BL 
 240 
 .K55 
 1893 
 
tihx<xry of t:he theological ^tminavy 
 
 PRINCETON . NEW JERSEY 
 
 FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
 ROBERT ELLIOTT SPEER 
 
 L 
 
 BL 240 .K55 1893 
 
 Kinsley, William Wirt, 1837 
 
 1923. 
 Science and prayer 
 
THE CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY AND SCIEN- 
 TIFIC CIRCLE. 
 3^oun^c& (n 1878. 
 
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 THE REQUIRED LITERATURE FOR 1893-4. 
 
 Rome and the Making of Modern Europe. 
 James R. Joy fl.OO 
 
 Roman and Medieval Art (illustrated). W. H. 
 Goodyear 1.00 
 
 Outlines of Economics. Richard T. Ely . 1.00 
 
 Classic Latin Course in English. W. C. Wil- 
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 Song and Legend from the Middle Ages. 
 Edited by W. D. McCIintock 50 
 
 Science and Prayer. By William W. Kinsley .50 
 
 The Chautauquan (12 numbers, illustrated) . 2.00 
 
% 
 
 ^tU 20 
 
 Cbautauqua IRea&liifl Circle Uttecature X %)ft/(;^^[_ 
 
 SCIENCE AND PRAYER 
 
 ¥ 
 
 
 
 BY 
 
 W. W. KINSLEY 
 
 Author of " Vietvs on Vexed Questions. 
 
 FLOOD AND VINCENT 
 Cbe (^ijautauquarfCcnturp ^u0 
 
 MEADVILLE PENNA 
 
 150 FIFTH AVE. NEW YORK 
 
 1893 
 
Copyright, 1893, 
 By Flood & Vincent. 
 
 The ChautauqiLa-Century Press, Meadville, Pa., U. <S. A. 
 Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by Flood cfe Vincent 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter. Page. 
 
 I. God can Interfere when and as He Chooses^ 
 ivithout Destroying any Force or Abrogating 
 any Law ....... 5 
 
 II. He has in fact from time to time thus Inter- 
 fered and is still Interfering . . . 27 
 
 III. He will Interfere for each one of us, however 
 
 Insignificant we may at present seem to he 44 
 
 lY. He will Interfere because we ■ ask Him, Do- 
 ing for us what otherwise he would not 
 have Done 67 
 
 Y. Every Sensible Prayer offered in the Right 
 
 Spirit is certain of Favorable Answer . 94 
 
SCIENCE AND PRAYER. 
 
 I. 
 
 The Scriptures affirm, that, in answer to prayer, a 
 part of Palestine was once visited with long drought and 
 afterward with copious rains and harvests, an entire 
 family healed, a raging fire quenched, God's purpose to 
 destroy a stiff-necked people changed, the sun and moon 
 apparently stopped in mid-heaven for an entire day, a 
 thunderstorm made to burst right in wheat harvest, a 
 leprous hand cured, a dead child revived, a good king's 
 life lengthened, and, for an assuring token, a dial's 
 shadow actually turned backward. 
 
 The Bible unmistakably teaches thai] God both can 
 and does interfere in our behalf, that his interference 
 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 health- 
 ful 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 unchangea- 
 ble law, not only in the production of material but even 
 
 5 
 
6 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 of mental phenomena. We have found that within the 
 walls of every particle of matter there is lodged a force j 
 that these forces are of sixty-four or more different 
 kinds, and their differences in nature and effect make 
 all the differences in the substances about us ; that they 
 bear to each other certain unalterably fixed relations, 
 and exert over each other unalterably fixed influences. 
 These relations we have been able by our experiments 
 to reduce to mathematical formulae. 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 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 complemental parts, has had a germinal 
 beginning, has been, and still is, incarnating under pre- 
 established laws of evolution, point by point, age after 
 age, a certain set ideal under the guidance of a central 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 7 
 
 germ-power, divinely commissioned it may be, but com- 
 missioned 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 chil- 
 dren 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 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 you will with it, it will reappear iden- 
 tically 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 sunbeam. Matter and force are at your bid- 
 ding, but their laws are inexorable. Eays of light will 
 travel ninety-five millions of miles to serve you ; the at- 
 
8 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 mosphere 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 
 Eussias, unless he does. The prayerless sinner and the 
 praying saint meet here on a common level. All 
 those stories about producing thunderstorms by prayer, 
 healing the sick, turning back shadows, stopping the 
 sun in the heavens, raising the dead, are thoroughly un- 
 scientific and absurd, and the height of absurdity is 
 reached when it is claimed that the all- wise Creator 
 can be induced to change his plans by the importunate 
 pleadings of a little creature to whom he has given a 
 brief existence on one of the obscure satellites of one of 
 the million suns that make up one of the nebulous 
 clusters with which the heavens are swarming. What 
 greater presumption can be imagined? Has the Al- 
 mighty so sadly blundered in his plans that this little 
 creature can discover to him their defects, and induce 
 him to make a change at this late day, when everything 
 is so intimately interlinked and interdependent that 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 9 
 
 an interference in one part may demand a reconstruc- 
 tion 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 con- 
 cerns of this vast swinging universe are upon him ? He 
 has laid down broad general plans. We cannot reason- 
 ably 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 malarious 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 mischiev- 
 ous mixture of truth and error. The spirit of cold 
 speculative scepticism 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 modern materialistic thought ! How many 
 prayers are simply the outbreathings of a reverential 
 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 offered with the same confident assurance 
 of results as inspires the farmer when he sows his fields,. 
 
10 SCIENCE AND PBA YER. 
 
 or the telegraphic operator when with his key he 
 closes the electric circuit and sends his messages over 
 the long leagues of ocean cable I 
 
 My purpose 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. 
 
 2d. That, as a fact, he has thus actually interfered 
 again and again. 
 
 3d. That it is not only not presumptuous, but 
 most natural and reasonable, for us to expect that he 
 will interfere for uSj insignificant though we may seem 
 to be. 
 
 4th. That he will interfere because we ask him, 
 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. Hoic can God answer prayer without destroy- 
 ing any force or abrogating any law? In my own 
 experience, real light on this point first came from 
 the perusal of Dr. BushnelPs ^^IS^ature and the Super- 
 natural." His mode of treatment has long since passed 
 
SCIENCE AND Pit A YER. 11 
 
 out of memory, but a thought-germ was lodged in my 
 mind which has since grown into a deep-rooted con- 
 viction. 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 unraveled much of the in- 
 finite 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. They of 
 course cannot 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 important ones, in the world about us. How 
 our wills are thus linked with matter, it would probably 
 puzzle the wisest to explain ; but that they actually are, 
 is a fact patent to all. 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. 
 
 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 fibres at once begin to shorten. I exercise this 
 
12 SCIENCE AND FRA YER. 
 
 direct will power right against the force of gravity, tem- 
 porarily overpowering but not destroying it, for it 
 still continues 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 the 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 mastered by a stronger antagonist. Eemove 
 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 over- 
 coming the cohesive. Eaise the temperature, and the 
 water will change to steam, and a repellence between the 
 particles will appear, the heat driving them asunder, 
 despite all that cohesion 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 confusion, not a single 
 force destroyed, not a law abrogated. Our volitions are 
 simply supernatural, not contranatural. Our wills act 
 indirectly by complying with the conditions that un- 
 fetter nature's forces. The scientists have established 
 beyond question the fact that there is not a single one of 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 13 
 
 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, discovering in very many instances pre- 
 cisely 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 intelli- 
 gence, and we have become masters of nature by simply 
 understanding and complying with her laws. For in- 
 stance, we want homes for ourselves and our little ones, 
 and so we cast about and fijid abundance of crude 
 material, — sand and clay, metal and slate, rock and 
 standing trees and running water. Our wills decree 
 that these shall be transformed into cemented walls 
 of brick and stone, framed timbers, tessellated floors, 
 frescoed ceilings, plate -glass windows, roofs and mantels, 
 furnaces and swinging doors, and step by step, under 
 the quickening 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 developing 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 
 
14 SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 
 
 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 effects have been produced by this intelli- 
 gent 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-messages 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 
 granite and of marble transformed into palaces and 
 statue-crowned temples to body forth his ripest culture 
 and most holy thought. 
 
 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 absolute 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 
 another's will reaching us through channels of argu- 
 ment, persuasive kindling of the fancy, eloquent appeal, 
 shrewd suggestion, or show of appreciative sympathy. 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 15 
 
 There are a thousand avenues to the heart, a thousand 
 ways to arouse the conscience, 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 responsible free 
 choice are with the vast majority still retained, but it is 
 through these multiform influences of personal character 
 that the life of the world's subtile social organism is, 
 under pre-established spiritual laws, regulated and 
 maintained. 
 
 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 interference. 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 conclu- 
 sively 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 profounder 
 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 undisturbed? 
 
