, a fitting environment, that all the mighty 
 processes of evolution had been carried on through 
 all the untold geologic eons of forgotten time, and 
 it was for him earth was fitted up, not as a per- 
 manent home, as the all-in-all of his existence, 
 but simply as a first year's training school for 
 powers which, though barely budding now, have 
 in them the promise and the potency of an endless 
 life and of a divine likeness. A single deathless hu- 
 man soul outweighs in worth ten thousand worlds 
 of lower sentient life. 
 
 The now widely studied, though still very imper- 
 fectly understood, sub-conscious mind widens 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 79 
 
 vastly our conceptions of the exalted and inex- 
 haustible resources of the human spirit and 
 furnishes new and unmistakable evidences of its 
 immortality. Recent researches in psychology 
 reveal to us that this spirit in this submerged 
 realm never tires, never sleeps, that it is far- 
 reaching in its activities even when the wearied 
 bodily organism is wrapped in profoundest 
 slumber, that it ceaselessly carries on the vital 
 chemistries of the body, building up and main- 
 taining its bony framework and many different 
 tissues out of the mass of crude material fur- 
 nished for its fashioning, that it lifts the curtains 
 of the future in premonitory dreams, that no idea 
 or incident once made known to it ever fades from 
 its memory, that by some subtile system of mental 
 telegraphy it sends its messages out over conti- 
 nents and rolling seas, that it even measures vast 
 distances in projecting its personal presence in 
 times of mortal stress as if transported on the 
 wings of angels, that it reaches out with clear 
 vision and with dynamic power without the inter- 
 vention and beyond the limits of the body, that 
 it banishes under the laws of suggestion many 
 forms of disease almost instantly even in cases 
 in which skilled physicians have met with dis- 
 couraging failure, that it has filled every depart- 
 ment of human thought and activity with the in- 
 explicable dazzling splendor of the works of 
 genius. 
 
 In reading authentic accounts of its achieve- 
 
80 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 ments it is hard for us to realize that we are not 
 in fairy land, that there are not being rehearsed 
 to us extravaganzas equal to those in the Arabian 
 Nights' Entertainments. But the more we search 
 the carefully prepared scientific records of its 
 achievements, astounding though they are, the 
 more we are convinced of their verity and their 
 deep significance. We have here at hand an 
 Aladdin's magical lamp that can uncover to us 
 hidden treasures of priceless riches and place at 
 our bidding slave genii of wonder-working power. 
 But while the evidence shows us conclusively 
 that such marvelous capacities have been placed 
 in our keeping yet it also shows that they have 
 been reserved in large measure for some other life 
 beyond, from the very fact that only under ex- 
 ceptional supernormal conditions are occasional 
 glimpses of them now possible, that only very 
 partial use is placed as yet within our reach and 
 that they are hung about with such a cloud of 
 impenetrable mystery. To its magical workings 
 in the field of therapeutics we have already directed 
 attention. It will suffice, perhaps, for our present 
 purpose to call attention more especially to but a 
 single one of its other manifestations, the one last 
 mentioned, that of the conceptual, creative powers 
 of genius. Here we have a glimpse at least, and 
 can form perhaps an approximate estimate of 
 God's priceless gifts to us and of his far-reaching 
 designs concerning us during the coming endless 
 years, and may be able to dismiss all further doubt 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 81 
 
 of our being worthy in his eyes of unremittent 
 care during this the formative first period of our 
 existence. 
 
 The wide differences among men in the degree 
 of endowment, apparent to-day, are, for our com- 
 fort be it spoken, but the temporary accidents of 
 perishable, inadequately equipped bodies, and of 
 a temporary world-environment. 
 
 Difference in hindy without conferring pre- 
 cedence in point of worth, but simply promoting 
 and assuring pleasurable variety, will probably 
 always remain, but differences in degree will de- 
 pend upon the future determining power of the 
 human will, for each incarnate spirit is one of 
 God's immortals, in whose germinal nature is 
 wrapped up the incalculable possibilities of an end- 
 less growth. 
 
 The distinguishing characteristics of genius 
 are spontaneity, power to create, sudden and un- 
 anticipated revelations of the deepest secrets in 
 nature and life, bright, unbidden concepts in 
 mathematics, in music, poetry, sculpture and paint- 
 ing, in oratorical achievement, in military strategy, 
 in farseeing statesmanship, in every department 
 of thought and action. 
 
 The uneducated boy Colbum, by processes of 
 computation which he never could explain, which 
 were as much a mystery to him as to every one else, 
 would give the cube roots of the largest numbers 
 offered him almost instantly, with unvarying ac- 
 curacy, without pencil or paper, seemingly with- 
 
82 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 out any mental effort. His mind through some 
 unknown automatic action, through some intimate 
 acquaintance with the laws of numbers, too pro- 
 found for our fathoming, instantly reached results 
 which in the ordinary way would require long, 
 tedious, complicate calculations. 
 
 I distinctly recall a case cited in one of my 
 college text books on mental science of a distin- 
 guished professor who, puzzling one evening with- 
 out avail until bed time over the solution of a 
 problem in higher mathematics, at last in a fit of 
 discouragement threw his paper aside and retired 
 to rest. In the middle of the night his wife being 
 awakened by some noise in the room, discovered 
 that her husband, though still sound asleep had 
 returned to his desk. After a time he went back 
 to bed with his sleep still undisturbed. In the 
 morning to the astonishment of them both they 
 found the whole solution In all its stages carefully 
 written out in the dark on the papers left lying 
 open on his desk. He never afterward could gain 
 the slightest recollection of ever having during 
 the night raised his head from the pillow. 
 
 The author, the artist, the musical composer, all 
 creative geniuses, oftentimes confess that they 
 cannot explain how their best works are produced ; 
 that they can never by directly willing it attain 
 to the same degree of creative freedom ; that the 
 divine afflatus is at times very coy, then again it 
 comes unbidden and is excessively domineering and 
 persistent until the record is made ; that in inspired 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? SB 
 
 moments some power, apparently outside them- 
 selves, gains control ; that the clearest vision of 
 intricate situations and the most surprising facility 
 of expression are suddenly placed at their disposal, 
 they little dreaming that up from the fathomless 
 depths of their sub-conscious being come these 
 haunting phantoms and these most surprising 
 powers. 
 
 Helen Hunt Jackson, whom Emerson pro- 
 nounced one of the best, if not the best, poets 
 America has produced, in describing to a friend 
 the origin and the writing out of Ramona, that 
 superb Indian story which was the consummate 
 flower of her genius, and on which her fame will 
 ultimately rest, wrote, that for three or four years 
 she had longed to embody in a telling fiction her 
 conception of the red-man's claim upon the white 
 man who was heartlessly crowding him off from 
 his hunting grounds, but that she had hopelessly 
 brooded over the theme, being utterly unable to 
 formulate a plot, or conceive of the proper local 
 coloring for background " until," as she relates, 
 " one October morning before I was wide awake 
 the whole plot flashed into mj'^ mind — not a vague 
 one either, — the whole story just as It stands to- 
 day, in less than five minutes, as if some one spoke 
 It. I sprang up, went to my husband's room and 
 told him. I was half frightened. From that 
 time till I came here It haunted me, becoming 
 more and more vivid. I was Impatient to get at 
 it. I wrote the first of it December First. As 
 
84 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 soon as I began to write it seemed impossible to 
 write fast enough. In spite of myself I wrote 
 faster than I would write a letter. I write two 
 to three thousand words in a morning and I can- 
 not help it. It racks me like a struggle with an 
 outside power. I cannot help being superstitious 
 about it. I have never done half the amount of 
 work in the same time. Ordinarily it would be a 
 simple impossibility. Twice since beginning it I 
 have broken down utterly for a while, with a cold 
 ostensibly, but with great nervous prostration 
 added. 
 
 " What I have to endure in holding myself away 
 from it, the afternoons I am compelled to be in 
 the house, no words can tell. What do you 
 think ? Am I possessed of a demon ? Is it a freak 
 of mental disturbance or what ? " 
 
 It is related of this gifted author that during 
 her last illness immediately on waking one morn- 
 ing a new exquisitely finished poem monopolized 
 her thoughts and pressed for utterance. She re- 
 cited it to her attending physician when he called, 
 and asked for an explanation as to its origin, ap- 
 parently surmising it to be a premonition, a 
 masked prophecy, of her fast approaching fate. 
 
 Longfellow has kindly lifted the curtain for 
 us as to the origin of some of his poems. " The 
 Arrow and the Song " came into his mind he 
 tells us instantaneously. " My Lost Youth " oc- 
 curred to him in the night after a day of pain 
 and was written out the next morning. On an- 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 85 
 
 other occasion at midnight he was sitting by his 
 fire when suddenly it was suggested to him to write 
 the Ballad of the Schooner Hesperus " which,'* 
 he says, " I accordingly did. Then I went to bed 
 but could not sleep. New thoughts were running 
 in my mind and I got up and added them to the 
 ballad. It was three by the clock when I had 
 finished. I then went to bed and fell asleep. The 
 poem hardly cost me an effort. It did not come 
 into my mind by lines but by stanzas." He had a 
 similar experience in writing " The Beleaguered 
 City " and " The Lock of Edenhall." 
 
 Rev. Dr. Stowe recently related in his lecture 
 on " Uncle Tom's Cabin " ; " My mother had not 
 the faintest idea what she would write about until 
 one day she was in church and suddenly the whole 
 scene of Uncle Tom and Legree floated before her 
 eyes. She broke into a fit of uncontrollable weep- 
 ing. When she reached home she went up to her 
 room and immediately wrote out that familiar 
 chapter, * The Death of Uncle Tom,' " over which, 
 we may add, the whole reading world has since 
 shed many a sympathetic tear. 
 
 Coleridge's " Kubla Khan " sprang into being 
 during the hours of profound sleep. What has 
 been preserved is but the merest fragment of his 
 vision, for while eagerly writing down the stanzas 
 as he recalled them he was suddenly summoned 
 out on business and detained for over an hour, and 
 on his return he found that only eight or ten 
 scattering lines, out of the two or three hundred 
 
86 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 which he was confident had been thus composed 
 without conscious effort, would answer to his 
 summons. This dream-bom poetic rendering of 
 his vision had fled from him forever. 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson, in his paper on 
 " Dreams," tells us that even his hours of sleep 
 were thronged with the little Brownies, breathing 
 out their loves and hates, which in his pages he 
 has so vividly limned into life. Indeed, then it 
 was in these very hours his creative faculties 
 wrought with greatest intensity, with most over- 
 mastering power. Dickens could not keep back 
 the throng of strange folk that peopled his im- 
 agination. They would come apparently without 
 his bidding. He would listen with rapt attention 
 to their sprightly conversations as if they were 
 palpable personages in the real world outside him- 
 self instead of the airy nothings to which he had 
 given a habitation and a name. 
 
 It is said of Schubert that " year after year he 
 wrote music of indescribable beauty in such enor- 
 mous quantities that but for the dates on the manu- 
 scripts we could not credit the account of his 
 biographers. He wrote because when his genius 
 inspired him he could not refrain. His pieces 
 were produced by hundreds and with a rapidity 
 bordering on the miraculous, seven or eight in a 
 day. He never repeated himself. Every produc- 
 tion was the result of a new inspiration, committed 
 to paper at the moment of conception, and all 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 87 
 
 received worthy treatment and bore the unmistak- 
 able imprint of genius." 
 
 Blind Tom, having no capacity whatever for 
 training, whose objective mind was an idiotic 
 blank, astonished the world by his exhibition of 
 a wonderful gift, being able to accurately repro- 
 duce the most difficult classical compositions on 
 the keyboard of the piano, and even to improvise 
 at will productions of remarkable excellence. 
 
 At the opening of the last century Toussaint 
 d'Overture, the Haytian Liberator, who had been 
 a slave until fifty, astonished the world by his 
 energy and matchless genius in battle. 
 
 The English were driven from every strong- 
 hold, twenty-eight Spanish forts in four days, fell 
 before his advancing columns ; he maintained 
 against an allied enemy long lines of Impregnable 
 defense, successfully besieged St. Mark and closed 
 the campaign by English capitulation and the re- 
 treat of the Spanish forces. Napoleon, the First 
 Consul of France, fearful of the rising splendor 
 of the negro chieftain sent against the Island 
 thirty thousand veterans and upwards of sixty war 
 ships, dreaming of easy triumphs and the re- 
 enslavement of a free people. His generals long 
 drilled in war and fresh from conquests on the 
 continent, here at last found a master. In the 
 conflict that followed ten thousand of Napoleon's 
 trained soldiery were slain, and the disordered 
 remnant of his defeated forces fell an easy prey 
 
88 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 to the galling fire of tlie mountain marksmen. 
 Only by cowardly intrigue, by treacherous appeal 
 to the most generous impulses, by empty profes- 
 sions of friendship and by lying promises of liberal 
 rule, did this ambitious, cold-blooded despot of 
 France at last prevail. 
 
 Toussaint could have truthfully said in the 
 beautiful words of the Eastern fable, " I was but 
 common clay until roses were planted in me." 
 
 Sir William R. Hamilton evolved the intricate 
 conception of the invention of quarternions while 
 walking with Lady Hamilton in the streets of 
 Dublin, the flash of discovery coming to him just 
 as he was approaching the Brougham Bridge. 
 
