The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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The next topic on which I must comment is Prayer, — (!>'" and this time it must be less briefly. We have heard r, much talk of late against prayer, especially against prayers '\^^ Jt for better weather and for the recovery of sick people. As regards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered to stand firm, it is that in certain environments prayer may contribute to recovery, and should ^ '^ be encouraged as a therapeutic measure.
Being a nor- ••- * mal factor of moral health in the person, its omission would be deleterious. The case of the weather is different. Notwithstanding the recency of the opposite belief,^ ^ A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work by Frank Granger : The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii. * Example ; " The minister at Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture in p. 464every one now knows that droughts and storms follow from physical antecedents, and that moral appeals cannot avert them. But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer ; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched.
Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion. " Religion," says a liberal French theologian, " is an intercourse, a conscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in distress with the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which its fate is contingent. This intercourse with God is realized by prayer. Prayer is religion in act ; that is, prayer is real religion.
It is prayer that distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar or neighboring phenomena as purely moral or aesthetic sentiment. Rehgion is nothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life.
This act is prayer, by which term I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain sacred formulae, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence, — it may be even before it has a name by which to call it.
Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no religion ; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we have living religion. One sees from this why * natural religion,' so- Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain.
As soon as the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said, * You Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to church and pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under water.'" R. W. Emekson: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 363.
p. 465called, is not properly a religion. It cuts man off from y prayer. It leaves him and God in mutual remoteness, •with no intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no interchange, no action of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom this pretended religion is only a philosophy. Born at epochs of rationalism, of critical investigations, it never was anything but an abstraction.
An artificial and dead creation, it reveals to its examiner hardly one of the characters proper to religion." ^ It seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth of M. Sabatier's contention.
The religious phenomenon, studied as an inner fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications, has shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the\ consciousness which indj.yiduals have of an intercourse \ R. between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related. This intercourse is re-- alized at the time as being both active and mutual.
If it be not effective ; if it be not a give and take relation ; if nothing be really transacted while it lasts ; if the world is in no whit different for its having taken place ; then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense that something is transacting, is of course a feeling of what is ^ illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as containing elements of delusion, — these undoubtedly everywhere exist, — but as being rooted in delusion altogether, just as materiahsts and atheists have always said it was.
At most there might remain, when the direct experiences of prayer were ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential belief that the whole order of existence must have a divine cause. But this way of contemplating nature, pleasing as it would doubtless be ^ Augusts Sabatier : Esquisse d'une Pbilosophie de la Religion, 2iiie ^d., 1897, pp. 24-26, abridged.
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