 Before the birth of science a radical misconception of 
 the true nature of miracles was entertained, and seems 
 still very generally to prevail, and this has doubtless 
 
16 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 largely provoked the attacks made on the truthfulness of 
 the Bible record. Cannot the miracle-workings spoken 
 of have been wrought by acts of divine will precisely 
 analogous to those of the human? What necessity is 
 there for thinking that any force or law has been, or 
 need be, destroyed? The ax that was made to float 
 on the water by God's command through his prophet 
 was not necessarily made lighter than the water any 
 more than my hand when I raise it is made lighter 
 than the air. The nature of the materials remained the 
 same, and gravity was still in full force, but God's 
 will was under the axe as mine is under the hand. Pre- 
 cisely how it got there I cannot explain, neither can 
 I how mine got under the hand. The one is no more 
 mysterious than the other, no more of a deviation 
 from nature's laws, but both volitions are, as far as 
 I can discover, essentially the same. 
 
 There perhaps is no Bible narrative whose truth 
 has been more violently and generally assailed than that 
 of the sun's being stayed upon Gibeon and the moon 
 in the valley of Aijalon. It has been pronounced scien- 
 tifically impossible. Some authors have attempted to 
 explain it by claiming that it is only a quotation from 
 the Book of Jasher, a mere poetical extravaganza 
 embellished by that warmth of imagery characteristic of 
 Oriental writings. But such a defense is not called for. 
 The Christian believer may confidently challenge the 
 scientist to show just cause for discrediting the state- 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 17 
 
 ment. Indeed the late Professor O. M. Mitchell did not 
 hesitate to assert that the rotary motion of the earth 
 could be completely arrested in a few minutes without a 
 single thing upon it being disturbed, and the arrest 
 of this one motion was all that was required to effect 
 the phenomenon. It would not have changed the 
 earth's positioii in the heavens or its relations with its 
 satellite, its sister planets, or its central sun. If the 
 scientist can by his own will-power put out his hand and 
 check the spinning of a top, what reason has he for 
 thinking that God's will cannot check the whirl of a 
 world? Has he any evidence that his will is more 
 closely linked with matter than God's! The same 
 eminent authority also pointed out that, if he had 
 chosen, God could have lengthened the day by simply 
 condensing the atmosphere and thus changing its power 
 of refraction. Whether he actually adopted either of 
 these methods or used a better we with our yet ex- 
 tremely meagre knowledge of nature have of course 
 no means of determining, but we can see even now how 
 such an end was within the ready reach of a will 
 as masterful and as wise as we are warranted in 
 believing God's to be. 
 
 The miracles of replenishing the widow's cruse of oil, 
 turning the water to wine, feeding the five thousand 
 with the five loaves and few fishes, though they involve 
 something more than simply the overmastering of one 
 force by another, as in the incident just cited, and are at 
 
18 SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 
 
 first more difidcult of apprehension and belief, 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 oil and the wine, 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 manufacturing. 
 There was no call for any new matter, as it was 
 already at hand in vast abundance. Christians 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 absurb. 
 An achievement like that would transcend even 
 divine power, for it involves a contradiction, an im- 
 possibility. 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 
 
SCIENCE AND PMA YER. 19 
 
 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 origin- 
 ally 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 prolonged 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 effect 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 presence oi force that is re- 
 vealed to our consciousness 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. 
 
 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 un- 
 used forces liberated, or greater direct power employed 
 by a sovereign will in carrying out its decrees. The 
 human will had before this accomplished the same ends 
 in other ways, for how else can we explain the presence 
 of the oil which the prophet found in the widow's cruse, 
 
20 SCIENCE AND PBA YEJR, 
 
 or 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 human will 
 had been compelled to resort to tedious and, for the 
 most part, indirect methods to accomplish 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 per- 
 fect knowledge of nature's laws we become more com- 
 plete masters of her forces. What giant strides have 
 we already made in this direction, especially during this 
 nineteenth century ! It is difficult for us to realize the 
 nature and extent of our recent victories over matter. 
 With what blank amazement would Washington and his 
 companions be filled were they now, without knowing 
 what had taken place, to return to the country they 
 fought to save ! For since Washington closed his eyes 
 to earth, there have come the steamship, the locomotive, 
 the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, and thou- 
 sands 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 bombard- 
 ment of Alexandria, though halfway round the globe, 
 
SCIENCE AND PEA YER. 21 
 
 took only as many minutes. The thunder of the first 
 gun had hardly died away along the banks of the Kile 
 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 peculiar 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 concede 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 insight of a God. But even if these 
 miracles were performed by direct will-power, still we 
 can point to constantly recurring instances in which 
 precisely 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 organ- 
 isms, effect combinations of elements which outside 
 of their laboratories or the laboratories of man are 
 never produced, and are marked by extreme instability, 
 
22 SCIENCE AND FRA YER. 
 
 readily decomposing under the influence of heat or 
 fermentation, so soon as their influence is withdrawn. 
 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 nitrogen never would have con- 
 gregated into such chemical groups, or arranged them- 
 selves along such lines of symmetry, or climbed to such 
 dizzy heights, directly against the steady pull of gravity, 
 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. 
 
 Further than that, we see the products of vegetive- 
 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, disintegration begins. These nitrogenous combi- 
 nations are the very embodiment of instability. 
 
 We are daily witnesses of more startling wonders still. 
 
SCIENCE AND PEA YEB, 23 
 
 They form part of our personal experiences. 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, astronomers 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 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 
 
24 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 man over all, what valid objection can science urge 
 to the Christian's creed that God's will can by direct 
 impressment effect combinations 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 relationships its 
 marked analogy to the characteristics of force which 
 science has herself recorded ? Why may not the divine 
 will not only make bread, wine, and fish directly out of 
 the surrounding 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 human will 
 is doing every day? There are multitudes 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 imagination over these susceptible bodies, 
 there have arisen schools of theorists which advocate 
 that what have hitherto been pronounced incurable dis- 
 eases may be made to yield to the modern mind -cure 
 treatment. They have doubtless overrated the will's 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 2& 
 
 curative energy, but they certainly have made no 
 mistake, except in the extent to which such cure can be 
 carried. Sudden fright, worriment in financial difficul- 
 ties, brooding over loss of friends, remorse, chagrin, dis- 
 couragement, loneliness, and longing, — all have their 
 depressing effect on the body, and if not checked in 
 time will lead to serious illness, if not to positive brain 
 lesion. 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 exhilarating, 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 communication as there evidently 
 must be, — avenues more open and numerous than be- 
 tween 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 
 regulating its processes, and with his intimate and 
 accurate acquaintance with its ever-varying environ- 
 ment, can by turning the currents of thought by 
 means of timely suggestions, by firing the fancy, rousing 
 
26 SCIENCE AND PEA YER. 
 
 the conscience, raising the hope, occasioning and con- 
 firming the purpose, and, by the even more mighty 
 magnetism of such positive and such sympathetic per- 
 sonality as his must be, summon health or sickness, 
 life or death, when and where he chooses? 
 
 Thus the Christian's creed that God can answer 
 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 discoveries of modern science most abundant 
 confirmatory 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 judgment as her strongest witness and most 
 helpful ally. 
 
II. 
 
 But, query our doubting Thomases, suppose you 
 can thus show that scientific discoveries warrant a belief 
 in the possibility 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 aU life ; that the world is simply an immense organ- 
 ism which has reached its present complex perfectness 
 through inherent forces working under fixed laws of evo- 
 lution ; that the stages of its growth have been as regular 
 and predetermined as those of a tree f that its social 
 amenities, its arts and literatures, its ripened civiliza- 
 tions, 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 en- 
 ergizings of the germ-force that at the first lay hidden 
 within the walls of the seed ? We return to this query a 
 most decided negative answer, and will endeavor to 
 establish, as the second point in our present argument, 
 
 27 
 
28 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 that God has actually interfered again and again 5 that 
 his interferences have not been confined to any one age, 
 but have been present in all ages j that his 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 philosophy and in science, are present with us 
 to-day. 
 
 At the first, matter was formless, motionless, forceless, 
 structureless, rayless. On this there is now no con- 
 troversy among the different schools of thought. Moses 
 and Herbert Spencer, the creationist and the evolution- 
 ist, the dates of whose writing 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 infinite com- 
 plexity, 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 afi&rm that in this unfolding there are 
 no evidences of the active presence of an intelligent 
 personal will-power are confronted by seemingly in- 
 superable objections which science itself 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 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER, 29 
 
 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 is 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, work- 
 ing under absolutely fixed conditions which no skilled 
 chemist has ever succeeded in dislodging, or destroying, 
 or changing in the minutest particular ; each having all 
 the characteristics of a manufactured article as affirmed 
 by Herschel, Faraday, and Clerk Maxwell, 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 combina- 
 tions, 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 abiding 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 nature 
 of their being, as well as over the cradle of their birth, 
 there has been thrown a veil of mystery through whose 
 
30 SCIENCE AND PEA YER. 
 
 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. 
 