 Mozart had the aria of the beautiful quintette 
 in the " Magic Flute " revealed to him while play- 
 ing a game of billiards and seemed prepared for 
 such occasional influxes of musical ideas by carry- 
 ing a note book for their instant record. When 
 he was but thirteen years old he composed an 
 opera and directed it. He wrote of himself, " If 
 one has the spirit of a composer he writes because 
 he cannot help himself. Whence and how my 
 ideas come, I know not nor can I force them. 
 Those that please me I retain. They fire my soul, 
 the subject enlarges, becomes methodized and de- 
 fined, and the whole, though long, stands almost 
 complete and finished in my mind so that I can 
 survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue 
 at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination 
 the parts successively but as it were all at once," 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 89 
 
 " An inventor suddenly conceived the proper 
 way of constructing a prism for a binocular 
 microscope, a problem which he had long thought 
 of and abandoned, while he was reading an un- 
 interesting novel." 
 
 The late Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, in describing 
 the way in which that majestic, inspired Battle 
 Hymn of hers happily characterized by another as 
 a " swinging, splendid lyric, the war song of mih- 
 tant righteousness," sang itself into being while 
 she slept, remarks, " The road was so filled with 
 soldiers that our return from the parade ground 
 to the city was very tedious, and to pass the time 
 away we sang * John Brown's Body.' Some of 
 the marching regiments took it up and it was 
 passed along the road until the echoes reverberated 
 for miles. My pastor asked me why I did not 
 put the spirit of ' John Brown's body lies 
 a-mold'ring in the grave ' into some graceful and 
 expressive words. I told him I had tried. One 
 morning soon after that I awoke suddenly about 
 daylight and the lines I wanted were running 
 vaguely through my mind. I arose and wrote 
 them down. They were published in the Atlantic 
 Monthly and the editor named them ' The Battle 
 Hymn of the Republic' " 
 
 The astounding achievements of this secretly 
 working sub-conscious self are almost past belief. 
 They are so significant and suggestive in the 
 present discussion I cannot refrain from adding 
 two or three more to the number already recited. 
 
90 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 W. Poole, F. R. S., in describing how Bidder 
 could determine mentally the logarithm of any 
 number to seven or eight places says, " He had 
 almost a miraculous power of seeing, as it were, 
 intuitively what factors would divide any large 
 number, not a prime. Thus if he were given the 
 number 17,861 he would instantly remark it was 
 337 X 53. He could not, he said, explain how 
 he did this, it seemed a natural instinct to him." 
 Bidder himself remarks, " Whenever I feel called 
 upon to make use of the stores of my mind they 
 seem to arise with the rapidity of lightning.'* 
 Prof. Safford, Mondeux Prolongeau and others re- 
 late similar experiences. Buxton would talk freely 
 while mentally performing his intricate calcula- 
 tions, that being no molestation or hindrance to 
 him. 
 
 Sir John Herschel's Experience in Geometrical- 
 Spectres led him to remark that " we have evidence 
 of a thought, an intelligence working within our 
 organization distinct from our ordinary per- 
 sonality." 
 
 M. Sully Prudhomme, at once a psychologist 
 and a poet, says, " I have sometimes suddenly un- 
 derstood a geometrical demonstration made to me 
 a year previously without having in any way 
 directed thereto any attention or will. It seems 
 that the mere spontaneous ripening of the con- 
 ceptions which the lectures had implanted in my 
 brain had brought about within me this novel 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 91 
 
 grasp of the proof. A like personal history is 
 given by Arago and Cardillac. 
 
 George Sand, the famous French novelist, tells 
 us that " in the act of writing she felt a continu- 
 ous and effortless flow of ideas, sometimes with 
 and sometimes without an extemalization of the 
 characters who spoke in her romances." Mrs. 
 Gamp, Dickens' greatest creation, persistently 
 thrust her voluble personality upon his attention 
 especially in church when he was in the act of 
 worship. 
 
 Very recently Professor W. Bert Reese a Ger- 
 man resident of New York City, exhibited, under 
 exceptionally guarded conditions, powers of clair- 
 voyant sight and mind reading in the presence 
 of such trained investigators as the famed in- 
 ventor Thomas A. Edison, a pronounced skeptic 
 as to immortality and the existence of a soul, and 
 of Dr. Wm. H. Thompson, author of the book 
 entitled " Brain and Personality," and others alike 
 eminent in intellectual circles. It was the unani- 
 mous verdict that the Professor actually possessed 
 these marvelous powers which to them were utterly 
 inexplicable, Edison simply placed the strange 
 phenomena in the same category with the feats 
 of mathematical, musical, mechanical, and literary 
 prodigies, as results, all of them, of some super- 
 development of senses and gifts that will some day 
 in the further evolution of the race come out into 
 the open. But as I have already remarked, does 
 
92 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 not the very fact that thus far through all the 
 past ages they and other occult powers have been 
 largely the product of abnormal states, rarely, 
 very rarely, tractable and serviceable in this 
 present life, only occasionally and very imperfectly 
 displayed, thus dimly intimating that there are 
 hidden away, somewhere in some way, vast stores 
 of mental wealth, with little or no advance in the 
 unraveling of their mystery, does not this fact 
 warrant us rather in the belief that they are being 
 purposely held in reserve as promises and proph- 
 ecies of some other larger, fuller, freer life beyond? 
 
 I will not further multiply instances of the 
 magical workings of this submerged self, although 
 they brighten every age of human history and are 
 to be met with in every walk in human life. 
 
 I would not have given as many as I have were 
 I not especially impressed with their deep signifi- 
 cance and solicitous to place upon them the em- 
 phasis which is their due, for right here in this 
 very realm of the sub-conscious self, this mystery- 
 shrouded border-land of the spirit, the birth-place 
 of intuitions, we cannot help but see of what price- 
 less worth is every separate human soul, we can all 
 but catch the sound of angel-voices, we come into 
 closest touch with the Infinite. 
 
 Having described at some length in my answer, 
 elsewhere to the question, " Was Christ Divine? " 
 the discoveries and conclusions of science as to 
 man's place in nature, and having no space here 
 for its general discussion, I will content myself 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 93 
 
 with the simple statement that the more profoundly 
 phenomena have been studied by scientists and 
 scientific philosophers, the more clearly and glori- 
 ously has it been revealed that God has been busied 
 through untold ages in preparing for man's ad- 
 vent, that man has been the grand goal of his 
 endeavor, the ultima Thule of his creative thought 
 on this planet ; that all this prolonged preparation 
 could not have been merely to render comfortable 
 a short-lived and low-planed animal existence, that 
 this patient approach could not have been to a 
 consummation so inconsequential and unworthy, 
 but that he for whom the centuries have been so 
 long waiting and to whose coming they have been 
 pointing with prophetic finger, who fulfills the 
 types, completes the prophecies, wears the crown, 
 surely was not bom to die ; that he who has 
 proved himself capable of unraveling the intri- 
 cacies and following the vast sweep of the Divine 
 thought as is evidenced by his discoveries in science, 
 his classifications of knowledge, his advancement 
 in the arts, his rapidly approaching universal 
 mastery and ingenious utilization of nature's 
 forces, his unconscious duplicating of God's 
 thought-processes as incorporated in the lives of 
 the world's silent, instinct-guided workers and in 
 the mechanism of their bodies ; he who has proved 
 himself capable of so apprehending the spirit of 
 God's vast creative plans as to be able to become 
 his sub-creator, noticeably multiplying and im- 
 proving the products of vegetable and animal life, 
 
94. DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 making the waters swarm, turning deserts Into 
 gardens, developing the crude possibilities of un- 
 tamed nature ; he whose whole being can thrill 
 with harmonies of sound, of form, and of color, 
 and who has not only reproduced them but carried 
 them to grand exaltations in oratorio and sculp- 
 tured marble, speaking canvas, cathedral pile, and 
 landscape gardening, and has laid all matter and 
 even all force under tribute to his aesthetic tastes ; 
 he who can thus enter with keen appreciative zest 
 and assimilative capacity into the thought-life of 
 God ; and, finally, he who has had entrusted to him, 
 what far transcend everything beside, the responsi- 
 ble gifts of moral discernment and liberty of 
 choice, out of which alone character can come, 
 surely must have reached, in point of privilege, 
 the very top of being, and must possess in living 
 germ the very attributes of God himself, with all 
 the golden possibilities of growth in God's eternal 
 years. 
 
 When we thus attempt to measure the worth and 
 dignity of man, we must also keep in mind that 
 each individual soul comes fresh from the Creator, 
 and is not simply the product of processes of 
 evolution begun in some far age and perpetuated 
 by secondary causes which God has long since 
 ceased to superintend and to whose general out- 
 come alone he has ever directed attention. The 
 soul's environment, its body and its wider sur- 
 roundings are, indeed, the result of such processes, 
 but each soul is In itself a unique spiritual entity. 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 95 
 
 bearing the imprint of a distinct personal purpose, 
 and constituting the embodiment of some cherished 
 ideal, some fond anticipation, some sacred love, 
 right out of the very throbbing heart of God. 
 
 The drift of the centuries has been to an ever 
 more complete development of individuality; it 
 has been a progress from homogeneity to hetero- 
 geneity ; such has been the history of evolution 
 from the dawn of time, as Spencer, Huxley, and 
 thinkers of that school have, through learned and 
 brilliant treatises, informed the world. 
 
 It is not the great mass as such that excites 
 God's loving interest, but the individualized units 
 in it. It was not the creating and provisioning 
 of a mighty human race simply as such that was 
 the ultima Thule of his thought, but the develop- 
 ing of the distinctive traits of individual souls, 
 and the establishing with them at the last, after 
 discipline has done its work, intimate and eternal 
 companionship. To think that God ever pro- 
 posed to stop short of this would be to belittle 
 his plan, to belie the teachings of all sound 
 science and philosophy, leave the grand scheme 
 of evolution incomplete, and judge of God as be- 
 ing coldly self-contained, craving no sympathy, 
 contentedly sitting apaii; in eternal isolation, 
 wholly unresponsive to the tender pleadings of his 
 children. 
 
 When we discover that God has given his per- 
 sonal attention and poured out a wealth of invent- 
 ive thought on every particle of dust, on every 
 
96 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 minutest fibre of every leaflet, on every organ 
 of every infinitesimal creature, we can no longer 
 reasonably withhold our faith in his sympathetic 
 presence with the humblest of his human children. 
 And so science will eventually forever silence the 
 fear of the self-depreciating, who, in their dis- 
 couragement, are tempted to doubt whether the 
 great God of the universe has ever in the vast 
 multiplicity of his affairs particularly noticed 
 them, much more kept loving and tireless watch 
 over their personal destiny, or ever sought for 
 their confidence and the outpouring of their long- 
 ing and their love. 
 
 But science has not only convinced us that we 
 have no valid reason for questioning God's sym- 
 pathetic presence, but furnished the strongest 
 possible grounds for resting our full faith upon 
 it, and making it the delight and inspiration of 
 our burdened souls. Those grounds it furnished 
 the moment it published its discovery that every 
 form of vegetive and animal life demanded an en- 
 vironment, that it has no resources in itself for 
 self-maintenance, and that also within its reach 
 it invariably found that on which it was fitted to 
 feed. Plants have required soils and sunlight and 
 distilling dews, and they have found them. 
 Though almost countless the peculiarities of 
 need, no species has appeared for which provision 
 has not been made awaiting its advent. The sea- 
 weed found its ocean bed and salted surf; the 
 cactus, its parched sand plain ; the lichen, its rock ; 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 97 
 
 edelweiss, its Alpine height; the gills and fins of 
 fish, oceans of water; the wings and lungs of 
 birds, oceans of air. Our eyes have found ob- 
 jects without to be painted on their retina within 
 and artist-sunbeams to paint them ; our olfactories, 
 the air loaded with odorous exhalations ; our 
 nerves of taste, a wide variety of flavors to select 
 and enjoy ; our ears, all nature vocal with a grand 
 concert of song. Not only are our bodies con- 
 stituted to touch and take in an environment and 
 find one wondrously suited to every need, but the 
 same is time of both our intellectual and emotional 
 capacities. All nature abounds with suggestive 
 thought. It is full of mental stimulant. It is 
 a book in which every grade of intellect finds pas- 
 sages of absorbing interest and deepest import. 
 Its leaves are turned eagerly by prattling children, 
 gray-haired savants, matter-of-fact men of affairs, 
 dream-enamored poets, and system-building phi- 
 losophers. Its lore is still unexhausted, though 
 the human race for scores of centuries has sought 
 to master it. It has depths of meaning which 
 human insight has not yet fathomed; heights of 
 sublime exaltation to which not even the most 
 spiritually gifted have yet attained. It Is full of 
 open letters to every sor and daughter of earth 
 with every sentence penned by a Divine hand. 
 Our longings for Intellectual and sympathetic 
 Interchange with our fellows have been met 
 through literature, and arts and architecture, 
 through family ties and ever widening social cir- 
 
98 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 cles. But with this almost Infinite painstaking to 
 provide a fitting environment for man, there is a 
 want which In all the fullness of God's works there 
 Is absolutely nothing suited to satisfy. Man In 
 his higher nature craves a sympathy which no 
 creature can give. Unless these spiritual aspira- 
 tions and deep longings, the sure tokens not only 
 of his Divine sonship but of his Divine likeness, 
 can find a Divine environment of companionship, 
 of interchange of thought and affection, all that is 
 God-like within him will languish and die and 
 he sink to brute life or below it. National and 
 individual history, wherever people have self- 
 exiled themselves from the Father, has furnished 
 sad cumulative proofs of this. Is it reasonable 
 to suppose that a plan so wonderful In its elab- 
 orate painstaking and masterful achievements, ex- 
 hibiting such seeming exhaustlessness of inventive 
 resource, would fail just where a failure must 
 prove so disastrous? Is it reasonable to suppose 
 that God would create man with a capacity and 
 a longing for his own sympathetic presence, in- 
 deed make that presence necessary to his well- 
 being, and then withhold it; that he would give 
 him spiritual lungs on whose respiration of an 
 atmosphere of Divine loving recognition his spir- 
 itual life depended, and then leave him to pant 
 and die In a vacuum? These questions carry with 
 them their own emphatic denial. To proclaim this 
 grand fact of God's sympathetic presence and to 
 embody It In a life was the glory of Christ's mis- 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 99 
 
 sion to this sin-cursed and sorrow-burdened world. 
 He even sealed it with his blood. 
 
