The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 466to persons of a pious taste, would leave to them but the spectators' part at a play, whereas in experimental religion and the prayerful life, we seem ourselves to be the actors, not in a play, but in a very serious reality. The genuineness of rehgion is thus indissolubly bound up with the question whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not deceitful.
The conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this consciousness is the very core of living religion. As to what is transacted, great differences of opinion have prevailed. The unseen powers have been supposed, and are yet supposed, to do things which no enlightened man can nowadays believe in.
It may well prove that the sphere of influence in prayer is subjective exclusively, and that what is immediately changed is only the mind of the praying person. But however our opinion of prayer's effects may come to be Hmited by criticism, rehgion, in the vital sense in which these lectures study it, must stand or fall by the persuasion that effects of some sort genuinely do occur.
Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about : energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in some part^^ it objective or subjective, of the world of facts. This postulate is strikingly expressed in a letter written by the late Frederic W. H. Myers to a friend, who allows me to quote from it.
It shows how independent the prayer-instinct is of usual doctrinal complications. Mr. Myers writes : — " I am glad that you have asked me about prayer, because I have rather strong ideas on the subject. First consider what are the facts. There exists around us a spiritual universe, and that universe is Jn actual relation with the material. From the spiritual universe comes the energy which maintains the matep. 467rial ; the energy which makes the life of each individual spirit, -yi^^u-^^jt^ *i Our spirits are supported by a perpetual indrawal of this \ energy, and the vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing, ^>*d^ ^ much as the vigor of our absorption of material nutriment ^jw-v-Wwn*«^' changes from hour to hour. ,#.
'...t^tt^^-^ < " I call these ' facts ' because I think that some scheme of ^ this kind is the only one consistent with oixr actual evidence ; too complex to summarize here. How, then, should we act on these facts? Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much spiritual life as possibj^e, and we must place our minds in any / attitude which experience shows to be favorable to such in- / drawal.
Prayer is the general name for that attitude of open and earnest expectancy. If we then ask to whom to pray, the answer (strangely enough) must be that that does not much matter.
The prayer is not indeed a purely subjective thing ; — a ^^ ^v*** it means a real increase in intensity of absorption of spiritual y powgr or grace ; — but we do not know enough of what takes ^ CJ"**^ ■place in the spiritual world to know how the prayer operates ; O^TvS^**" — who is cognizant of it, or through what channel the grace is ytT." given.
Better let children pray to Christ, who is at any rate ^^J the highest individual spirit of whom we have any knowledge. But it would be rash to say that Christ himself hears us ; while to say that God hears us is merely to restate the first principle, — that gi'ace flows in from the infinite spiritual world.
Let us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the belief that power is absorbed until the next lecture, when our dogmatic conclusions, if we have any, must be reached.
Let this lecture still confine itself to the description of phenomena ; and as a concrete example of an extreme sort, of the way in which the prayerful life may still be led, let me take a case with which most of you must be acquainted, that of George Miiller of Bristol, who died in 1898. Miiller's prayers were of the crassest petitional order.
Early in life he resolved on taking certain Bible promises in literal sincerity, and on letting himself be fed, not by his own worldly foresight,
p. 468
He had an extraordinarily active and successful career, among the fruits of which were the distribution of over two million copies of the Scripture text, in different languages ; the equipment of several hundred missionaries ; the circulation of more than a hundred and eleven million of scriptural books, pamphlets, and tracts ; the building of five large orphanages, and the keeping and educating of thousands of orphans ; finally, the establishment of schools in which \/ over a hundred and twenty-one thousand youthful and adult pupils were taught.
In the course of this work Mr. Miiller received and administered nearly a miUion and a half of pounds sterling, and traveled over two hundred thousand miles of sea and land.^ During the sixty-' eight years of his ministry, he never owned any j)roperty except his clothes and furniture, and cash in handj and he left, at the age of eighty-six, an estate worth only a hundred and sixty pounjis. ■.r His method was to let his general wants be publicly known, si^XJk Ay but not to acquaint other people with the details of his temporary necessities.
For the relief of the latter, he prayed directly to the Lord, believing that sooner or later prayers are always answered if one have trust enough.
" When I lose such a thing as a key," he writes, " I ask the Lord to direct me to it, and I look for an answer to my prayer ; when a person with whom I have made an appointment does not come, according to the fixed time, and I begin to be inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased to hasten him to me, and I look for an answer ; when I do not understand a passage of the word of God, I lift up my heart to the Lord that he would be pleased by his Holy Spirit to instruct me, and I expect to be taught, though I do not fix the time when, and the manner how it should be; when I am going to minister in the Word, I seek help from the Lord, and . . . am not cast down, but of good cheer because I look for his assistance. 1 My authority for these statistics is the little work on Miiller, by Frederic G. Warne, New York, 1898.
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