 Skilled specialists, after repeated trials to demonstrate 
 that vitality may spring through spontaneous generation 
 from dead matter, now candidly confess that all their 
 efforts have thus far proved unavailing. 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 crucial test of the science of this nineteenth 
 century. The lamented Agassiz affirmed 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 burning 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 multi- 
 tudes of living organisms that have from age to age so 
 peopled our planet f 
 
 The secret of the ^gg, its nature and its origin, quite 
 as seriously puzzles and confounds the evolutionist as 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 31 
 
 does that of the elemental atom. Within its walls there 
 hides 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 unbidden into 
 her very presence, but the sprite, warned by the first 
 footfall of the intruder, passes with viewless feet 
 through some secret postern gate out into the unknown 
 beyond, and never comes back again. After this he 
 compounds in his laboratory the like chemical ingredi- 
 ents of which he has found the e>gg composed, and in 
 precisely the same proportions, 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 organ- 
 izing 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 
 impalpable thought it is commissioned to incarnate into 
 living form. 
 
 Again, between not only the four primordial divisions 
 of the animal kingdom and also the classes, orders, and 
 
32 SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 
 
 genera, but even the one hundred and thirty thousand 
 different species, it has been demonstrated, after a cen- 
 tury of most painstaking 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 reappearing through 
 the law of atavism when in new surroundings or 
 removed from the culturing care of man. But, how- 
 ever, 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 stern voice, saying, 
 '^Thus far, but no farther." That voice they are 
 rapidly learning to recognize as the commanding voice 
 of God. 
 
 The origin of bodily organs is another of nature's 
 many secrets to which evolution theories furnish no key. 
 These organs are found on examination to be contriv- 
 ances of the most complicated 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 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 33 
 
 complemental one to the other and incapable of per- 
 forming any useful office unless 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 absurd 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 varia- 
 tions, 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 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 
 corporate work. 
 
 Exploring parties of geologists, naturalists, and anato- 
 mists, 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 even the Silurian strata 
 to the very dawn of being, 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 ever were any such proc- 
 esses as evolutionists so boldly announce to have taken 
 
34 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 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 phenomena of 
 correlated growth. 
 
 Materialistic expounders of the universe also find 
 themselves confronted on every side by the ever re- 
 curring phenomena of instinct and are at their wits' end 
 to account for that perfect poise and mastery of body ex- 
 hibited by some animals directly after birth, for that 
 accurate intuitive knowledge of perspective, that minute 
 familiarity with first witnessed scenes, that unrivaled 
 ingenuity of design and flawless finish in mechanical ex- 
 ecution of works performed without experience or a 
 guiding model or the aid of instruction, that instantane- 
 ous 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 denom- 
 inate instinct a lapsed intelligence, affirming that it is 
 the accumulated wisdom of past generations acquired 
 through painful and protracted experience and handed 
 down under the laws of heredity in the form of fixed 
 habits and of constitutional mental bent. But scientific 
 investigations in natural history have brought to light 
 thousands of facts to which such an explanation is 
 
SCIENCE AND PRA YER. 35 
 
 wholly inapplicable, which fairly laugh these theorists 
 down. 
 
 The spider that builds its tiny diving-bell, anchors 
 it with strong cable to the river bottom, and distends its 
 walls with air pressed from entangling meshes of web on 
 its abdomen, and then, with this, its royal pavilion, that 
 shines through the water like a globe of woven silver, 
 rears with watchful wisdom, amid seemingly most hostile 
 surroundings, its brood of hungry children, is one out of 
 a 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 
 particles of matter which, when the time is ripe, 
 arrange 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. 
 
 But over the question of the advent and distinctive 
 attributes of man the battle of the schools has been most 
 hotly contested, calling into action on both sides 
 every reserved force of scholarship and mental acumen, 
 as the issues at stake transcend every other, involving 
 not only the foundations of theistic faith, but even 
 the very evidences of an endless life. 
 
36 ^SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 
 
 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 to which the extreme evolutionist and the equally 
 extreme creationist have both gone for corroborative 
 proofs of their theories, and neither of them gone in 
 vain. 
 
 Man in his body, in his instincts, and in his mental 
 traits, bears many very striking resemblances 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 existing. 
 
 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 denote marked de- 
 generacy were they not most strangely accompanied by a 
 vastly increased mass and multiplied convolution of 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 37 
 
 brain. Here appears that same deep correlation on 
 which the parts of a bodily organ are built, bearing the 
 same emphatic testimony to the prior existence, the per- 
 sonal presence, and the plastic power of some intelli- 
 gent, organizing will. 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 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 en- 
 vironment 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 phenom- 
 ena 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 successively set at work in the world, 
 that an absolutely new force has been ushered in, a force 
 possessing characteristics so fundamentally different 
 from all others that they can in no sense be regarded 
 as its progenitors, and a force not only of a unique- 
 ness so complete as to thus preclude any suggestion 
 of kinship, but of a uniqueness so peculiar that it 
 
38 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 becomes a travesty on scientific interpretation to explain 
 it simply as an unfolding 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 feature, lifts him completely up out of the 
 low plane of brute being. 
 
 In the mental life below the human there are 
 semblances of self-conscious, deliberative thought, of 
 moral discernment and of responsible free-will ; and in- 
 stances of this nature are so many and so striking, 
 the belief is prevalent, not only in scientific 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 investi- 
 gators of the highest attainments and of international 
 celebrity who believe 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, involuntary memory, indeliberate 
 volition, reproductive imagination, sympathetic emotion 
 and emotional expression. Nearly, if not quite all of 
 the phenomena of their thought-life can come through 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 39 
 
 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 conscious- 
 ness ever reaches up into consciousness 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 not 
 seem susceptible of this explanation, but as we find 
 clearly within the charmed circle of instinct, where there 
 is uniformly nothing but blind obedience to a God- 
 given impulse, acts which to ordinary observers show 
 deliberation, design, profound reasoning, even moral 
 purpose on the part of the animal, we naturally feel 
 warranted in assuming that these occasional instances 
 met with apparently outside of this circle, and indi- 
 cating that animals at times really enter within the 
 vestibule, 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, 
 
40 SCIENCE AND PR A YER, 
 
 did they possess truly reflective faculties like our own, 
 tlie 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-progressiveness 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 have never yet built a fire or re- 
 plenished 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 pur- 
 pose seems to be simply to conserve the body, with him, 
 to improve the mind ; that with them the supplying 
 of physical wants brings unbroken peace, a deep con- 
 tent, 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 in- 
 definable dread, angel- winged expectancies. 
 
 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, so far as we can see, 
 for preserving and developing anything nobler, except 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 41 
 
 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 posi- 
 tive evidences in nature of some mysterious relationship 
 between men and brutes, that relationship is certainly, 
 as I have already suggested, as remote as that exist- 
 ing between the flower and the soil out of which it 
 springs. The dull clod has no magic gift of self- 
 transfiguration but displays merely a capacity for a 
 passive yielding to the plastic touch of some newly 
 arrived vital force, when out of its well-nigh shape- 
 less, scentless, colorless dust are wrought the queenly 
 robes and peerless perfume and richly crimson blush 
 of roses. 
 
 The investigations of science bring the certain knowl- 
 edge of the direct action of the divine will still closer 
 to us, even within the circle of our own individual 
 experiences. Sir George Mivart, Fellow of the Eoyal 
 Society, who stands in the forefront of science, and 
 Professor Eudolf Schmid, President of the Theological 
 Seminary at Schonthal, Wiirtemburg, who stands in 
 the forefront of philosophy, claim that self-conscious 
 and responsibly free spirits must be new and inde- 
 pendent existences transcending nature, they going so 
 far as to state outright that each human soul is the 
 
42 SCIENCE AND PBA YEB, 
 
 result of a separate creative fiat of the Almighty. 
 
 We might enforce this their position by remarking that 
 out of the old nothing new can come except new combi- 
 nations, and the soul is believed to be an absolutely new 
 element and not simply a new form of an old one. This 
 our self- consciousness positively afi&rms, and we must 
 implicitly rely on its testimony or our whole foundation 
 for any belief is hopelessly swept away. It also says 
 that each soul is an indivisible unit, that there cannot be 
 transmitted from parent to child any portion of the ego, 
 Eesemblances may be, but nothing of the child's 
 spiritual entity has been or can be derived from his pro- 
 genitors. Human souls are God's direct gift. To the 
 fashioning of each one he has given his personal at- 
 tention. It is only its fleshly covering and its other 
 material environment he has entrusted to the care of 
 secondary causes. 
 
 Facts brought to light by modern scientific investiga- 
 tions and closely analyzed by modern scientific methods, 
 are thus daily diffusing 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 evolu- 
 tion 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 
 
iSCIENGE AND PR A YER. 43 
 
 limitations being, as the work progressed, utilized, when 
 found available, simply as avenues for ushering in 
 
 the new. 
 
III. 
 
 We now come to the third general division of our 
 theme, that God not only can effectively interfere, either 
 by direct or indirect methods, without working any 
 disorder, abrogating any law, or destroying 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 pre- 
 sumptuous, but most natural and reasonable, for us 
 to expect that he will interfere for us individually, how- 
 ever insignificant we may at present seem to be. 
 