 Thus from nature, philosophy, and the revealed 
 word there comes to this life-giving fact a three- 
 fold confimiation. 
 
 In our lonely hours, in hours of desperate bat- 
 tling with temptation, of bitter bereavement, of 
 perplexed and care-cumbered thought, at times 
 when our hearts bleed with poignant regret or 
 through unjust accusation, when friends on whom 
 we have leaned or in whom we have confided the 
 sacred secrets of our inner selves have become 
 estranged, through the long days of languish- 
 ment on sick beds, in moments when with stream- 
 ing eyes and trembling lips we bid good-by to 
 loved ones, in every hour of need, we are priv- 
 ileged to say^ as did the Saviour when the dark 
 clouds gathered about him : " And yet I am not 
 alone, for the Father is with me." 
 
 Into God's sympathetic presence the lovingly 
 obedient come, into its welcoming smile, its golden 
 sunlight, its eternal day. 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 IV 
 
 I have thus far attempted to show — 
 
 1. How God can interfere in nature whenever 
 he chooses without working any confusion, 
 abrogating any law, or destroying any force ; 
 
 2. That he has thus actually interfered, and 
 that repeatedly ; 
 
 3. That we are, each one of us, of sufficient 
 importance to warrant his interfering for us. 
 
 I now desire to consider whether we can reason- 
 ably believe that he will interfere because we ask 
 him, doing for us what otherwise he would not 
 have done. 
 
 In following out the different lines of inquiry 
 suggested by this theme, we have found that the 
 whole earth is instinct with the Divine Presence, 
 that whichever way we turn we stand face to face 
 with nature's God, witnessing not only finished 
 works replete with his thought, but works still be- 
 ing carried on by organized and tireless living 
 forces. These forces we have found wrapped in 
 such unfathomable mystery, working right before 
 our very eyes with such unabated vigor, such 
 wondrous precision, such wisdom, such irresistible- 
 ness of movement, that we have recognized Divine 
 thought and Divine power in every bit of rock 
 crystal, every pendent leaf, every tint of sky or 
 painted petal, every liquid note of bird, or rest- 
 100 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 101 
 
 less tongue of flame. And it has greatly en- 
 hanced our pleasure to find that our own minds 
 are so akin to the Divine that we can trace with 
 clear, interpretive insight the great trend of God's 
 thoughts through the ages as they have become 
 incarnated one by one; for when, from off that 
 illumined face confronting us everywhere, there 
 thus fades that strange faraway look and in its 
 stead comes an answering glance of recognition 
 and kindly greeting, that face apparently draws 
 so near we can all but feel its warm touch upon 
 our cheek, look down into the infinite depths of its 
 love-lit eyes, and see the parting of its lips as they 
 break the long-kept silence with words of bene- 
 diction. 
 
 But it appearing that these forces are derivative 
 and delegated, rather than direct acts of Divine 
 will, we have found that we must take other steps 
 in our thinking before we can reach that assurance 
 for which every human heart hungers, of God's 
 still being present on this earth and still actively 
 interested in it ; for otherwise, what grounds have 
 we for believing that these forces were not fully 
 commissioned ages ago, and that since then God 
 has gone far into the stellar depths to people 
 other planets and never once come back again or 
 even given this little globe a passing thought.? 
 for otherwise, how do we know but that the earth 
 is nothing more than a finished piece of mechanism, 
 like the watches we carry, and, like them, wound 
 up and kept running by the coiled energy of some 
 
102 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 hidden spiral spring? Happily we have discovered 
 that matter and force are of such a nature, and so 
 related, that abundant opportunity has been af- 
 forded, and with apparent design, for the effective 
 intervention at any time of direct will-power. A 
 study of our own experiences has suggested this ; 
 for, if we by the might of our own wills have 
 wrought such multitudinous changes on the earth, 
 we can readily conceive that the Divine will can 
 work by analogous methods, and be as much more 
 effective as the Divine knowledge transcends the 
 human. It cannot, as we have found, be reason- 
 ably urged that this, God's, direct personal inter- 
 ference would be a confession of flaw in his 
 scheme of evolution, as provision for this may 
 have been and doubtless was, a part of that very 
 scheme. He, as we have seen, left many of his 
 works incomplete with the evident design that 
 man's will should complete them ; and if provision 
 was thus made for the after use of the guiding 
 force of the human will, why not for that of the 
 Divine? And we are confirmed in this faith when 
 we reflect that, otherwise, God, instead of being 
 an cxhaustless fountain of outflowing, energizing 
 thought, instead of being to us the very personi- 
 fication of living force, of tireless mental buoy- 
 ancy and zest, becomes a picture of changeless, 
 thoughtless, emotionless calm, of absolute mental 
 stagnation ; all the vast plans of his whole universe 
 of worlds, having been completed inconceivable 
 ages ago, not only determined upon to theii: 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 103 
 
 minutest details, but intrusted for their unfold- 
 ing to agencies fully commissioned and empowered 
 to carry out those details to the very letter. Since 
 that time, which lies in a past so remote that no 
 finite imagination can conceive it, he must have 
 been lying with folded hands and folded thought 
 and folded feeling, virtually dead in the midst of 
 the abounding life which he himself created. This 
 conception of the Divine existence is repellent to 
 every earnest active soul, and there is nothing in 
 the discoveries of science to compel such a belief. 
 The perfecting of the intellectual and spiritual in 
 man must, of course, be God's highest work here, 
 and command his chief attention. But he has 
 linked the soul indissolubly with matter and 
 cosmic force in this world certainly, and also in 
 the next, if the Bible disclosures be true ; for after 
 death our souls, so says the record, will still be 
 clothed upon, though the garments be of an im- 
 perishable and glorified texture. So we have no 
 warrant in afl^rming that God has withdrawn his 
 personal oversight and interference from any, 
 even the lowest of his kingdoms, so long as they 
 are so inseparably intertwined, and exercise over 
 each other an influence so vital and lasting. 
 
 The facts of the past as disclosed by science, 
 we have found to confirm us in this faith; the 
 progressive changes from a first formless chaos 
 of dead atoms to whirling sun-clusters and solar 
 systems of organized peopled worlds being but 
 the stately steppings of a creating God, and testi- 
 
104 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 tying to a sleepless watch and tireless activity as 
 the ages have one by one rolled by. On this 
 revelation of God's mode of existence in the past 
 we may safely predicate that of to-day and of all 
 coming time. We can feel assured that his hands 
 will never fold in weariness in caring for his own, 
 that his eyes will never close in listless inattention 
 to their fate, that he will never surrender to del- 
 egated forces the full conduct of the complex af- 
 fairs of his universe; but will ever be a command- 
 ing and directing power everywhere present to the 
 uttermost bounds of space, — just as the vital 
 forces within the boundaries of these bodies of 
 ours sway the cosmic, only more perfectly ; and as 
 our spirits, so mysteriously housed within, order 
 the organs to answer the behests of their all- 
 governing wills. 
 
 But having progressed thus far in our at- 
 tempted solution of this most perplexing problem, 
 we find ourselves confronted by questions far more 
 formidable than any we have yet met. They are 
 questions which are sure to intrude whenever there 
 is any thorough thinking on this theme. They 
 have proved such fruitful sources of doubt in 
 earnestly inquiring minds, that, instead of being, 
 as they too often are, ignored or evaded by the 
 leaders of Christian thought, they should be 
 squarely met and fully answered. I remember 
 stating them once at a prayer-meeting presided 
 over by my pastor, who was also a college pro- 
 fessor, and, although they were perfectly germane 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 105 
 
 to the subject of the evening, and I asked for light 
 and needed it, he simply remarked, " There is some 
 intellectual difficulty in that," and immediately 
 passed to other things, and neither in public nor 
 private discourse did he in the slightest manner ever 
 again allude to them. This reverend teacher in his 
 evasive indifference is, I fear, far from being an 
 exceptional case, for it has never been my fortune 
 to have either heard from the pulpit or seen in 
 print any attempted reply. 
 
 Grant, says the doubting Thomas, that it is true 
 and demonstrable, as claimed, that God can inter- 
 fere, that he has interfered and is still interfering, 
 and interfering every day and hour, in every in- 
 dividual life, watching that life with loving 
 interest and with unremitting care, still what proof 
 is there, in all this, that prayer has in a single 
 instance effected any change in the plans which 
 God had formed before the prayer was uttered? 
 Has any prayer given God any new information 
 as to the needs of any petitioner; or rather, has 
 not God had from the first an infinitely fuller 
 and more accurate knowledge of the entire life- 
 necessities of every soul than the soul itself can 
 ever possibly have, with its imperfect finite facul- 
 ties and meagre experience? Is it not absurd to 
 imagine that we can in any way instruct Jehovah? 
 Do not our prayers appear to him who knows our 
 real needs but utterances of wildest absurdities? 
 But, further asks the questioner, suppose they do 
 sometimes actually voice our real wants, have not 
 
106 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 those wants already been known to God and def- 
 initely provided for by him? Has he not been 
 busy for ages fitting up this world for us? Are 
 not those instances of his direct interference which 
 are insisted on as having actually occurred and 
 as still occurring, as much parts of this original 
 plan as the formation of a crystal or the growth 
 of a tree? Has he not thought out to the mi- 
 nutest detail just what to do and how to do it? 
 Are the forces at work in the world, and their 
 combinations, so complex that exigencies are con- 
 stantly arising which escaped God's foreknowl- 
 edge or for which he failed to provide? Does 
 science or revelation afford us any warrant for 
 thus limiting God's wisdom, for questioning the 
 perfection of his works? If God thus thought 
 out deliberately and fully his vast plans before he 
 uttered his first creative fiat, and had as his guide 
 a perfect and all-comprehending foreknowledge, 
 think you his will has since become so vacillating 
 that he can be cajoled against his best judgment, 
 or that more kindly feeling can be enkindled 
 within him, by the blind, passionate pleadings of 
 creatures of his own make, and whose lives are yet 
 but in the bud? 
 
 The only reply I have ever heard given leaves 
 the difficulties just where it found them. It is 
 this, that the prayers of God's people have been 
 all foreknown to him, and their answers provided 
 for, uncomputcd ages before they were uttered; 
 that they entered into God's thought when he 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 107 
 
 formed his original plan, and were made to con- 
 stitute an integral part of it. This reply is so 
 plausible and has given such general satisfaction, 
 that it may be regarded as the accepted creed of 
 Christendom. 
 
 Suppose this were true, that God has both fore- 
 known all prayers and made ample provision for 
 each as each deserves, would not the difficulties 
 just urged still remain? For if the prayer of a 
 righteous man availeth much, as the Scriptures 
 teach, and if it had influence with God, as Chris- 
 tians believe, what matters it, so far as these ob- 
 jections lie, whether that influence is exerted now 
 or was exerted ages ago? For, according to the 
 supposition, prayer has actually wrought a change 
 in the Divine purpose just the same, only at an 
 earlier date; and it is just as truly an embodiment 
 of the blind longings of a finite being addressed 
 to an infinite God; and the fact of the prayer's 
 availing — which must mean, if it means anything, 
 that it actually effects a change in God's plan at 
 the time its influence is felt — -witnesses just as 
 pointedly against the perfection of God's plan, 
 since it existed before the change was wrought, 
 and against the stability of his purpose, whether 
 that change occurs now or took place before the 
 chaotic fire-mist was rolled into suns. But, say 
 you, how, then, can the objection be answered? 
 Only in this one way, — by denying the doubter's 
 major promise, that God's foreknowledge is all- 
 comprehending. The denial of this, I believe, 
 
108 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 can be shown to be in perfect consonance both 
 with sound philosophy and the Revealed Word 
 when once that Word is rightly understood. Let 
 us then examine this denial, first, from a philo- 
 sophical standpoint, from the standpoint of the 
 science of metaphysics. 
 