 It is claimed by those who controvert this position, 
 that God has, as we have already remarked, adopted 
 broad, comprehensive plans, in which he has regard 
 to general interests, and not to exceptional 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 
 
 44 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 45 
 
 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 modifications 
 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 inclination 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 
 
46 SCIENCE AND Pit A YEB, 
 
 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 with strange rapture ; at another, 
 when the delicate nerves are aflame with fever, it 
 tortures with its touch, and blisters and blackens 
 that very same canvas it had with its swift pencil 
 painted with splendor. An atmosphere miles in thick- 
 ness completely 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 un- 
 roofs a city. Water is as omnipresent as air. The 
 air is indeed permeated with it, as all substances, fluids 
 and solids, have their every particle encased in air. 
 What interminable 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 in- 
 gredients 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 
 
SCIENCE AND PMA YEB. 47 
 
 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, 
 ready with their ruddy faces to beam kindliest cheer 
 from our furnaces and chimney corners and swinging 
 chandeliers 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, turn 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 universality 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 
 continents and under seas with well-nigh the swiftness 
 of light. 
 
48 SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 
 
 As we thus study nature force by force, attribute 
 by attribute, and note this feature of universality per- 
 vading all, and this dual relationship which each 
 sustains of blessing or cursing, as angel or devil, how 
 powerful and painful the questioning, whether, after all, 
 it is not too true that exceptional cases, or individuals 
 during exceptional 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 multitu- 
 dinous and complex, that he has time to make only gen- 
 eral 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 necessi- 
 tated 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 sufiacient to establish the great dynas- 
 ties of organized living creatures that through the 
 ages have seemed to rise and sink with the regularity of 
 the tides of the sea? We cannot even number the 
 massive worlds which he has set whirling through 
 illimitable space, and which must demand at least his 
 
SCIENCE AND PBA YER. 49 
 
 general supervision and require his constantly sus- 
 taining power. 
 
 At first glance we are apt to conclude, viewing the 
 subject from this standpoint, that there is indeed no 
 individualizing in God's providences, no 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 Her- 
 culaneum 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 disaster, 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 Almighty 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 life history of every 
 
50 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 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 com- 
 forting assurance which blessed Christ's sorrow- wrung 
 heart when he said, ^^And yet I am not alone, for 
 the Father is with me'' ! Is it presumptuous for us 
 to think that that assurance may also be ours ? That it 
 is not, I believe 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 revelation. 
 There is rarely a page not illumined by it. To teach it 
 was one of the distinctive features 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 cloth- 
 ing 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, through- 
 out the books of the Bible, find most abundant confir- 
 mation 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 chil- 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 51 
 
 dren. The more deeply nature is searched, the more 
 convincing the proofs of God's infinite painstaking for 
 his creatures. His plans to these ends have evidently- 
 been thought out in their minutest details. We are 
 overwhelmed with astonishment as we see into what 
 small concerns he has suffered his thoughts to enter, and 
 out of them by an ingenuity of contriving possible only 
 to a creator of limitless resources has wrought results of 
 far-reaching import. Ko candid student of nature can 
 fail of becoming profoundly convinced that there is 
 absolutely nothing, however inconspicuous, 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 attract God's 
 personal attention, much more be the object of his con- 
 stant 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 concep- 
 tion 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 abundant 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 minuteness. That mighty hand in whose 
 
52 SCIENCE AND PR A YER, 
 
 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- conception and 
 marvelous skill that paint the sunset and bend the rain- 
 bow have touched with most brilliant 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 infinitude 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 Diatom- 
 aceae, which have existed in such vast numbers that 
 entire mountains have been found composed of their re- 
 mains. The forms of their infinitesimal shells when 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 53 
 
 magnified are discovered to be of most exquisite beauty 
 and of every conceivable 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 
 they are distinctive, yet all having apparently the 
 same habits and without any perceptible difference of 
 function." Neither sexual nor natural selection 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 con- 
 trovert, of God's giving his personal attention to the 
 adornment of the minutest of his creatures, to his con- 
 ceiving and embodying in innumerable faultless forms 
 and pleasing combinations of tints his conceptions of 
 beauty? How this infinite painstaking has benefited 
 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 Architect 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 paint- 
 ings were designed. Perhaps the ultimate purpose was 
 the sesthetic 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. 
 
64 f'iCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 with overwhelmingly convincing force, that God is per- 
 sonally conversant with, and has taken an active 
 personal interest in, the life- furnishings of creatures so 
 minute that their individual forms are to us absolutely 
 invisible without the aid of the microscope, 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 illustrative 
 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 aeri- 
 form chemical combination of hydrogen with oxygen 
 and carbon. The difference in the degree of inflamma- 
 bility of the first two gases is the cause of all the 
 illuminating properties of the flame, and yet that differ- 
 ence 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 car- 
 bonic dust. These minute particles become little glow- 
 ing coals emitting a brilliant light just for an instant, 
 and then, like the hydrogen, spring into the chemical 
 embrace of the all -devouring oxygen. The infinite 
 painstaking here displayed, the delicate nicety of adjust- 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 55 
 
 mentj the critical attention to the minutest details, are 
 no less astounding than the world-embracing beneficence 
 of the results. 
 
 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 minutest matters 
 in his kingdom. In common with the numerous species 
 of this order of articulates which abound in all parts of 
 the world, this diminutive creature has had given to 
 it four pairs of seven-jointed 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 glutinous 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 instinctive 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 
 
66 SCIENCE AND PR A YEB, 
 
 interstices between the hairs and the meshes of web 
 are filled with air, swims under the bell, presses out into 
 it the entangled air, comes again to the surface, and 
 repeats 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 unquestionably- 
 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 thinking, 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 in- 
 ventor 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 in- 
 verted receiver it will crowd out the water, instead 
 of being absorbed by it. Has this spider been so close a 
 student of nature as to have discovered these laws of 
 physics, and is it so gifted an inventor as thus in- 
 geniously to have applied its knowledge, without either 
 instruction or experience? 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 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 57 
 
 totally destroy it. There must be either perfection or 
 flat failure. This alternative was presented to the 
 first spider of the 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 
 deposit 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 displayed 
 by all instinct guided creatures and their equally mar- 
 velous equipment for their work, afford us illustrative 
 proofs without number of God's most intimate acquaint- 
 ance with, and loving care for, the momentary interests 
 of earth's speechless, soulless, perishing myriads. 
 I^either their implements nor their skill can be ac- 
 counted for as the slow outcome of stern 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 impress- 
 ment and informing. New wants with correspondingly 
 new implements and new instinctive impulses issued 
 from the creative will of the Almighty. Provision wa» 
 doubtless made at the incoming of each species fox 
 
58 f^CIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 the transmission, through laws of heredity, of such traits 
 as should constitute its distinctive endowment, and thus 
 a general supervision over each species instituted. 
 
 But still more specific provision seems to have been 
 made to cover exceptional necessities, to answer the 
 demands of exceptional crises in the individual 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, animals unquestionably possess, in 
 common with us, not only blindly followed instincts, but 
 sense-perception, association of objects and ideas, auto- 
 matic attention, involuntary memory, indeliberate voli- 
 tion, reproductive imagination, sympathetic emotion, 
 and emotional expression. Though the phenomena of 
 their thought-life may be classed under these lower 
 forms of mentality, though they may never rise to 
 deliberative, abstract, introvertive thinking, may never 
 attain to self-consciousness, having no self to be con- 
 scious 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 supple- 
 menting instinct in those peculiar emergencies for which 
 no general provision through instinct could be secured. 
 This clearly evidences to us that God's providential 
 care, even over the lowliest, extends beyond the segre- 
 gated mass that constitutes the species to each separate 
 individual in it, and even to that individual's excep- 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 59 
 
 tional needs. The thinking here displayed, though out- 
 side the circle of instinct proper, will still be found, 
 on final analysis, 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 to- 
 morrow ; and we must also keep in mind, what science 
 has not only conclusively demonstrated, 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 grains 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 sceptered 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 permanent 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 human 
 soul outweighs in worth ten thousand worlds of lower 
 sentient life. 
 
60 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 HaviDg described at some length, in a paper entitled 
 ^'Science and Christ/' 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 
 with the simple statement that the more profoundly 
 phenomena have been studied by scientists and scien- 
 tific philosophers, the more clearly and gloriously have 
 shone out the truths to which I have just alluded ; that 
 God has been busied through untold ages in preparing 
 for man's advent, that man has been the grand goal of 
 his endeavor, the ultima Thule of his creative thought on 
 this planet j 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 in- 
 consequential and unworthy, but that he for whom the 
 centuries have been so long waiting and to whose com- 
 ing they have been pointing with prophetic finger, who 
 fulfills the types, completes the prophecies, wears the 
 crown, surely was not born to die j and that he who has 
 proved himself capable of unraveling the intricacies 
 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 
 
SCrEl^CE AND PR A YER. 61 
 
 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 improving the products of 
 vegetable and animal life, making the waters swarm, 
 turning deserts into gardens, developing the crude possi- 
 bilities of untamed 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 sculptured 
 marble, speaking canvas, cathedral pile, and landscape 
 gardening, and has laid all matter and even all force 
 under tribute to his aesthetic tastes j 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 responsible gifts of moral dis- 
 cernment 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 dig- 
 nity of man, we must also keep in mind that each indi- 
 vidual 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 
 
62 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 general outcome alone he has ever directed attention. 
 The soul's environment; its body and its wider surround- 
 ings are, indeed, the result of such processes, but each 
 soul is in itself a unique spiritual entity, bearing the im- 
 print of a distinct personal purpose, and constituting the 
 embodiment of some cherished ideal, some fond antici- 
 pation, 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 heterogeneity ; 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 developing of the distinctive per- 
 sonal 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 purposed to stop short of this would be to 
 belittle his plan, belie the teachings of all sound science 
 and philosophy, leave the grand scheme of evolution 
 incomplete, and judge of God as beiug coldly self- 
 contained, craving no sympathy, contentedly sitting 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 63 
 
 apart in eternal isolation, wholly unresponsive to the 
 tender pleadings of his children. 
 