 If God foreknows everything that will ever 
 come to pass, all his own mental states must neces- 
 sarily be included in that foreknowledge. His 
 eternal past and eternal future must be to him an 
 eternal now. This is axiomatic. A moment's 
 reflection will convince us that otherwise there is 
 not a single present intention or plan but what 
 is exposed to the possibility of modification. If 
 a single thought or emotion is ever going to 
 spring up in God's mind unanticipated, coming in 
 as a complete surprise, God himself must be as 
 ignorant as we concerning what part of his vast 
 plans it will pertain to, or what will be its relative 
 importance, or what the radius or duration of its 
 influence. Indeed, both radius and duration must 
 be absolutely infinite ; for, however minute the in- 
 fluence or modification, it must result in others, 
 and those in others still — the circle widening thus 
 without end; for the parts of God's plans are sup- 
 posed to be intimately interlinked, complemental, 
 so precisely fitted part to part that the eff*ect of 
 each is felt throughout the whole, like the intri- 
 cate complications of a piece of mechanism. And 
 If one thought or emotion may thus spring into 
 being unanticipated, be absolutely original, why 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 109 
 
 not ten or ten thousand? Indeed, what limit can 
 be placed on their number or on their modifying 
 power? And so, if we would logically defend a 
 belief in the all-comprehensiveness of God's fore- 
 knowledge, we must affirm that not a single new 
 idea can arise in his mind, — not a single new 
 emotion be felt, and that if he is thus limited now 
 he must have been equally so at every moment in 
 all the eternal past, and must be through all the 
 years to come ; for if there ever has been, or ever 
 will be, a moment when a new thought can thus 
 come, then during all the time preceding that mo- 
 ment the foreknowledge was incomplete. Where 
 does this lead us? In what sort of an intellectual 
 or emotional condition does this irrefragable logic 
 compel us to assert God to be continually? Un- 
 questionably that of perfect stagnation. No 
 thought-processes can be carried on under such 
 conditions, — no succession of ideas, no change of 
 mental state ; but God must have been, and must 
 still be, imprisoned in a hopelessly dead calm. 
 
 When then did he form his plans for creation? 
 Under this supposition, there never could have 
 been a time when he began to think about them, 
 nor a period during which he adjusted their dif- 
 ferent parts, each to each, in that perfection of 
 harmony which so astounds us ; for that would 
 involve thought-succession. We are not at liberty 
 under this supposition to affirm even that the en- 
 tire plan in all its details flashed instantly upon 
 him, — for this would impeach the perfection of 
 
110 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 his foreknowledge up to the instant of such in- 
 flooding of thought, but must content ourselves 
 with asserting that it has existed in his mind from 
 all eternity as one of its constituent elements. If 
 God has had no thought-succession, he can have 
 had no feeling; his emotional state having ever 
 necessarily been that of unbroken placidity, — of 
 absolute apathy, his heart throbless as stone. He 
 could experience no change of feehng; for that 
 would involve thought-succession. From all the 
 sources of joy or sorrow of which we can con- 
 ceive, he would be utterly debarred — from 
 pleasurable or painful memories, from hopes and 
 forebodings, from social sympathies, from emo- 
 tions that accompany changes, contrasts, surprises, 
 from the glow of activity, even from the delights 
 and griefs of contemplation ; for they all involve 
 thought-movement. Therefore under this sup- 
 position God can have no emotional activity, for 
 he would have no thought-activity for its back- 
 ground. Thoughts must course, must come and 
 go, or the heart lies dead. 
 
 Such are the absurdities in which we become 
 hopelessly entangled the moment we attempt to 
 defend the doctrine of God's perfect foreknowl- 
 edge. And besides, on further reflection, we will 
 discover that it is, after all, utterly impossible, 
 from the very nature of the case, for God to fore- 
 know all his own future. The very fact that he" 
 is a sovereign spirit precludes this. It is equally 
 impossible, and for the same reason, for him to 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? Ill 
 
 know what our future will be. He has made us, 
 equally with himself, of sovereign will, and placed 
 upon us all the responsibiHties of that sovereignty. 
 When he thus created us in his own image, he, by 
 that very act, surrendered a part both of his power 
 and of his foreknowledge. He has left it possible 
 for us, despite all the influences he can bring to 
 bear, to rebel against his throne and persist in that 
 rebellion. He in thus constituting us the arbiters 
 of our destinies, necessarily circumscribed his 
 own power. There was no other course open 
 to him. We must be free, must be sovereign, if 
 we become morally accountable, and ever reach up 
 out of a state of simple innocency to that of Di- 
 vine virtue. And God when he thus surrendered 
 absolute control, also of necessity limited his 
 foreknowledge, for our own self -study reveals that 
 our perfect freedom of choice is inseparably 
 linked with uncertainty as to what that choice 
 will be. Character can be evolved only out of 
 struggle. Virtues are the names of victories won 
 over temptations ; and where temptations environ 
 a sovereign will, there must be risks, a certain 
 degree of uncertainty. It cannot be otherwise. 
 We cannot exercise this sovereignty or know that 
 we have it. unless there are open to us two or more 
 courses from which to choose, and our fidelity to 
 principle or the depth of our self-sacrificing af- 
 fection cannot be developed or brought to test 
 except by genuine wage of battle. And how can 
 it be certainly known whether this shall issue in 
 
112 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 defeat or be made glorious by decisive victory? 
 From the very nature of things, complete fore- 
 knowledge is precluded, for we can go in the 
 direction of either the weaker or the stronger 
 motive. But, say you, perhaps we have the power 
 thus to go, but in point of fact we never do, for 
 the motive that controls us proves itself the 
 stronger in that we invariably yield to it. This 
 is too wide a conclusion for the premises. Our 
 yielding does not prove it the stronger intrinsically, 
 but simply relatively, and then only because we 
 make it so through our choosing to direct and 
 hold the current of our thoughts in that direc- 
 tion until the chosen object of contemplation ac- 
 quires prominence and power. We cannot stop 
 the flow of thought, but can change its direction. 
 And even God himself cannot with unerring cer- 
 tainty predict what that change will be, for it is 
 purely an act of sovereignty. If, in fact, we 
 never go in the direction of the weaker motive, 
 how do we know we can? Would not this un- 
 broken regularity prove the presence of inexorable 
 law? The testimony of our inner consciousness 
 that we could do differently, would under such 
 circumstances never come to proof. And yet 
 only where strict regularity prevails, can the 
 necessary data be obtained for perfect foreknowl- 
 edge? Outside this circle of responsible sover- 
 eignty, under the reign of absolutism, of 
 immutable order, within which the physical and 
 vital forces and the pure animal instincts work 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 113 
 
 their wonders, God can of course predict with 
 unerring certainty, and to the minutest detail ; for 
 the plan is all his own, and from it there is not 
 the slightest deviation, nor can there be. Courses 
 here are predetermined and as exact as mathemat- 
 ical formulas. God, who fixed the conditions, 
 who founded the laws, must know the issue. But 
 in the region of delegated sovereignty, of abso- 
 lute freedom of choice, or moral accountability, 
 uncertainty just as necessarily enters in and 
 renders prediction impossible. 
 
 Dr. Henry VanDyke in his " Gospel for an Age 
 of Doubt," stated and defended substantially the 
 same position I have here taken. As he is one 
 of the leading lights of Presbyterianism, from 
 which, if anywhere, it would be supposed strong 
 opposition would come, his hearty advocacy is 
 especially noteworthy and reassuring. 
 
 His affirmation is briefly this: The Divine 
 omnipotence which Christ taught is not sheer, 
 absolute, unconditioned. He taught that God 
 chose to hmit the autocratic exercise of his 
 sovereignty by creating beings who have the 
 power of yielding to his will or of resisting it, 
 for otherwise he would be forever shut out from 
 all personal relations, they being possible only 
 where there are different independent wills. It 
 must be admitted frankly that this view of Divine 
 sovereignty does not seem to be consistent with 
 the theory of absolute divine foreknowledge of all 
 volitions and all events. If an event is certain, 
 
114 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 fixed and foreordained then God knows it as 
 such; if contingent on free, self-determining, 
 preferential action of a human will then he knows 
 it only as thus contingent. 
 
 If what I have argued be true, we need no 
 longer struggle with those hopeless tasks of 
 harmonizing foreordination with free will, and 
 of explaining how a beneficent God could bring 
 into being souls which he at that very time posi- 
 tively knew would be eternally lost. 
 
 The doctrine of God's perfect foreknowledge 
 is not only unphilosophical, but also unscriptural. 
 The Bible exhorts us to the deepest earnestness in 
 prayer, — to downright importunity, — and en- 
 courages us to believe that the fervent prayer of 
 the righteous man availeth much. No petitioner 
 can plead with any genuine unction unless he be- 
 lieves that he can actually efi'ect some change in 
 the purposes existing in the Divine Mind at the 
 time his prayer is offered. If he were convinced 
 that everything had been prearranged from all 
 eternity ; that his tears, and sighs, and passionate 
 words of longing had been present in God's mind 
 always ; that they never had exerted, and never 
 could exert, any influence, eff^ect any change, as 
 there could never be a time when they would first 
 arrest God's attention, — how could he wrestle, 
 agonize, in prayer? It would seem but empty 
 show to him, that he was merely playing a part. 
 Every word he uttered would fall back dead. If 
 he believes in God's foreknowledge, he must, while 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 115 
 
 he prays, if he prays as the Bible commands, 
 utterly forget his belief and fall into the tempo- 
 rary delusion that the matter is yet undetermined, 
 that God's heart is tender, can be moved, that his 
 purposes can be changed. He must forget his 
 belief, must go ahead just as if foreknowledge 
 were not true. Think you God would force his 
 children to such straits, to such mental stultifica- 
 tion? The thought is repellent. Read if you 
 will the ninth chapter of Deuteronomy. Moses 
 here rehearses the several rebellions of Israel, and 
 his three separate pleadings before the Lord, of 
 forty days and forty nights each, without either 
 eating bread or drinking water. Each time he 
 fell down before a very angry God who had fully 
 purposed and had definitely announced his pur- 
 pose to destroy the rebels, and each time, if 
 Moses can be credited, he actually changed that 
 purpose right then and there and rescued his peo- 
 ple. The God here depicted had none of that 
 foreknowledge which theologians with such 
 strange unanimity ascribed to him. But, say you, 
 that and similar accounts scattered throughout 
 the Bible are simply instances of anthropomor- 
 phism, or rhetorical accommodation, of describing 
 in the language of human experiences and human 
 limitations what really transcends the human ; 
 that it was not the intent to have these narrations 
 interpreted as literal history, but as poetic ap- 
 proximations or dim shadowings of really inef- 
 fable truths. It seems to me that it would be a 
 
116 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 strange way to bring the truth within our com- 
 prehension, to state what is directly opposed to 
 the truth, and to reiterate the downright false- 
 hood, again and again. In a most misleading way, 
 and in a matter of such vital moment that all 
 possibility of religious life depends on it, and 
 through which alone any lasting comfort comes 
 to the hungry human soul. Could Moses have 
 thought that what he was so importunately plead- 
 ing for had actually been determined upon mil- 
 lions of ages before, and that the picture of his 
 prostrate form, his streaming eyes, his starving 
 body, his passion-swayed soul, had been lying in 
 the divine mind from all eternity? He unques- 
 tionably believed directly the opposite, and the 
 narration was designed to teach us that directly 
 the opposite was true. 
 
 Think you that Christ during that long night 
 of agony in Gethsemane, when he cried out over 
 and over again, while great drops of blood stood 
 on his brow, " If It be possible, let this cup pass 
 from me," knew all the time that there was but 
 one way in which the human race could be rescued, 
 that precisely this one had been predetermined to 
 its minutest detail, and that all that was left for 
 him was to carry it out to the bitter end? Were 
 not those the agonized utterings of a faithful yet 
 shrinking human soul, — for Christ was human as 
 well as divine, — poured out before a supposed 
 loving and sympathetic Father? And have we 
 not a right to believe that they not only deepened 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? IIT 
 
 God's sympathy, but actually influenced him to 
 again reconsider the whole subject, that haply 
 he might discover some escape for his Son from 
 the impending doom? When Christ prayed, he 
 unquestionably meant the same as if he had 
 directly said, " Father, do think it over again, 
 and see if it be possible, and if it is, let the cup 
 pass," for the petition is pointless unless this 
 thought is embodied in it. Christ had not yet for 
 an instant harbored the thought of relinquishing 
 the enterprise or even imperiling it by any at- 
 tempt at self-rescue. He did not even ask for 
 sustaining grace. All he pleaded for was another 
 more searching inquiry to see if some different 
 means of rescue could not be devised. He simply 
 desired to avoid needless humiliation and pain. In 
 what a pitiable farce he must have consented to 
 become an actor during the watches of that memo- 
 rable night, if he positively knew all the time that 
 there was no other way possible! And if he did 
 not thus know, but God did, — and that too from 
 all eternity, even to the precise mode and to its 
 every detail, — and had unalterably determined up- 
 on its being carried out to the very letter, with 
 what cold, relentless cruelty this Father must have 
 listened, hour after hour, to that sorrow-stricken 
 Son as he plead in heart-rending agony for him 
 to see if there were not some other equally effective 
 way to save the lost ! How could he listen to that 
 pleading, wailed out on the night air, for some- 
 thing he had not the faintest idea of granting? 
 