 When we discover that God has given his personal 
 attention and poured out a wealth of inventive thought 
 on every particle of dust, on every minutest fiber 
 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 discouragement, are tempted to doubt whether the 
 great God of the universe has ever in the vast multi- 
 plicity 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 out- 
 pouring of their longing and their love. 
 
 But science has not only convinced us that we have no 
 valid reason for questioning God's sympathetic presence, 
 but furnished the strongest possible grounds for resting 
 our full faith upon it, and making it the delight and in- 
 spiration of our burdened souls. Those grounds it 
 furnished the moment it published its discovery that 
 every form of vegetative and animal life demanded an 
 environment, 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 pecul- 
 
64 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 iarities of need, no species htis appeared for which 
 provision has not been made awaiting its advent. The 
 seaweed found its ocean bed and salted surf; the cactus, 
 its parched sand plain j the lichen, its rock ; the edel- 
 weiss, 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 objects without to be 
 painted on their retince 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 
 constituted to touch and take in an environment and 
 find one wondrously suited to every need, but the same 
 is true 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 passages 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 philosophers. 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 exalta- 
 tion to which not even the most spiritually gifted have 
 yet attained. It is full of open letters to every son and 
 daughter of earth with every sentence penned by a 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 65 
 
 divine hand. Our longings for intellectual and sympa- 
 thetic interchange with our fellows have been met 
 through literature and arts and architecture, through 
 family ties and ever widening social circles. But with 
 this almost infinite painstaking to provide a fitting 
 environment for man, there is a want which in all the 
 fulness 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 
 aspirations 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 reason- 
 able to suppose that a plan so wonderful in its elaborate 
 painstaking and masterful achievements, exhibiting 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, 
 indeed 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 spiritual life depended, and 
 then leave him to pant and die in a vacuum? These 
 
66 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 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 mission 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 threefold confirma- 
 tion. 
 
 In our lonely hours, in hours of desperate battling 
 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 lan- 
 guishment 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 privileged to say, as 
 did the Saviour when the dark clouds gathered about 
 him J ^^And yet I am not alone, for the Father is 
 with me." 
 
 Out from God's sympathetic presence into the chill 
 night of an endless death the incorrigibly wicked finally 
 go away. Into it the lovingly obedient come, into 
 its welcoming smile, its golden sunlight, its eternal day. 
 
lY. 
 
 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 im- 
 portance to warrant his interfering for us. 
 
 I now desire to consider whether we can reasonably 
 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 sug- 
 gested by this theme, we have found the whole earth in- 
 stinct 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 being 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 pre- 
 cision, such wisdom, such irresistibleness of movement, 
 
 67 
 
68 SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 
 
 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 restless tongue of flame. And it has 
 greatly enhanced 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 in- 
 carnated one by one ; for when, from off that illumined 
 face confronting us everywhere, there thus fades that 
 strange far-away look and in its stead comes an answer- 
 ing 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 
 benediction. 
 
 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 be- 
 ing 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 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 69 
 
 thought? for otherwise, how do we know but that the 
 earth is nothing more than a finished piece of mechan- 
 ism, like the watches we carry, and, like them, wound 
 up and kept running by the coiled energy of some 
 hidden spiral spring? Happily we have discovered 
 that matter and force are of such a nature, and so 
 related, that abundant opportunity has been afforded, 
 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 multi- 
 tudinous changes on the earth, we can readily con- 
 ceive 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 reasonably urged that this, God's, direct 
 personal interference 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 exhaustless fountain of out- 
 flowing, energizing thought, instead of being to us 
 the very personification of living force, of tireless 
 
70 SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 
 
 mental buoyancy and zest, becomes a i^icture of change- 
 less, thoughtless, emotionless calm, of absolute mental 
 stagnation ; all the vast plans of his whole universe 
 of worlds, having been inconceivable ages ago, not only 
 determined upon to their minutest details, but intrusted 
 for their unfolding 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 concep- 
 tion 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 at- 
 tention. 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 imperishable 
 and glorified texture. So we have no warrant in affirm- 
 ing that God has withdrawn his personal oversight 
 and interference from any, even the lowest of his 
 kingdoms, so long as they are so inseparably inter- 
 twined, and exercise over each other an influence so 
 vital and lasting. 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YEH. 71 
 
 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 testifying 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 delegated forces the full 
 conduct of the complex affairs of his universe ; but will 
 ever be a commanding 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 attempted solu- 
 tion 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 
 
72 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 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 professor; and, although they were 
 perfectly germane to the subject of the evening, and I 
 asked for light and needed it, he simply remarked, 
 ^^ There is some intellectual difiBculty in that,'' and im- 
 mediately 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 ex- 
 ceptional case, for it has never been my fortune to have 
 either heard from the pulpit or seen in print any at- 
 tempted reply. 
 
 Grant, says the doubting Thomas, that it is true and 
 demonstrable, as claimed, that God can interfere, that he 
 has interfered and is still interfering, and interfering 
 every day and hour, in every individual 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 im- 
 perfect finite faculties and meagre experience? Is it 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 73 
 
 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 absurdi- 
 ties? But suppose they do sometimes actually voice our 
 real wants, have not those wants already been known to 
 God and definitely 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 minutest 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 
 constantly arising which escaped God's foreknowledge or 
 for which he failed to provide ? Does science or revela- 
 tion afford us any warrant in thus limiting God's wisdom 
 or 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 feelings 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 
 
74 SCIENCE AND PBA YER. 
 
 prayers of God's people have been all foreknown to him, 
 and their answers provided for, uncomputed ages before 
 they were uttered j that they entered into God's thought 
 when he formed his original plan, and were made to 
 constitute an integral part of it. This reply is so plaus- 
 ible 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 foreknown 
 all prayers and made ample provision for each as each 
 deserves, would not the difidculties 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 Christians believe, what matters it, so 
 far as these objections 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 
 
/sciexc:e and pea yer. 75 
 
 denying the doubter's major premise, that God's fore- 
 knowledge is all-comprehending. The denial of this, 
 I believe, 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 philosophical stand- 
 point, from the standpoint of the science of metaphysics. 
 If God foreknows everything that will ever come 
 to pass, all his own mental states must necessarily be in- 
 cluded 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 modifi- 
 cation. 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 as to what part of his vast plans it will pertain, 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 j for, however 
 minute the influence or modification, it must result 
 in others, and those in others still — the circle widening 
 thus without end j for the parts of God's plan are 
 supposed to be intimately interlinked, complemental, so 
 precisely fitted part to part that the effect of each is felt 
 throughout the whole, like the intricate complications of 
 a piece of mechanism. And if one thought or emotion 
 
76 SCIENCE AND PEA YER, 
 
 may thus spring into being unanticipated, be absolutely 
 original, why not ten or ten thousand? Indeed, what 
 limit can be placed on their number or on their modify- 
 ing power? And so, if we would logically defend a 
 belief in the all -comprehensiveness of God's foreknowl- 
 edge, we must afiSrm 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 moment 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? Unquestionably 
 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 different 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 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 77 
 
 that the entire plan in all its details flashed instantly 
 upon him, — for this would impeach the perfection of his 
 foreknowledge up to the instant of such inflooding 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 un- 
 broken placidity — of absolute apathy, his heart throb- 
 less as stone. He could experience no change of feeling; 
 for that would involve thought-succession. From all 
 the sources of joy or sorrow of which we can conceive, 
 he would be utterly debarred — from pleasurable or pain- 
 ful memories, from hopes and forebodings, from social 
 sympathies, from emotions 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 
 supposition God can have no emotional activity, for 
 he would have no thought-activity for its background. 
 Thoughts must course, must come and go, or the heart 
 lies dead. 
 