118 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 Why did he not encircle him in the arms of his 
 everlasting love and at once explain the impos- 
 sibility of change, if he certainly knew that no 
 change was possible? What importunate plead- 
 ing! No parallel can be found in all human 
 history. Was it for naught? Was it a stupen- 
 dous blunder bom of ignorance? We cannot 
 mistake it for some blind outcry of a sinking soul. 
 Should we not seek for some sane, sensible purpose 
 in the plea? We have here revealed not simply 
 one of the disciplinary seasons in Christ's career, 
 his desperate battling with the tempter, for he had 
 betrayed no weakness, no unwillingness to face, if 
 need be, any fate however terrible. He showed 
 from first to last a spirit of perfect submission, for 
 note how carefully he coupled with his passionate 
 prayer, " Not as I will, but as thou wilt." Noth- 
 ing could be added to his consecration. His self- 
 surrender stood complete. His soul was white as 
 the light that beats on God's throne. But how 
 natural, and necessary, and full of deep signifi- 
 cance, appears this whole scene in this, earth's 
 darkest tragedy, the moment that we conceive that 
 Christ, instead of being crazed by his grief, was 
 quickened by it to clearer spiritual insight ; that in 
 his cry, " O my Father, if it be possible, let this 
 cup pass from w^," the real plea was that the 
 whole subject-matter of modes of rescue should be 
 reopened and again most searchingly reviewed; 
 that God fully answered that prayer by a long, 
 deep study ; and that, when the last faint ray of 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 119 
 
 hope went out in night, he in accents tender as 
 an infinite pity could make them, told Christ all; 
 and then that the Saviour, satisfied, rose from his 
 knees, wiped away the blood-stains of his agony, 
 and with a calm, majestic bearing — that never 
 again left him, save in the last throes of dissolu- 
 tion, — said to his disciples, " Rise up, let us go ; 
 lo ! he that betrayeth me is at hand." 
 
 Had I time, and were it necessary, I might mul- 
 tiply indefinitely citations from Scripture of 
 cases in which it is clearly taught that even to 
 God's eye the future is not wholly uncurtained, — 
 that he carries on processes of thought as we do, 
 elaborates plans, modifies them and sometimes even 
 abandons them altogether to meet the demands of 
 unforeseen exigencies as they arise, that he inter- 
 feres in behalf of his children and because they ask 
 him, actually forming and executing entirely new, 
 unpremeditated purposes in response to their ask- 
 ing. 
 
 Against this view, that we actually exert an in- 
 fluence over the Divine mind, it has been urged, as 
 I have already remarked, that it implies imperfec- 
 tion in the Divine adjustments, and vacillation in 
 the Divine will, that it is the very height of pre- 
 sumption in us to suppose that we can influence 
 the great God of the universe to do differently 
 from what he had in his wisdom deliberately 
 planned. The usual reply, that God has from 
 the first foreknown all prayers and carefully in- 
 corporated his answers into his original designs, 
 
120 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 is, as I have endeavored to point out, fatally lack- 
 ing both in sound philosophy and in Scripture 
 support. How, then, can the objection be met? 
 In the first place, God has, as I have explained, 
 left his works in such plastic state that he can 
 whenever he chooses interfere by direct will-power 
 without occasioning any disorder. If so, what can 
 be urged against the belief that he left them thus 
 with the express design of introducing from time 
 to time such modifications as circumstances should 
 require? Indeed, what other explanation can be 
 given than this for the presence of this universal 
 characteristic? This, instead of betraying a 
 weakness, a flaw, in God's plans, reveals its 
 strength and finish. So far as it was possible 
 for him to perfectly foreknow, so far the condi- 
 tions of change and activity have been unalterably 
 fixed, as in the operation of chemic, vital, and in- 
 stinct forces. But realizing that in delegating 
 to his human offspring the responsible power of 
 free choice he would necessarily let in the element 
 of uncertainty, thus obscuring his prophetic 
 vision, he with most profound wisdom contrived 
 through this very plasticity in nature to be able 
 to meet any emergency that might arise, to leave 
 every avenue free, every particle of matter and 
 every form of force promptly responsive to his 
 call. His plans in such a case, instead of being 
 ill advised and marred with faults, are simply 
 unperfected and In constant process of comple- 
 tion. He is thus afforded ample opportunity to 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 121 
 
 enjoy unceasing mental activity and with sleep- 
 less eye and tireless hand to be ever caring for his 
 own. To me this conception of God is by far 
 the most exalted and stimulating. Instead of an 
 idle spectator walled out of his own universe, he 
 becomes an intense participant of effective per- 
 sonal presence, a living, loving spirit, free and 
 masterful, the embodiment of all the active vir- 
 tues and throbbing sympathies that are the neces- 
 sary heroic belongings of him who would win the 
 affectionate reverence of human hearts. 
 
 In consonance with this view we shall find that 
 actual and adequate provision has been made, and 
 that methods have been devised in the very con- 
 stitution of things for the answering of prayer. 
 They are to be found in part in the well nigh 
 miraculous capacities of this self-same sub-con- 
 scious mind to which we have alluded, and in that 
 law of suggestion under which its invaluable serv- 
 ices are placed at our disposal. In the nature of 
 this provision it will also be seen that it is God's 
 purpose not to directly interfere except in emer- 
 gencies where means already provided and placed 
 in human reach prove inadequate to accomplish 
 the desired ends. 
 
 To make our requests known to God in the right 
 spirit, that is, with the understanding that we 
 will actively and at once set about using whatever 
 resources we now have, or may acquire, and with 
 the understanding that we purpose to ask only 
 for what we intently long for and are willing to 
 
122 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 make every proper personal sacrifice to secure, to 
 purge ourselves from all selfishness, to place such 
 implicit trust in God's loving care that no worry- 
 ment will enter in, to open our minds unreservedly 
 to the inflowing of his helpful sympathy ; all this 
 is to secure the most favorable conditions, and to 
 invite ultimate success. 
 
 Prayers for blessings which are now or may be 
 within our own reach have already been answered. 
 It would be idle to pray to be placed in Liverpool 
 so long as an ocean steamer is at the wharf ready 
 to take us there. God will not furnish again what 
 he has amply provided. When we come into that 
 state of submission where we can say from our 
 hearts, " not my will but thine," we have not 
 necessarily tied our own hands, but we have, in- 
 deed, liberated God's by making it possible as 
 never before to carry out his plans of loving help 
 without injury to us; on the other hand while we 
 harbor a spirit of insistence on having our own 
 way, to grant our request would be to encourage 
 us in that spirit and to intensify it, to weaken our 
 trust in him and make ourselves self-sufficient. 
 This spirit of submission does not necessarily pre- 
 clude having and expressing preference and long- 
 ing. We not 3^et knowing God's mind in the 
 matter, it does not prevent us from trying to 
 co-operate with him in securing our desires, it 
 simply places us in an attitude of loving trust, of 
 patient waiting, of assurance that the best will 
 prevail; meantime it takes one very serious ob- 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 123 
 
 struction out of God's path to the granting of our 
 request. We can help God as well as he can help 
 us. 
 
 Until we are convinced to the contrary we have 
 a right to believe that what we unselfishly desire is 
 what God wants us to have and what he will surely 
 help us to get, how and when we must leave to his 
 infinite wisdom and love to determine. His plans 
 for answering may in some instances reach over 
 into the other life, but their accomplishment is 
 certain and will not unnecessarily be delayed. 
 
 He needs our co-operation, desires us to use all 
 known and rightful aids and remedies, and when 
 necessary stands ready to supplement our efforts. 
 There is an attitude of resignation that is false, 
 fatalistic, utterly unfilial, not only not enjoined 
 but positively forbidden. This is characteristic 
 of Mohammedanism and Buddhism, and of all 
 Oriental philosophy. There is a belief in Divine 
 imminence widely prevailing at the present day 
 in our own churches, maintaining that God as " an 
 Infinite Spirit fills all the universe with himself 
 alone, so that all is from him and in him and there 
 is nothing that is outside," that all the inorganic 
 and the organic forces are the direct energizings 
 of his personal will, all life infused and suffused 
 with his will, the whole universe his living gar- 
 ment ; a belief that is alike destructive of the true 
 spirit of prayer, for unless we can believe in God 
 as transcendent, as apart from his creation, and 
 in delegated, secondary causes, carrying out a 
 
IM DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 general plan which is open to modifications to 
 suit unforeseen emergencies, we can not ask God 
 to interfere either directly or indirectly for then 
 we should be simply asking him to interfere with 
 himself. 
 
 Sir Oliver Lodge says, *' Science cultivates a 
 vigorous, adult, intelligent, serpent-like wisdom 
 and active interference with the course of nature ; 
 religion fosters a meek, receptive, child-hearted 
 attitude of dove-like resignation to Divine Will." 
 This may be true of some religionists, but not 
 of true religion. 
 
 If you will examine recent works on psychology 
 you will find that this very frame of mind which 
 I have described as the one in which we should 
 pray is the one out of which the most effective 
 suggestions will come to the sub-conscious mind, 
 as it embodies faith, trust, complete concentration 
 and absorption of the attention, deep, unselfish 
 love, cheerful expectancy, whole souled co-opera- 
 tion, true submission, exclusion of fear and all 
 forms of disturbing and unworthy thoughts. 
 
 In this way you enlist not only the curative 
 and kindly helping forces already organized and 
 operative, but also when necessary the direct be- 
 nign will power of God himself who ever keeps 
 over his own his loving watch and care. 
 
 How these suggestions arouse all the latent ac- 
 tivities of this sub-conscious self, of whose " sub- 
 merged mentation we catch only indirect refracted 
 glimpses," and how its marvels are wrought are 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 125 
 
 mysteries which so far we have made very little 
 headway in fathoming. The conscious personality 
 is never more than a small fraction of the psychical 
 personality. 
 
 Part emerges into consciousness, the most mar- 
 velous part, " the underground workshop of 
 thought," as Dr. Holmes characterizes it, remains 
 concealed. We do know, however, that it is one 
 of the most potent agencies ever at work in the 
 world, and by experience we have found the secret 
 charm, suggestion, that will unfetter its forces. 
 We have also found out some of its limitations, 
 for it is only one out of many of God's instru- 
 mentalities, and so the more conservative and sane- 
 minded of Christian psychotherapists confine their 
 attention solely to functional nervous complaints 
 in which the mind and moral nature are controlling 
 factors, and these are indeed a great company 
 making up, according to the estimate of an emi- 
 nent neurologist, seventy-five per cent, of the dis- 
 orders of the American people, including as they 
 do neurasthenia, hysteria in its protean forms of 
 simulated organic lesions, hypochondria and mor- 
 bid worries; while excluding diseases caused by 
 micro-organisms, like malaria, pneumonia, diph- 
 theria, yellow fever, cancer and smallpox, also 
 cases requiring surgical operation, and those in 
 which the tissues have been actually destroyed. 
 
 Out from the shadowy manifestations of the 
 sub-liminal self come " genius, premonition, inspi- 
 ration, prevision, telepathy, clairvoyance, the hyp- 
 
126 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 notic trance and allied states at present beyond 
 the pale of science, but inside the universe of fact." 
 No attitude of the soul is so certain of securing 
 the co-operation of these mighty spiritual forces as 
 that of devout prayer and through them we are 
 brought into access to all other helpful instru- 
 mentalities of God's providing, besides coming into 
 the most intimate spiritual relationship with God 
 himself. Through telepathy, the spirit's wire- 
 less telegraph, to cite but a single one, our per- 
 sonality can reach out, in control, to those, how- 
 ever far away, who can render us service or it may 
 be are disposed to do us harm. 
 
 An instance once came to my personal knowl- 
 edge illustrating this. A man at one time had it 
 in his power and in his purpose to do another a 
 great business injury. This second man heard 
 of it in some way. That night he agonized in 
 prayer until near daybreak, that God would avert 
 the impending calamity. At last there came to 
 him profound peace and he fell asleep. The next 
 day he heard through a mutual acquaintance the 
 confession of the first man, that his mind had 
 come into such a distressing tumult over the mat- 
 ter that he had to abandon the project before he 
 could get any comfort or peace. Of course I 
 cannot say with certainty that the agitation and 
 final change of purpose was wrought by telepathy, 
 God employing this indirect method of answering 
 prayer, but I can say that this is a very prob- 
 able, a very natural, explanation, and serves to 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 127 
 
 show the avenues left open here and there by the 
 Heavenly Father, through which he may extend 
 to his pleading children his personal care. 
 
 Auto-hypnotism, to cite another of these in- 
 direct means, has no doubt saved many martyrs 
 from the horrors of their fate. They have been 
 lifted into that state of ecstasy in which pain and 
 fear are impossible, while burning at the stake or 
 while being torn in pieces by the ravenous beasts 
 of the amphitheatre. 
 
 There are no doubt laws of prayer amid the 
 mysteries of the universe. So prevalent an in- 
 stinct must be founded on the constitution of the 
 world. Prayer will be found to be a positive 
 power, the prayer attitude being a definite psychic 
 state having natural psychic consequents opening 
 the inner consciousness, enlarging the soul's re- 
 ceptivity to spiritual forces and, because of the 
 close union of body and soul, acting on all the 
 nerve centres, restoring tone and rhythm. 
 
 Man's will, we now know, can co-operate with 
 God's, effecting results which would not be secured 
 were not both wills conjoined. In prayer we are 
 brought into close sympathetic relations with the 
 Heavenly Father. We unburden our souls to 
 him, confide all our secret sorrows and aspirations 
 and longings, for we feel that he understands 
 them, and can be trusted. This very unburdening 
 brings relief. We no longer feel lonely and 
 friendless. The soul thus freed is in the best 
 mood possible to convey auto-suggestions to the 
 
128 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 sub-conscious self and that self best prepared to 
 take them in. We are thus brought into tele- 
 pathic touch with the Infinite, and are brought 
 into tune with those among our fellows who can 
 render aid. What more powerful stimulant to 
 health of body and soul? What more powerful 
 persuasive over others or incentive to ourselves? 
 