 Such are the absurdities in which we become hope- 
 lessly entangled the moment we attempt to defend the 
 doctrine of God's perfect foreknowledge. 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 foreknow all his own future. The very fact that 
 
78 SCIENCE AND PR A YER, 
 
 he is a sovereign spirit precludes this. It is equally im- 
 possible, and for the same reason, for him to know 
 what our future will be. He has made us equally 
 with himself of sovereign will, and placed upon us 
 all the responsibilities 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 sover- 
 eign, if we become morally accountable, and ever reach 
 up out of a state of simple innocency to that of divine 
 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 vic- 
 tories won over temptations ; and where temptations 
 environ a sovereign will, there must be risks, a cer- 
 tain 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 affection cannot be 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 79 
 
 developed or brought to test except by genuine wage 
 of battle. And how can it be certainly known whether 
 this shall issue in 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 direction until the chosen object 
 of contemplation acquires prominence and power. We 
 cannot stop the flow of thought, but can change its 
 direction. And even God himself cannot with unerring 
 certainty 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 unbroken 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 foreknowledge. 
 Outside this circle of responsible sovereignty, under the 
 reign of absolutism, of immutable order, within which 
 
80 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 the physical and vital forces and the pure animal in- 
 stincts work 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 mathematical for- 
 mulas. God, who fixed the conditions, who founded 
 the laws, must know the issue. But in the region of 
 delegated sovereignty, of absolute freedom of choice, 
 of moral accountability, uncertainty just as necessarily 
 enters in and renders prediction impossible. 
 
 If what I have argued be true, we need no longer 
 struggle with those hopeless tasks of harmonizing fore- 
 ordination with free will, and of explaining how a 
 beneficent God could bring into being souls which he 
 at that very time positively 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 encourages us to believe 
 that the fervent prayer of the righteous man availeth 
 much. Ko petitioner can plead with any genuine 
 unction unless he believes that he can actually effect 
 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 
 
^SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 81 
 
 had been present in God's mind always ; that they never 
 had exerted, and never could exert, any influence, effect 
 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 he prays, if he 
 prays as the Bible commands, utterly forget his belief 
 and fall into the temporary 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 stultification? The 
 thought is repellent. Bead if you will the ninth 
 chapter of Deuteronomy. Moses here rehearses the 
 several rebellions of Israel, and his three separate plead- 
 ings 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 
 purpose to destroy the rebels, and each time, if Moses 
 can be credited, he actually changed that purpose right 
 then and there and rescued his people. The God here 
 depicted had none of that foreknowledge which theolo- 
 gians with such strange unanimity ascribe to him. 
 But, say you, that and similar accounts scattered 
 
82 SCIENCE AND PEA YER. 
 
 throughout the Bible are simply instances of anthropo- 
 morphism, of rhetorical accommodation, of describing 
 in the language of human experiences and human limi- 
 tations what really transcends the human; that it was 
 not the intent to have these narrations interpreted as 
 literal history, but as poetic approximations or dim 
 shadowings of really ineffable truths. It seems to me 
 that it would be a strange way to bring the truth within 
 our comprehension, to state what is directly opposed 
 to the truth, and to reiterate the downright falsehood, 
 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 im- 
 portunately pleading for had actually been determined 
 upon millions 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 unquestionably 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 race could 
 be rescued, that precisely this one had been predeter- 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 83 
 
 mined 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 God's sympathy, but actually 
 influenced him to again reconsider the whole subject, 
 that happily 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 imperil- 
 ing it by any attempt at self-rescue. He did not 
 even ask for sustaining grace. All he plead for was an- 
 other 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 memorable 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 unalter- 
 ably determined upon its being carried out to the very 
 
84 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 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 something he had not 
 the faintest idea of granting ? Why did he not encircle 
 him in the arms of his everlasting love and at once 
 explain the impossibility of change, if he certainly 
 knew that no change was possible ? What importunate 
 pleading ! No parallel can be found in all human 
 history. Was it for naught? Was it a stupendous 
 blunder born 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 un- 
 willingness to face, if need be, any fate however ter- 
 rible. He showed from first to last a spirit of perfect 
 submission, for note how carefully he coupled with 
 his passionate prayer, ^^ ]S"ot as I will, but as thou wilt." 
 Nothing 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 deepest significance, appears this 
 whole scene in this, earth's darkest tragedy, the 
 moment that we conceive that Christ, instead of being 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 85 
 
 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 me," the real plea 
 was that the whole subject-matter of modes of rescue 
 should be reopened and again most searchingly re- 
 viewed ) that God fully answered that prayer by a long, 
 deep study ; and that, when the last faint ray of hope 
 went out in night, he in accents tender as an infinite 
 pity could make them, told Christ all ; and then the 
 Saviour, satisfied, rose from his knees, wiped away 
 the blood-stains of his agony, and with a calm, ma- 
 jestic bearing — that never again left him, save in the 
 last throes of dissolution — said to his disciples, " Else 
 up, let us go ; lo ! he that betrayeth me is at hand." 
 
 Had I time, and were it necessary, I might multi- 
 ply 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 interferes in behalf of his children and 
 because they ask him, actually forming and executing 
 entirely new, unpremeditated purposes in response to 
 their asking. 
 
 Against this view, that we actually exert an influ- 
 ence over the divine mind, it has been urged, as I 
 have already remarked, that it implies imperfection 
 
86 SCIENCE AND PR A YEB, 
 
 in the divine adjustments, and vacillation in the 
 divine will, that it is the very height of presumption 
 in ns 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 incorporated his answers into his original 
 designs, is, as I have endeavored to point out, fatally 
 lacking 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 in- 
 terfere by direct will-power without occasioning any dis- 
 order. If so, what can be urged against the belief 
 that he left them thus with the express design of in- 
 troducing 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 be- 
 traying 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 conditions of 
 change and activity have been unalterably fixed, as 
 in the operation of chemic, vital, and instinct forces. 
 But realizing that in delegating to his human off- 
 spring the responsible power of free choice he would 
 necessarily let in the element of uncertainty, thus ob- 
 scuring his prophetic vision, he with most profound 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. g7 
 
 wisdom contrived through this very plasticity in na- 
 ture 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 completion. He is thus afforded 
 ample opportunity to enjoy unceasing mental activity, 
 and with sleepless 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 be- 
 comes an intense participant of effective personal pres- 
 ence, a living, loving spirit, free and masterful, the 
 embodiment of all the active virtues and throbbing 
 sympathies that are the necessary heroic belongings 
 of him who would win the affectionate reverence of 
 human hearts. 
 
 God being able to forecast the general trend, the ordi- 
 nary tendencies, of the lives of his children, has un- 
 questionably prearranged his providences to meet their 
 probable wants, has provided for them a bountiful envi- 
 ronment full of illimitable possibilities of joy and growth. 
 For the extraordinary and unforeseen he has made pro- 
 vision by leaving himself ample facilities for immediate 
 interference. And then, too, by timely suggestions he 
 may, and often does, make us willing and intelligent 
 servitors of his will, inaugurating by a single whispered 
 
88 SCIENCE AND PR A YER, 
 
 thought, in moments 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 opportunely 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 
 hammer 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 certainly can 
 as long as it is free, he reserves the power of either 
 temporarily or permanently placing 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 ifc 
 becomes like any other force in nature. It is, however, 
 responsible for necessitating such summary procedure. 
 This divine impressment, this infringement upon our 
 freedom, may, for aught we know, be frequently re- 
 sorted to in the course of individual or national 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 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER, 89 
 
 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 
 purposes 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 loyal and loving, but 
 simply to furnish the possibilities for loyalty and love, 
 and then do all in his power consistent with the con- 
 ditions 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 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 opportunities are 
 still presented, each century witnesses some new con- 
 quests of love, some souls added to heaven's company, 
 the great scheme is steadily going forward to its final 
 glorious consummation. 
 
90 SCIENCE AND PRAYER. 
 
 Such a view of God — of his maturing and executing 
 planSj 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 uncon- 
 ditioned, unchangeable, omniscient, ommipotent, omni- 
 present, using these words in their ordinary and fullest 
 acceptation, placing no restriction upon their meaning, 
 is simply falling, unintentionally no doubt, into noth- 
 ing less than word jugglery, affirming what to human 
 minds must of necessity be absolutely unthinkable. 
 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 attri- 
 butes analogous to our own, although these are yet ger- 
 minal 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 importu- 
 nately, why kindle our souls into such intensity of 
 fervor? The Scriptures in enjoining earnestness need 
 not be understood as favoring attempts 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 sympathy. 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 
 always stood with outstretched arms, with overflowing 
 sympathy, waiting impatiently to bless us. What 
 
SCIENCE AND PEA YER. 91 
 
 untold wealth of deep inventive thought, what untold 
 eons of slowly passing years he has already lavished in 
 his preparations for our coming, for our maintenance, 
 for our unfolding, for our permanent weal ! While our 
 prayers will not make him any more kindly disposed, 
 will not noticeably increase his sympathy for us, they 
 will in most marked measure increase his sympathy 
 \cith 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 medicine 
 now. We thus furnish God new facts upon which to act, 
 facts of mental attitude, the unforeseen outputs of our 
 sovereignty. That attitude is one of Christ-like love, 
 manifesting itself in five forms, — that of willing obedi- 
 ence, of self-sacrificing service, of sense of divine de- 
 pendence, of restful confidence, and of intensest long- 
 ing. Until that attitude is attained in all these its 
 prime essentials, God, if he should interfere by stepping 
 outside his general providence, 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-sufficiency, 
 distrust, and ignoble apathy. It is the fervent prayer 
 of the righteous man that availeth much. He must be 
 
92 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 righteous and his righteousness must be on fire to fulfill 
 the Scripture conditions. That availing power is some- 
 thing 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 
 absolutely free choice, there cannot be, as I have shown, 
 any sure prophecy of its coming. But when it comes, 
 all barriers are burnt away. Eeserve 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- 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 science, 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 suggestions reveal its 
 
/SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 93 
 
 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 
 modern 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 earnest 
 plead our case, and plead believing that the heart and 
 arm of God will answer to our plea ! But in this in- 
 tensely materialistic and scientific age there have so 
 insidiously settled about our thought the bewildering 
 fogs of learned and subtile sophistries breathed out by 
 those who would either relegate God altogether from his 
 universe or make his relations quite inconsequential and 
 remote, that only in the distressing 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? 
 