 Modern psychotherapy, the healing power of 
 the spirit, has been crudely foreshadowed all down 
 the centuries. It is ingrained in the very fibre of 
 all human history, although this psychic element 
 with its myriad activities thus dimly divined by 
 philosophers and religionists in the long ago, is 
 just beginning to be explored in downright ear- 
 nest by the scientists of to-day. Christ demon- 
 strated it in many of the cures he wrought. He 
 taught it to his disciples and they successfully 
 practiced it in their day. It, however, gradually 
 fell into disuse as society grew more complex. 
 The Church through neglect largely lost its power. 
 It is now again coming to its own. The New 
 Thought is but a restatement of the old. The 
 new movement, in its saner aspects is an earnest 
 attempt to recover those principles and powers of 
 the Church which should never have fallen into 
 disuse. Doctor Horace Bushnell boldly chal- 
 lenged in his day the Christian Church to show 
 warrant for abdicating its healing function. 
 
 Professor William James, of Harvard, says, 
 " It is quite obvious that a wave of religious ac- 
 tivity analogous in some respects to the spread of 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 129 
 
 early Christianity is passing over our American 
 Continent. Materialistic philosophy is being 
 superseded by a new idealism — the supremacy of 
 the spirit, the sub-conscious self, connection of 
 mind to mind, are now commanding attention — " 
 We may go still farther and say that a great 
 spiritual awakening is sweeping over the world, 
 an enlarged realization of its hitherto neglected 
 spiritual resources, and a wider understanding of 
 how to transform them into servitors and saviors 
 of mankind. 
 
 Why is it, we naturally ask, that God has suf- 
 fered the world to wait so long before coming into 
 this, its rich spiritual inheritance? Why so long 
 conceal this priceless treasure, if there is one, giv- 
 ing only a hint of it here and there? We might 
 with equal reason ask why he buried the coal beds 
 and rock quarries and mines of metal, why he hid 
 the utilities of steam and electric forces, why 
 secretly provided the possibilities of anesthetics, 
 and vaccines, and anti-toxins and poison antidotes 
 in the chemistries of the earth, why he left his 
 vegetable and lower animal creations in a wild, 
 crude state requiring subjugation before utiliza- 
 tion, why he so planned that only after vast toil 
 and exhausting study, the evolving of deep in- 
 ventive thought, railroads and steamships and 
 printing presses and wireless telegraphs and hos- 
 pital equipments have become features of modem 
 life. 
 
 We can simply answer that growth through 
 
130 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 struggle is the only possible law under which 
 moral character can be evolved. The very exig- 
 encies of the case demanded this patient waiting 
 for development. This scheme, of which in the 
 physical world we see but a part, was the only pos- 
 sible one whereby the soul of man could at last 
 be transformed into the image of God, that " one 
 divine event to which the whole creation moves." 
 
 Hints of the presence of electrical energy have 
 been given out everywhere all along down the ages, 
 but not until the last seventy-five years has the 
 most advanced of the human races taken advantage 
 of these hints. 
 
 Since investigations have been begun in down- 
 right earnest, progress has been rapid and achieve- 
 ments phenomenal. 
 
 So not until very recent years has the true na- 
 ture of prayer, the possibilities of its accomplish- 
 ment and the secret sources of its power been 
 rightly understood, and in consequence it fell into 
 sad neglect. 
 
 Certain cold formalities, called prayers, which 
 have never been expected to be answered, have 
 been abundant, but real prayers that well up out 
 of a deep soul-hunger, embodying an unselfish 
 love and inspired by a reverent faith that moves 
 the arm that moves the world, how few, very few. 
 
 Let us hope then that the day of the world's 
 deliverance is at hand, that the materialistic nine- 
 teenth century is destined to be superseded by a 
 century marked by a new idealism, that the works 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 131 
 
 and powers of the spirit are to be the theme of 
 thought, that the long lost power of the Church, 
 Christ's legacy, is again to be restored. 
 
 Let us dismiss all lingering doubt of our being 
 of sufficient worth for God to hear when we call, 
 or that he has not made ample provision in order 
 to interfere in our behalf either directly or in- 
 directly, and to interfere because we ask him. 
 
 God being able to forecast the general trend, 
 the ordinary tendencies, of the lives of his chil- 
 dren, has unquestionably prearranged his provi- 
 dences to meet their probable wants, has provided 
 for them a bountiful environment full of illimitable 
 possibilities of joy and growth. For the extraor- 
 dinary and unforeseen he has made, as I have 
 shown, provision for leaving himself ample fa- 
 cilities for immediate interference. And then, too, 
 by timely suggestions he may, and often does, make 
 us willing and intelligent servitors of his will, in- 
 augurating by a single whispered thought, in mo- 
 ments of crisis, movements of deep and lasting 
 import in our own or others' destiny. 
 
 Thoroughly conversant, as he must be, with all 
 the peculiar mental states of every individual as 
 fast as they arise, his seed-thoughts fall op- 
 portunely into responsive soils and soon quicken 
 into harvests. A word dropped into the mind of 
 a young Luther starts a reformation that shakes 
 to its very center the papal throne of the world. 
 As Carlyle says, " The clock strikes when there is 
 a change from hour to hour, but there is no ham- 
 
132 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 mer in the horologue of time to peal through the 
 universe when there is a change from era to era." 
 God notes those pivotal periods and uses them. 
 
 Any human will obstinately standing in the way 
 of the great ongoings of his providence, as it cer- 
 tainly can as long as it is free, he reserves the 
 power of either temporarily or permanently pla- 
 cing under duress. Of course, while thus borne 
 down by a superior personality, while deprived of 
 its freedom of choice, it is relieved of responsibility, 
 its acts lose their moral quality, and it becomes like 
 any other force in nature. It is, however, respon- 
 sible for necessitating such summary procedure. 
 This divine impressment, this infringement upon 
 our freedom, may, for aught we know, be fre- 
 quently resorted to in the course of individual or na- 
 tional history. We certainly are the arbiters of our 
 destinies. But woe betide him who recklessly dashes 
 against the thick bosses of Jehovah's buckler. 
 We are closely hedged in by carefully constructed 
 systems of inexorable law. We can break those 
 laws if we choose, but we do it at our peril. We 
 can stand out persistently against all God's good 
 influences ; we may render futile his utmost efforts 
 to rescue us from the thraldom of sin. The whole 
 race may combine successfully to thwart his pur- 
 poses of love. From the very nature of the case 
 he was forced to incur that risk, for virtue can live 
 only in an atmosphere of liberty. But we must 
 remember God's unalterable determination from 
 the beginning has been not to make everybody 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 133 
 
 loyal and loving, but simply to furnish the 
 possibilities of loyalty and love, and then do all in 
 his power consistent with the conditions precedent 
 to character-forming to develop within each soul 
 the germs of divinity of his own hand's planting. 
 He may be forced to summon a deluge, or an 
 earthquake, or some wasting pestilence to do his 
 terrible bidding; he may be forced to abandon 
 what after trial prove ineffectual methods, and 
 adopt new ones; he may be forced to recall the 
 gift of liberty, or the very gift of the present 
 form of existence here and hereafter from those 
 who persistently repel all proffers and become 
 hopelessly hardened; but his loving purpose still 
 holds out, his laws still stand, the golden oppor- 
 tunities are still presented, each century witnesses 
 some new conquests of love, some souls added to 
 heaven's company, the great scheme is steadily 
 going forward to its finally glorious though as yet 
 far distant consummation. 
 
 Such a view of God — of his maturing and ex- 
 ecuting plans, of his intellectual and emotional 
 life — as I have endeavored to present, is the only 
 one, after all, actually conceivable by finite minds. 
 To pronounce him unconditioned, unchangeable, 
 omniscient, omnipotent, omni-present, using these 
 words in their ordinary and fullest acceptation, 
 placing no restriction upon their meaning, is sim- 
 ply falling, unintentionally, no doubt, into nothing 
 less than word-jugglery, affirming what to human 
 minds must of necessity be absolutely unthinkable. 
 
134 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 The only rational course is to take for our basic 
 thought that we have been created in God's image, 
 and then to picture God as a spirit possessing in 
 perfection attributes analogous to our own, al- 
 though these are yet germinal and sin-distorted. 
 
 I am now ready to answer the question, How can 
 we reasonably hope by our petitions to effect a 
 change in the Divine purposes, and why should we 
 plead importunately, why kindle our souls into such 
 intensity of fervor? The Scriptures, in enjoining 
 earnestness, need not be understood as favoring at- 
 tempts to coax and tease God, as we too frequently 
 do our earthly parents, to act against his better 
 judgment out of some weak, short-sighted sym- 
 pathy. If that be our purpose, we may be certain 
 of flat failure. Our prayers will never induce him 
 to deal any more generously with us. He has al- 
 ways stood with outstretched arms, with overflow- 
 ing sympathy, waiting impatiently to bless us. 
 What untold wealth of deep inventive thought, 
 what untold eons of slowly passing years he has 
 already lavished in his preparations for our com- 
 ing, for our maintenance, for our unfolding, for 
 our permanent weal! Wliile our prayers will not 
 make him any more kindly disposed, will not notice- 
 ably increase his sympathy for us, they will in most 
 marked measure increase his sympathy with us, will 
 profoundly change our attitude toward him and 
 multiply our capacity for blessing ten thousand- 
 fold. Indeed, so radical is the change wrought, 
 that what would have been poison before, becomes 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 135 
 
 medicine now. We thus furnish God new facts 
 upon which to act, facts of mental attitude, the un- 
 foreseen outputs of our sovereignty. That atti- 
 tude is one of Christ-like love, manifesting itself in 
 five forms — that of willing obedience, of self-sacri- 
 ficing service, of sense of Divine dependence, of 
 restful confidence, and of intensest longing. Until 
 that attitude is attained in all these prime essen- 
 tials, as I have already explained, God, if he should 
 interfere by stepping outside his general provi- 
 dence, in which the evil and the good are served 
 alike, to confer especial favors, would be doing 
 violence to his conceptions of fitness and of true 
 beneficence, would work his children a most positive 
 injury, placing a premium on qualities that stand 
 over against these forms of love, thereby counte- 
 nancing a spirit of rebellion, selfishness, self-suffi- 
 ciency, distrust and ignoble apathy. It is the 
 fervent prayer of the righteous man that availeth 
 much. He must be righteous and his righteous- 
 ness must be on fire to fulfill the Scripture condi- 
 tions. That availing power is something more 
 than retroactive; it moves the arm that moves the 
 world. As this is a moral state of the soul within 
 the circle of its sovereignty, the product of its ab- 
 solutely free choice, there cannot be, as I have 
 shown, any sure prophecy of its coming. But 
 when it comes, all barriers are burnt away. Re- 
 serve gives place to closest sympathetic intimacy. 
 What more natural when the spirits of father and 
 son thus meet and mingle, than that the son, care- 
 
136 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 cumbered it may be, or broken with grief, or baffled 
 in purpose, though battling still, should pour out 
 in most impassioned utterance his deep and noble 
 longings? Love itself would so prompt; for love 
 casteth out fear, is the very essence of liberty. 
 Cautious reserve cannot live in its atmosphere of 
 holy confidence. All curtains of concealment fall 
 instantly at the magic touch of sympathy. He 
 could not keep his longings back. His father's 
 tender look and tone would break the seals of 
 silence, would touch his lips with coals of fire. 
 The thought of trying by coaxing to melt down 
 his stern reluctance is utterly foreign to such a 
 scene, repugnant to such a state, and was never 
 contemplated in the Gospel. What more natural 
 than that God's heart should be deeply stirred by 
 the fervid outflow of such a passion of love and 
 longing, and that he should by direct will-power 
 supply the deficiencies of his general providence, 
 or by timely suggestion reveal its resources, and 
 place them in reach to meet the needs of such a 
 soul in such an hour? 
 
 These views are not only thus in deep accord 
 with the principles of sound philosophy and the 
 revelations of modem science, but also with the 
 profoundest intuitions of human hearts ; for when 
 once our sense of world-dependence and of self- 
 sufficiency is rudely swept away by some disaster, 
 and we come intently to long for what we find we 
 cannot reach without God's help, how soon we 
 brush aside all hindering creeds, and in dead 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 137 
 
 earnest plead our case, and plead believing that 
 the heart and arm of God will answer to our plea ! 
 But in this intensely materialistic and scientific age 
 there have so insidiously settled about our thought 
 the bewildering fogs of learned and subtile sophis- 
 tries breathed out by those who would either rele- 
 gate God altogether from his universe or make his 
 relations quite inconsequential and remote, that 
 only in the stress of crises in our history do our 
 long-neglected religious intuitions assume their 
 rightful sovereignty, and restore us to our true 
 relations with him who in his great love never 
 wearies in caring for his own. But may we not 
 hope that the night is well-nigh spent, that the 
 fogs are lifting, that a new day dawns — a day of 
 deeper, clearer, truer thought, of more perfect 
 knowledge, of more enlightened faith, and a faith 
 whose kindly light will prove the sure harbinger of 
 God's perfect day? 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 I have thus far endeavored to show — 
 
 1. How God may interfere whenever he chooses; 
 
 2. That there are incontestable evidences, and 
 multitudes of them along down the centuries, that 
 he has thus actually interfered; 
 
 3. That we are warranted in believing that we, 
 each one of us, the humblest and most obscure, are 
 of sufficient consequence to attract his attention 
 and secure this his direct interference; and 
 
 4. That he will interfere because we ask him, 
 doing for us what otherwise he would not have 
 done. 
 
 There is left for me now but one other general 
 affirmation to make. With its explanation and 
 proof I believe I shall have presented the subject 
 in all its essential phases. It is this : Every 
 reasonable prayer offered in a right spirit is certain 
 of favorable answer. This is the clear import of 
 Christ's comprehensive promise to his disciples, as 
 recorded in Matthew, " All things whatsoever ye 
 shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive," or, 
 as Mark states it, " Whatsoever things ye desire, 
 when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye 
 shall have them." If we interpret these passages 
 in the light of the context and of the general 
 trend of Christ's teachings, we cannot but con- 
 clude that Christ premised in his promise that the 
 138 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 139 
 
 prayers should be reasonable and that they should 
 be offered in the right spirit. No petitioner who 
 complies with these two conditions need ever fear 
 failure. 
 