I HAVE thus far endeavored to show — • 
 
 1. How God may interfere whenever he chooses ; 
 
 2. That there are incontestable evidences^ and multi- 
 tudes 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 suffi- 
 cient 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 affir- 
 mation 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 
 
 94 
 
SCIENCE AND PRA YER. 95 
 
 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 conclude that 
 Christ premised in his promise that the 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, making 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 pro- 
 visions in his general providence, and if we ourselves 
 can by proper industry discover and utilize this pro- 
 vision, 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 would 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 blessing ; and if such a course 
 were continued, all incentive to industry and enterprise 
 would thus be taken away, physical and mental sloth 
 would succeed to healthful, growth-promoting activity, 
 abject timidity and feeling of dependence would take 
 
96 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 the place of a manly spirit of self-reliance. No wise 
 parent among us, however keen and quick his sympa- 
 thies, would ever consent thus to shield his child from 
 toil and care and battle test, for he 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 faculties 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 of&ce is not to relieve but to 
 incite, not dwarf but draw out, not 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 fledglings 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 i)oise 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 wisely and too well to heed any 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 97 
 
 of our cries except in times of positive and pressing 
 need. He will let us struggle alone until our strength 
 and judgment fail. He will, however, always keep 
 in call, and will in deepest sympathy watch the con- 
 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 answering 
 heartbeat, shall hear some whispered word, shall feel 
 the uplifting power of some helping hand of love. 
 A prayer for God to convert our impenitent friends 
 would be unreasonable if without conditions or pro- 
 visos, as it might be utterly impossible 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 attention, rouse the con- 
 science, 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 con- 
 sistent in all their parts, must be free from contradictory 
 requests. To answer such prayers in their entirety 
 would be impossible even to God. To illustrate : It 
 would be inconsistent for us to ask only for the agree- 
 able things of this life, — for freedom from care, sorrow, 
 and pain — from disappointment, privation, calumny — 
 
98 SCIENCE AND PBA YER. 
 
 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 
 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 simply 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 Eevelator of the 
 Divine Heart, the Liberator and Saviour of mankind, 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 99 
 
 the Prince of Peace. We must bear Christ's cross, 
 would we wear his crown. 
 
 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 pur- 
 pose now. We have been housed in perishable bodies 
 full of quivering nerves ; have been environed with an- 
 tagonistic forces that threaten and thwart us at every 
 turn J our paths have been left rough and full of 
 dangerous pitfalls ; poisons pervade much of the air we 
 breathe, the water we drink, the food we take to re- 
 pair these weak clay tenements. To millions, life is 
 a heavy care- burden, a fierce contest, and how fre- 
 quently is it one long catastrophe made up of broken 
 hopes and baffled purposes, of weariness 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. 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. Ko 
 more mischievous confusion of thought can possibly 
 be entertained. These principles and conditions must 
 
100 SCIENCE AND PEA YEIi. 
 
 reacli back infinitely, can of necessity have had no be- 
 ginning, and cannot be susceptible of the slightest 
 change ; for otherwise 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 heartless 
 cruelty on a par with a spirit of self- forgetting love. 
 
 What he has done for us in this regard is to give 
 power of free choice, and capacity for moral discern- 
 ment, and to place us in moral relations with himself 
 and with our fellows, and to establish us amid such sur- 
 roundings 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 relation- 
 ships 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 afflic- 
 tions 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 
 
ISCIENCE AND PEA YEB. 101 
 
 SO memorable for its deep, pathetic tenderness, prayed 
 not tliat 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 creative 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 limita- 
 tions of knowledge, seemed to hope that God might 
 in some way avert the impending doom and still 
 accomplish the objects of his mission, 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 mission 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 confidently 
 pray, that he will not suffer us to be tempted above that 
 we are able to bear, but will with the temptation pro- 
 
102 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 vide some way of escape, some way to glorious and 
 final victory. His purpose is to supplement, not sup- 
 plant. He will send angels to minister, will grant 
 moments of respite, and glimpses of glory. 
 
 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- soul 
 earnestness in the plea, accompanied 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 appropriate 
 its blessings: neither have we prepared the way for 
 God's interference, as we have not fully exhausted our 
 own resources, and thus disclosed the fact, the amount, 
 and the nature of our need. Our prayers should there- 
 fore be premeditated, should embody only what we in- 
 tently 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, determined 
 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 j for Christ's words 
 
iSCIENCE AND PEA YEB, 103 
 
 of promise were, ^^ Therefore I say unto you, What 
 things soever ye desire when ye pray, believe that ye 
 receive them, and ye shall have them." Christ de- 
 manded it of those upon whom he wrought miracles of 
 healing : ^^ Stretch forth thy hand," ^^Take up thy bed," 
 "Go wash." In the command to make the effort, there 
 was clearly implied the promise to add the strength f 
 but the effort must be made in most trustful confidence 
 before the divine re-enforcement 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 answering to our call the very moment certain 
 conditions are fulfilled, and in the surety we feel in 
 their honoring to the letter the terms of their com- 
 mission. 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 exact, 
 and it is as prompt and ready to render service the in- 
 stant those conditions are complied with % Eest assured 
 not until we throw ourselves as unreservedly 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 re- 
 
104 SCIENCE AND PRA YER. 
 
 quires not even a statement ; but this element presents 
 such protean forms, it is so 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 blessings bestowed 
 will be either specifically or substantially what we ask ; 
 specifically when the objects sought prove to be or to 
 embody what they seem. This is not always, and per- 
 haps not often, the case ; and because of that, the bless- 
 ings are substantially rather than specifically granted. 
 To illustrate : I remember some years since 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 so 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 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 105 
 
 disappointment, a disillusion, which lie would not at all 
 have 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 imita- 
 tion, would have been to have answered his prayer sub- 
 stantially 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 specifically, it is 
 strenuously contended that he did not answer them 
 at all. But how can we, with our extremely limited 
 knowledge, pronounce intelligently on a matter so com- 
 plicate, involving so many interests, personal, domestic, 
 and national ? Is it not possible that God conferred sub- 
 stantially 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 absolutely in- 
 significant compared with what his martyrdom 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 
 
106 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 the civilized countries on the globe ? Garfield's suffer- 
 ing and death gave to this generation, under God's 
 beneficent overruling, a spiritual impetus and exaltation 
 which this eminent statesman, through a life however 
 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 catas- 
 trophe into a most blessed benefaction. 
 
 Perhaps he saw such combination of qualities in 
 Garfield's character and in the character of his counsel- 
 ors 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 Lin- 
 coln's sudden death, just as the terrible war-clouds were 
 lifting, that a nation's strength and safety depend not 
 upon any frail human life, but upon the cherishing 
 of right principles and the continuance 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 ! 
 
iSCIENCE AND PR A YER. 107 
 
 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 answered 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 antago- 
 nistic interests. This fact came out very prominently 
 during our late Civil War. For each of the fiercely con- 
 tending armies, victory was passionately plead for by 
 most devout believers. Who would question the sterling 
 integrity or religious 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 as- 
 pirations, 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 manu- 
 
108 SCIENCE AND PR A YER. 
 
 facturing enterprises, its improved agriculture, its 
 rapidly growing cities, its business boom 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 prosperities, 
 recognize now that God, while he swept away their 
 cherished institution of slavery and denied them South- 
 ern 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 multi- 
 tudes of deadly poisons, hidden under various disguises, 
 bearing remarkably close resemblance 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 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YEB. 109 
 
 masks. We learn of their presence only by their alarm- 
 ing mischief- making. How may 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 unsuspectingly ! We are also 
 exposed to intellectual and moral poisons as subtle, 
 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 knowl- 
 edge 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 lifting 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, 
 
110 SCIENCE AND PR A YER, 
 
 his patience gone, with 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 humble benefactor. Is there not a lesson here 
 for us? When we are baffled and beaten back in 
 some of our cherished purposes, when the cups of 
 sparkling 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 em- 
 phasis that every reasonable prayer offered in a right 
 
SCIENCE AND PR A YEE, 111 
 
 spirit is certain of favorable answer. To this, as we 
 have seen, science can urge no valid objection. It is in 
 consonance with the soundest philosophy ; it is in fulfill- 
 ment of divine promise ; it responds to the deepest 
 intuitions of human hearts. 
 
 The first effect of modern scientific inquiry has been 
 to weaken faith, and make God seem simply an im- 
 personal, 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 already 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. Eeappearing this time as the 
 ripe result of this nineteenth century's tireless and fear- 
 less research into time's deepest mysteries, I cannot 
 see how ever again it can lose its hold on the hearts 
 of men. 
 