 To have our prayers reasonable, we should, in 
 the first place, guard against asking for anything 
 which we can procure by our own exertions, mak- 
 ing use of the resources of physical and mental 
 strength, of social ties and general surroundings 
 already in reach. God is a strict economist. If 
 he has already made ample provisions in his gen- 
 eral providence, and if we ourselves can by proper 
 industry discover and utilize this provision, we 
 ought not to expect from him any further help by 
 special act. We must exhaust our own means first, 
 and ask him simply to supplement our weakness 
 and insufficiency. Otherwise we should be asking 
 not only for what God has really already bestowed 
 — and bestowed in a way which he thought would 
 do us the greatest and most lasting good — but for 
 what, if granted again in this more direct manner, 
 would prove to us a positive bane, and not a bless- 
 ing; and if such a course were continued, all in- 
 centive to industry and enterprise would thus be 
 taken away, physical and mental sloth would suc- 
 ceed to healthful, growth-promoting activity, ab- 
 ject timidity and feeling of dependence would take 
 the place of a manly spirit of self-reliance. No 
 wise parent among us, however keen and quick his 
 sympathies, would ever consent thus to shield his 
 child from toil and care and battle-test, for he 
 
140 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 knows he would by dandling him thus in the lap of 
 ease and luxury be sure to unman him, weaken his 
 body and invite disease, dull the edge of his facul- 
 ties and rob him of every prospect of progress, of 
 every trace of nobility, of everything that gives 
 zest and incentive and joy to life and gilds the 
 future with its pencilings of glory. Wise teachers 
 refrain from helping their pupils so long as they 
 can help themselves. Their office is not to relieve 
 but to incite, not to dwarf but draw out, not to 
 convert those under their charge into cowering 
 weaklings but into athletes and conquerors. Even 
 the eagle, prompted by a Divine wisdom, will push 
 her timid fledgelings out from their lofty eyrie- 
 home, and watch them flutter, and hear their cry of 
 distress as they disappear down the sides of the 
 gorges; keeping herself, however, meantime, in 
 ready reach, and now and then darting under to 
 save them from fatal fall, for God has taught this 
 mother thus to throw her children on their own 
 resources, that they may feel their wings and learn 
 to use them. This is a rude awakening. It seems 
 a cruel banishment. But otherwise they would 
 never learn to poise and wheel in air, to dart like 
 thunderbolts, to breast the hurricane, or to climb 
 the steep stairways of the sky. 
 
 God loves us too well to heed any of our cries 
 except in times of positive and pressing need. He 
 will let us stiTiggle alone until our strength and 
 judgment fail. He will, however, always keep in 
 call, and will, in deepest sympathy, watch the con- 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 141 
 
 test point by point, and we can rest assured that in 
 the hour of our extremity, should such hour come, 
 we shall be made gladly conscious of some answer- 
 ing heartbeat, shall hear some whispered word, 
 shall feel the uplifting power of some helping hand 
 of love. A prayer for God to convert our impeni- 
 tent friends would be unreasonable if without con- 
 ditions or provisos, as it might be utterly impossi- 
 ble for him to secure such a result. All we can 
 sensibly ask for is that he will make use of all the 
 instrumentalities at his command, arrest the atten- 
 tion, rouse the conscience, reveal the danger of 
 delay, the consequences of continued rebellion as 
 well as of loving obedience — in a word, bring to 
 bear all the persuasive influences possible and still 
 leave their wills untrammeled, for without absolute 
 freedom of choice being constantly maintained, no 
 moral change can possibly be wrought. 
 
 Again, our prayers to be reasonable must be 
 consistent in all their parts, must be free from con- 
 tradictory requests. To answer prayers in their 
 entirety would sometimes be impossible even to God. 
 To illustrate: It would be inconsistent for us to 
 ask only for the agreeable things of this life — for 
 freedom from care, sorrow, and pain — from dis- 
 appointment, privation, calumny — from all the 
 vexations, perplexities and disasters of life — and 
 at the same time that he would develop in us that 
 glorious Christ-likeness for which, in our nobler 
 inspired moments, we so intently long; as well ask 
 for the knit sinews of an athlete, while nestling in 
 
142 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 undisturbed repose In the padded sleepy hollows of 
 a rocking-chair. The ignoble fate of a soul set 
 free from life's carking care and environed with all 
 that the most cultured civilization could suggest, 
 Tennyson, in his " Palace of Art," has pictured 
 with a master hand. If we would be like Christ, we 
 must pass through Christ's school of experience. 
 He needed the discipline of suffering and struggle, 
 as well as we. He began where we begin — in 
 perfect innocency yet characterless, possessing sim- 
 ply the possibilities of virtue totally undeveloped. 
 It is because he afterward became a hero, battle- 
 taught, battle-tested, battle-scarred, and yet never 
 knew defeat; it is because he through faith 
 wrought righteousness, out of weakness was made 
 strong, endured the cross, despising the shame, 
 suffered long and was kind, sought not his own, 
 was not easily provoked, thought no evil, rejoiced 
 not in iniquity but rejoiced in the truth, bore all 
 things, believed all things, endured all things, loved 
 us with a love that never failed and loved us to 
 the end, — it is because of this, Christ has stood 
 before the ages, and will stand, as the Peerless 
 One, the Revelator of the Divine Heart, the Lib- 
 erator and Saviour of mankind, the Prince of 
 Peace. We must bear Christ's cross, would we 
 wear his crown. 
 
 Then answered the Lord to the cry of his world 
 
 Shall I take away pain 
 And with it the power of the soul to endure 
 
 Made strong by the strain? 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 143 
 
 Shall I take away pity that knits heart to heart 
 
 And sacrifice high? 
 Will ye lose all your heroes that lift from the fire 
 
 White brows to the sky? 
 Shall I take away love that redeems with a price 
 
 And smiles at the loss? 
 Can ye spare from your lives that would climb into 
 mine 
 
 The Christ on his cross? 
 
 We fall into these contradictions in our prayers, 
 through a total misconception of the design of 
 this life. Evolution, not unalloyed present 
 pleasure, is the purpose now. We have been 
 housed in perishable bodies full of quivering 
 nerves; have been environed with antagonistic 
 forces that threaten and thwart us at every turn ; 
 our paths have been left rough and full of dan- 
 gerous pitfalls ; poisons pervade much of the air 
 we breathe, the water we drink, the food we take 
 to repair these weak clay tenements. To millions, 
 life is a heavy care-burden, a fierce contest, and 
 how frequently is it one long catastrophe made 
 up of broken hopes and baffled purposes, of weari- 
 ness and scalding tears and sighs for rest! Why 
 is it? Is this life a stupendous failure? If there 
 is no beyond for which it is preparing, it most 
 certainly is. If there is no beyond in which other 
 and fully sufficient opportunities will be afforded 
 for reformation and restoration and ultimately 
 glorious development as God first planned, then 
 for these untold millions who have been afforded 
 
144 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 scant means and scant capacities in this initial 
 being through some as yet unexplained though 
 doubtless in their case unavoidable necessities, 
 God's scheme of life is surely a stupendous failure. 
 But, as we most sincerely believe, he has not fin- 
 ished with them yet. Tennyson's query and reply 
 in his " In Memoriam " we may well make our 
 own. 
 
 " What hope of answer and redress ? 
 Behind the veil, behind the veil." 
 
 Could not God have shielded his children from 
 suffering and struggle? Yes: but not without 
 hopelessly excluding them from all prospect of 
 spiritual progress, leaving them forever on the 
 low plane of ignoble, irresponsible brute life. The 
 error is widely prevalent, that God has by some 
 arbitrary decision established the great underlying 
 principles that determine moral character, and can 
 at will change the conditions of spiritual growth. 
 No more mischievous confusion of thought can 
 possibly be entertained. These principles and 
 conditions must reach back indefinitely, can of 
 necessity have had no beginning, and cannot be 
 susceptible of the slightest change; for othei'wise 
 before their establishment God could not have been 
 possessed of any moral attribute, or have had for 
 his own governance any standard of moral life. 
 He cannot change them or set them aside; for a 
 moment's reflection will disclose that not even he 
 can convert selfishness into a virtue, or place heart- 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 14.5 
 
 less cruelty on a par with a spirit of self -forget- 
 ting love. 
 
 What he has done for us in this regard is to 
 give power of free choice, and capacity for moral 
 discernment, and to place us in moral relations 
 with himself and with our fellows, and to establish 
 us amid such surroundings as are fitted by their 
 disciplinary processes to develop into glorious fact 
 what are at the first but bare possibilities of 
 virtue. We may, if we choose, stand true to these 
 eternal principles of obligation, live in loving 
 harmony with these many-sided relationships of 
 life, and thereby grow into Divine likeness, or we 
 may persistently refuse to conform, and shut 
 against our souls forever this only open door to 
 hope, miss forever this only opportunity to win 
 eternal life. Simply these possibilities are or can 
 be of Divine gift. Virtues God cannot bestow: 
 they must be born of battle. Dark as were 
 Christ's forebodings of the coming afflictions of 
 his disciples, deeply as he longed to save them 
 from the imprisonments and scourgings and cruel 
 deaths which awaited them, he, in that last prayer 
 so memorable for its deep, pathetic tenderness, 
 prayed not that his Father would take them out 
 of the world and save them from its sufferings 
 and from its spiritual exposures, but only that he 
 would keep them from the evil, from being finally 
 overmastered and borne down by the terrible 
 power of the tempter. God could not save even 
 his Son, his best beloved. He could by his crea- 
 
146 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 tlve word speak a universe into being, but he could 
 not set aside or render less exacting a single one 
 of the laws of spiritual unfolding, even for Christ 
 himself, though through those long night watches 
 in Gethsemane his shrinking human soul plead for 
 relief with an agony so intense as to cause his body 
 to sweat great drops of blood. Christ, with his 
 human limitations of knowledge, seemed to hope 
 that God might in some way avert the impending 
 doom and still accomplish the objects of his mis- 
 sion, and so he prayed, " Father, if it be possible, 
 let this cup pass from me." Yet while God could 
 not save him from that hour, he no doubt whispered 
 words of comfort, gave assurances of his deep- 
 felt sympathy, promised his loving presence and 
 sustaining grace through it all, and, once his mis- 
 sion ended, a glad and honored welcome to the 
 skies. 
 
 What God did for Christ and for his disciples he 
 will do for us, and for this we may most con- 
 fidently pray, that he will not suffer us to be 
 tempted above that we are able to bear, but will 
 with the temptation provide some way of escape, 
 some way to glorious and final victory. His pur- 
 pose is to supplement, not supplant. He will 
 send angels to minister, will grant moments of re- 
 spite, and glimpses of glory. 
 
 Let us not mistake God's plan and our privi- 
 lege, and supinely fold our hands thinking that 
 all the care-burdens, and griefs and racking pains 
 of this life are divinely sent and to be meekly 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 147 
 
 borne, but rather remember that while this world 
 is full of dangers and disasters it is also full of 
 curative forces, while our bodies are subject to 
 disease all their tissues tend towards health. In 
 this we find our divine warrant to relieve the stress 
 whenever and wherever we can. In searching out 
 and applying the remedies and in bravely bearing 
 the burdens when remedies finally fail we may 
 convert them into disciplinary blessings, into up- 
 lifts in the spiritual life. We ought not to regard 
 all ills as specially sent but simply as results of 
 a widely comprehensive plan, the output of general 
 delegated forces, that many of them are prevent- 
 ive, many due to carelessness and ignorance and 
 willful violations of known law, and that it is not 
 only our privilege but positive duty to try and 
 lessen the stress by removing the causes through 
 the varied helps afforded us. When we have 
 rightly striven and rightly prayed and there are 
 burdens still to be borne, then and not till then, 
 we may feel assured that God wants us to bear 
 them and bear them bravely. God is on the side 
 of order, of health, of happiness. Eventually no 
 doubt, it is his purpose to root out all abnormality 
 through human instrumentality and by his own per- 
 sonal interference through the many avenues and 
 agencies he has with such careful forethought pro- 
 vided. He, of course, could bring this about at 
 once without our help; he could have prevented it 
 at the first, but in so doing he would have been 
 forced to shut against us forever the very gates 
 
148 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 of Paradise. Now and here is laid upon us the 
 double command, work and wait, watch and pray. 
 
 Our prayers must thus, not only be reasonable, 
 but they must also be offered in the right spirit. 
 The want must be deeply felt, and there must be 
 a whole-souled earnestness in the plea, accom- 
 panied with a willingness to make any exertion, 
 and undergo any sacrifice, for the attainment of 
 the end. Until this be our attitude, we are not 
 yet worthy of the help, are not in the mood to 
 appreciate it, and have not the capacity to ap- 
 propriate its blessings ; neither have we prepared 
 the way for God's interference, as we have not 
 fully exhausted our own resources, and thus dis- 
 closed the fact, the amount, and the nature of our 
 need. Our prayers should therefore be premedi- 
 tated, should embody only what we intently long 
 for, what we are convinced we truly require, what 
 after repeated trial we find otherwise beyond our 
 reach, and what in order to obtain we are willing to 
 sacrifice any lower pleasures that stand in their 
 way. 
 
 Having thus, after most careful reflection, de- 
 termined the nature of our requests, being willing 
 to pay the cost involved in the grant, we should 
 come boldly to our Father, and in full faith plead 
 our cause, and then set about life's duties perfectly 
 confident of a favorable answer. 
 
 There must be this childlike faith; for Christ's 
 words of promise were, " Therefore I say unto 
 you, What things soever ye desire when ye pray, 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 149 
 
 believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have 
 them." Christ demanded it of those upon whom 
 he wrought miracles of healing : " Stretch forth 
 thy hand," "Take up thy Led," "Go wash." 
 In the command to make the effort, there was 
 clearly implied the promise to add the strength; 
 but the effort must be made in most trustful con- 
 fidence before the Divine reenforcement would 
 come. We with good reason rely implicitly upon 
 the trustworthiness of nature's divinely derived 
 physical forces. We are willing to stake, and in 
 fact do stake again and again, our very lives and 
 fortunes on our belief in their promptly answer- 
 ing to our call the very moment certain conditions 
 are fulfilled, and in the surety we feel in their hon- 
 oring to the letter the terms of their commission. 
 Why not as confidently rely on that more direct 
 Divine force for whose help we pray, for it is in 
 as true a sense conditional, with conditions as ex- 
 act, and it is as prompt and ready to render serv- 
 ice the instant those conditions are complied with? 
 Rest assured not until we throw ourselves as un- 
 reservedly on the arm of the Almighty as we do 
 on the operations of these lower delegated forces, 
 and this faith is inwrought into the very texture 
 of our lives, can the blessing come. 
 
 To have the right spirit when we pray, we must 
 also have our thoughts purged thoroughly from 
 all forms of selfishness. It would seem that so 
 patent a truth requires not even a statement; but 
 this element presents such protean forms, it is so 
 
160 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 subtle, assumes so many disguises, borrowing the 
 very livery of heaven, that even the elect are many 
 times self-deceived. 
 
 Every reasonable prayer offered thus in a right 
 spirit is certain of favorable answer. The bless- 
 ings bestowed will be either specifically or sub- 
 stantially what we ask; specifically when the objects 
 sought prove to be or to embody what they seem. 
 This is not always, and perhaps not often, the 
 case; and because of that, the blessings are sub- 
 stantially rather than specifically granted. To 
 illustrate: I remember some years ago noticing in 
 a show-window what appeared to be a basket of 
 most luscious fruit. The forms and the delicate 
 shadings were remarkable facsimiles of nature's 
 handiwork. The bloom was on the peach and the 
 plum and the purple cluster. On the cheek of 
 the apple glowed those brilliant sunset tints we 
 BO admire. The rich, juicy look of the sliced 
 melon was brought out most marvelously. It was 
 a masterpiece of art. I have often thought how 
 differently my little boy, had he been with me, 
 would have looked on this overflowing basket. 
 To him it would have been a complete deception, 
 and he no doubt would have plead with me to make 
 him the happy possessor of it, — not that he 
 might feast his eyes, but his palate. The cool 
 flavors, not the colorings and curves of beauty, 
 would have filled his fancy. A specific answer to 
 his plea would have been a downright disappoint- 
 ment, a disillusion, which he would not at all have 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 151 
 
 relished, for he would have found it but a cunning 
 device of paint and plaster. To have obtained 
 for him the fruit itself, of which he saw only a 
 skilful imitation, would have been to have answered 
 his prayer substantially and to have satisfied his 
 real longings. 
 
 Many point to the case of President Garfield 
 as a notable instance of the failure of the prayer 
 test. Countless petitions went up from loving and 
 anxious hearts for his recovery, and yet he died. 
 Because God did not answer these prayers specif- 
 ically, it is strenuously contended that he did not 
 answer them at all. But how can we, with our 
 extremely limited knowledge, pronounce intelli- 
 gently on a matter so complicate, involving so 
 many interests personal, domestic, and national? 
 Is it not possible that God conferred substantially 
 the blessings sought, and that the profits and 
 pleasures which we supposed would flow from 
 Garfield's continuance in the private home circle 
 and in his exalted post of public service were ab- 
 solutely insignificant compared with what his mar- 
 tyrdom could under Divine guidance be made to 
 yield? God very easily could have thwarted the 
 fell purpose of the assassin, and that vast volume 
 of agonizing prayer would never have ascended 
 to his throne from this stricken people. But do 
 you not remember how that event melted into most 
 loving sympathy the hearts, not only of all sections 
 of this great nation, but of all the civilized coun- 
 tries on the globe? Garfield's suffering and death 
 
162 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 gave to this generation, under God's beneficent 
 overruling, a spiritual impetus and exaltation 
 which this eminent statesman, through a life how- 
 ever long and prosperous, might never have 
 secured. That prayerful and nobly sympathetic 
 attitude of all good people unquestionably made 
 it possible, as nothing else could, for God to thus 
 convert this seeming catastrophe into a most blessed 
 benefaction. 
 
 Perhaps he saw such combination of qualities in 
 Garfield's character and in the character of his 
 counselors as to him seemed ominous of evil. 
 There is many a danger signal which we do not 
 detect, or even suspect to exist. It may be, too, 
 God thus sought to impress upon us again one 
 of those lessons taught in President Lincoln's 
 sudden death, just as the terrible war-clouds were 
 lifting, that a nation's strength and safety de- 
 pend not upon any frail human life, but upon 
 the cherishing of right principles and the con- 
 tinuance of the Divine care. For our earthly 
 bereavements and losses we may, if we will, secure 
 priceless compensations, " for our light affliction, 
 which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far 
 more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." 
 
 What deep peace has come, and will come still 
 as the years go by, to that once weeping home 
 circle, through the ever sacred memories of the 
 dead! What fondly cherished hopes have been 
 awakened of glad reunions in that golden by- 
 and-by ! 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 153 
 
 The results to President Garfield himself of his 
 weeks of suffering, and final exchange of worlds, 
 while right at the very zenith of his power and 
 his popularity, we have very inadequate means of 
 measuring; for directly behind him, as he an- 
 swered the summons, there fell an impenetrable 
 veil of mystery. Perhaps, when we too have 
 crossed the river, we shall find that those prayers 
 for life were answered by the gift of larger, 
 grander life than he in his loftiest moods had ever 
 dreamed of getting. 
 
 It frequently occurs that most earnest prayers 
 are offered to promote what appear to be directly 
 antagonistic interests. This fact came out very 
 prominently during our late Civil War. For each 
 of the fiercely contending armies, victory was pas- 
 sionately plead for by most devout believers. 
 Who would question the sterling integrity or re- 
 ligious fervor of Stonewall Jackson? and, as we 
 well know, he fought as he prayed. He imperiled 
 his life and finally gave it as a noble sacrifice to 
 the Southern cause. Were his prayers unavailing? 
 Did God turn a deaf ear to the pleadings of this 
 earnest, self-sacrificing disciple? Most assuredly 
 not, though specifically his prayer was denied. 
 Those who fought with him side by side, and 
 shared his local loves and aspirations, but who 
 have been spared to see this day and to enjoy the 
 phenomenal prosperity of the New South, — its 
 quickened pulse, the development of its inexhaust- 
 ible mineral resources, the birth of its gigantic 
 
154 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 manufacturing enterprises, its improved agricul- 
 ture, its rapidly growing cities, its business en- 
 largement everywhere, and, more than all, its 
 intellectual and moral renascence, and the ushering 
 in of a new era of permanent peace, of genuine 
 fraternal feeling, binding it in indissoluble union 
 with those whom it once faced as foes on stricken 
 fields, — those who have thus lived to see this day, 
 with its rich blessings already realized and with its 
 assured prophecies of vastly multiplied prosperi- 
 ties, recognize now that God, while he swept away 
 their cherished institution of slavery and denied 
 them Southern autonomy, suffered their land to 
 be overrun with devastating war, their homes to be 
 left desolate, and their once proud banners to 
 be torn by cannon shot and trailed in the dust, 
 not only granted them the real blessings which they 
 sought, but multiplied them ten thousandfold. 
 They lamentably erred, as they are now free to 
 confess, as to the channels through which those 
 blessings could come, and they have lived to thank 
 God that he, in his deeper wisdom and in his 
 larger love, himself chose the means through which 
 he should bestow his gifts. 
 
 We have discovered in the physical universe 
 multitudes of deadly poisons, hidden under vari- 
 ous disguises, bearing remarkably close resem- 
 blance to substances that are useful and life- 
 giving. Many of them elude our senses altogether. 
 We fail even with our microscopes and our most 
 careful chemical tests to tear off their masks. 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 155 
 
 We learn of their presence only by their alarm- 
 ing mischief-making. How many of our serious 
 diseases are traceable to these inimical forces, that 
 lurk in the air and water, in the vegetable and 
 animal foods, which we take into our systems un- 
 suspectingly ! We are also exposed to intellectual 
 and moral poisons as subtile, as concealed, as 
 deadly, as these which threaten us in the world of 
 matter. How true it is, we are *' but children 
 crying in the night, crying for the light, and 
 with no language but a cry," so little certain 
 knowledge have we of what will do us good! and 
 yet, with what unseemly haste we let go our faith, 
 and think our prayers unheard, so soon as any of 
 these hidden poisons are denied ! 
 
 I remember reading in my early school days, 
 in one of the text-books, of a nobleman, who, 
 while on his return from a long hunt with his 
 favorite hawk on a hot summer's day, filled his 
 cup from a sparkling rivulet that was leaping 
 down the sides of the mountain. As he was lift- 
 ing it to his parched lips, his hawk with sudden 
 sweep of wings dashed it from his hand, and then, 
 with a strange, anxious call, flew along the bank 
 of the stream toward its source. The nobleman, 
 no little annoyed, again essayed to drink; but the 
 bird the second time upset the cup, and fluttered 
 and called along up the mountain side the same 
 as before. A third time the cup was lifted, and 
 a third time its coveted contents were spilled. The 
 hunter, tired and thirsty, his patience gone, with 
 
156 DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 
 
 quick resentment struck his bird a fatal blow. 
 Then, as he looked on his favorite, dead at his 
 feet, it occurred to him to follow up the stream, 
 for the strange conduct of the bird and his strange 
 call had at last impressed him. In the spring, at 
 the very fountain head, he found, to his utter 
 horror, the half-decayed carcass of a huge serpent, 
 and it flashed upon him that it was deadly poison 
 he had been lifting to his lips, that the faithful 
 bird had saved his master's life, and that this same 
 master in a fit of blind passion had ruthlessly 
 destroyed his. Full of remorse, he dug a grave, 
 laid the bird tenderly in it, and afterward, to 
 mark the spot and tell of his gratitude and his 
 grief, he raised a marble shaft above this his hum- 
 ble benefactor. Is there not a lesson here for us.^* 
 When we are baffled and beaten back in some of 
 our cherished pui'poses, when the cups of spark- 
 ling pleasure which we are eagerly raising to our 
 parched lips are dashed from us, let us not in our 
 haste conclude that our prayers are unblessed, that 
 God has either turned away in deaf indifference 
 and left us to our fate, or become our covert foe. 
 The seemingly hostile forces may be the very 
 angels of his kindest providence, commissioned to 
 smite from our lips by the beating of their strong 
 pinions sparkling drafts which have come from 
 poisoned springs. 
 
 With these explanations I reaffirm with added 
 emphasis that every reasonable prayer offered in 
 a right spirit is certain of favorable answer. To 
 
DOES PRAYER AVAIL? 157 
 
 this, as we have seen, science can urge no valid 
 objection. It is in consonance with the soundest 
 philosophy; it is in fulfillment of Divine promise, 
 it responds to the deepest intuitions of human 
 hearts. 
 
 The first effect of modem scientific inquiry has 
 been to weaken faith, and make God seem simply 
 an impersonal, great First Cause, rather than a 
 present loving Father, and ourselves but processes 
 in a vast evolution, parts in an unchangeable order, 
 wheels and pinions, merely, in a mechanism whose 
 movements reach from motes to sun-clusters. A 
 reaction from this paralyzing scepticism has al- 
 ready set in. A faith fervent as that felt before 
 science had birth, seems destined again to prevail, 
 and to be the outcome of this very spirit of inquiry 
 which for the past few decades has threatened 
 to relegate it forever to the limbo of the world's 
 outgrown and discarded thought. Reappearing 
 this time as the ripe result of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury's tireless and fearless research into time's 
 deepest mysteries, I cannot see how ever again it 
 can lose its hold on the hearts of men. 
 

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