CHAUTAUQUA 
 
 Literary and Scientific 
 
 CIRCLE 
 ¥ 
 
 HOME READING COURSE 
 For 1893=4 
 
 Roman History and the Making of 
 
 Modern Europe 
 
 In Politics, Literature, and Art 
 
 OFFICERS. 
 
 John H. Vincent, Cfiancellor. Lewis Miller, President. 
 
 Jesse L. Hurlbut, OenH Sup't. Kate F. Kimball, Executive Sec'y. 
 
 COUNSELORS. 
 
 Lyman Abbott. H. W. Warren. 
 
 James M. Gibson. W.C. Wilkinson. 
 
 Edward E. Hale. J. H. Carlisle. 
 
 A. M. Martin, Pittsburgh, Fa., General Secretary. 
 Mrs. Mary H. Field, San Jos$, Cal., Secretary for Pacific Coast. 
 Mrs. a. M. Drennan, LTeno, Iga, Japan, Secretary for Japan. 
 Miss M. E. Landfear, Wellington, Secretary for South Africa. 
 
THE CHAUTAUQUA CIRCLE. 
 Aim. 
 
 The C. L. S. C. (Chautauqua Literary and Scientific 
 Circle) aims to promote habits of reading and study, in 
 history, Uterature, science, and art ; to give college gradu- 
 ates a review of the college course ; to secure for those 
 whose educational privileges have been limited, the college 
 student's general outlook upon the world and life, and to 
 encourage close, connected, persistent thinking. 
 
 Plan. 
 
 A definite course covering four years. 
 
 JSach year'' 8 course complete in itself. 
 
 Specified volumes approved by the counselors. 
 
 Allotment of time by the week and month. 
 
 A monthly magazine with additional readings and notes. 
 
 A Tuemhership book with review outlines and other aid. 
 
 Individual readers may have all the privileges. 
 
 Local cb'cles may be formed by three or more members. 
 
 Time required, about one hour daily for nine months. 
 
 Certificates granted to all who complete the course. 
 
 Seals to be affixed to the certificate are granted for col- 
 lateral and advanced reading. 
 
 Spirit. 
 
 The C. L. S. C. maintains that the higher education 
 should be extended to all, young and old, rich and poor, 
 and that education, best begun in academy, college, and 
 university, is not confined to youth, but continues through 
 the whole life. The Circle is not in any sense a college 
 either in its course of study or in its methods of work. 
 Yet it puts into the homes of the people influences and am- 
 bitions which will lead many thousand youths to seek 
 colleges and universities. The Circle is unsectarian and 
 unsectional, promoting fraternity and inspiring help to the 
 Home, the Church, and the State. 
 
 For whom Designed. 
 
 The C. L. S. C. is for busy people who left school years 
 ago, and who desire to pursue some systematic course of 
 instruction. 
 
 It is for high school and college graduates, for people who 
 never entered either high school or college, for merchants. 
 
THE CHAUTAUQUA READING CIRCLE. 3 
 
 mechanics, apprentices, mothers, busy housekeepers, farmer 
 boys, shop girls, and for people of leisure and of wealth. 
 
 Many college graduates, ministers, lawyers, physicians, 
 and accomplished women are taking the course. They find 
 the required books entertaining and helpful, affording a 
 pleasant review of studies long ago laid aside. Several 
 members are over eighty years of age ; comparatively few 
 are under eighteen. Since 1878, when the Circle was 
 founded, 210,000 readers have joined. 
 
 Are you Satisfied with Life? 
 
 Is it too late for you to go to school or college (are you too 
 old, or too poor, or too busy) ? Should you like to turn 
 mature years, middle life, and old age into youth again ? 
 Should you like to turn street, home, shop, railway-car, 
 kitchen, seaside, and forest into recitation rooms? The 
 C. L. S. C. will help you to gratify this desire. 
 
 Arrangement of Classes. 
 
 The C. L. S. C. was organized in 1878. The class that 
 joined then read four years— that is, 1878-1882. In 1882 this 
 class was graduated, and is still known as the "Class of 1882." 
 
 The readings of the several classes for any one year are 
 the same. The course marked out below for the year be- 
 ginning in the autumn of 1893 and closing in the early 
 summer of 1894 will be : The first year for the Class of 1897. 
 The second year for the Class of 1896. The third year for 
 the Class of 1895. The fourth year for the Class of 1894. 
 The class entering in 1893 is the Class of 1897. 
 Four Years' Course. 
 
 1893-94. 1895-96. 
 
 Roman and Medieval History. American History. 
 
 Latin Literature. American Literature. 
 
 Roman and Mediseval Art. American Govern ment. 
 
 MediEBval Literature. Social Institutions. 
 
 Political Economy. Physiology. 
 
 Religious Literature. Religious Literature. 
 
 1894-95. 1896-97. 
 
 English History. Greek History. 
 
 English Literature. Greek Literature. 
 
 English Composition. Greek Art. 
 
 Astronomy Ancient Greek Life. 
 
 Geology * American Diplomacy. 
 
 Religious Literature. Religious Literature. 
 
4 THE CHAUTAUQUA READING CIRCLE, 
 
 Required Literature. 
 
 The Circle has gradually secured a class of books written 
 
 by leading authors, and especially adapted to the needs of 
 
 self-educating readers. The Chautauquan, organ of the 
 
 C. L. S. C, contains much of the required reading for each 
 
 year, and many timely articles by the best American and 
 
 English writers. 
 
 Prescribed Reading for 1893=94. 
 
 Rome and the Making of Modern Europe, James R. Joy fl.OO 
 
 Roman and Medieval Art, William H. Goodyear 1.00 
 
 Outlines of Economics, Richard T. Ely 1.00 
 
 Classic Latin Course in English, W. C. Wilkinson 1.00 
 
 Song and Legend from the Middle Ages, Edited by W. D. 
 
 McClintock 50 
 
 Science and Prayer, Rev. W. W. Kinsley 50 
 
 The Chautauquan (12 numbers) 2.00 
 
 The Chautauquan Magazine 
 
 Will contain illustrated articles on European Life in the 
 Middle Ages, American Colonies in the Continental Capi- 
 tals, the influence of Roman language, literature, and art 
 on our own times, and papers on a wide range of present 
 
 day topics. 
 
 Memoranda. 
 
 The membership book contains duplicate sets of question 
 papers, called memoranda. These are not examination 
 papers but are review questions which may or may not be 
 answered from memory. The filling out of these meinoranda 
 is not essential to graduation. 
 
 The four-page paper gives a brief condensed review of the whole 
 course, and members who fill out this paper for each of the four years, 
 receive one white seal at graduation. The twelve-page paper offers a 
 more thorough review. One white seal is given for each paper which 
 shows 80 per cent of correct answers. Besides the seal, 
 
 (1) Any seal course paper will be corrected and returned to the student 
 upon payment of a special fee of 50 cents. 
 
 (2) Any seal course paper will be graded and returned to the student 
 upon payment of a fee of 25 cents. (In this case the questions which 
 are not wholly correct will be indicated but the correct answers will not 
 be given.) 
 
 (3) All other seal papers for which no special fee has been paid will be 
 graded and the exact grade reported to the student but the papers will 
 not be returned. The four-page papers will be examined to determine 
 whether they rank above or below eighty and the result reported. 
 
 (4) The four-page papers will be graded and returned for a fee of 
 twenty-five cents, or corrected and returned for a fee of fifty cents. One 
 fee for the four papers. 
 
THE CHAUTAUQUA READING CIRCLE. 5 
 
 How to Join the Circle. 
 
 Send answers to the following questions together with 
 fifty cents (fee for one year) to John H. Vincent, Drawer 194, 
 Buffalo, N. Y. [A blank containing these questions may 
 be had by applying to the Buffalo Office.] 
 
 1. Give your name in full. 2. Your post-ofRce address, with county 
 and state. 3. Are you married or single ? 4. What is your age ? Are 
 j^ou between twenty and thirty, or thirty and forty, or forty and fifty, 
 or fifty and sixty, etc. ? 5. If married, how many children living under 
 the age of sixteen years? 6. What is your occupation? 7. With what 
 religious denomination are you connected ? 8. Are you a graduate of 
 a High School or College ? If so, give the name of the institution. 
 9. If you have been a member of the C. L. S. C. in past years, but are 
 now beginning anew, state to what Class you formerly belonged. 10. 
 Do you join as (a) an individual reader, (b; a Home Circle reader (in a 
 family), or (c) as a "Local Circle" reader? The reader may change 
 trom one relation to another at will. 
 
 The Class of 1897 will be organized during the autumn of 
 1893, but students wall be received at any time. 
 How to Obtain the Literature. 
 
 All the required literature (books and The Chautau- 
 quan) may be obtained by sending a draft or money order 
 for 17 to Flood & Vincent, The Chautauqua-Century Press, 
 Meadville, Pa. On all orders of five or more sets of books 
 sent to the same address by express (charges unpaid) a dis- 
 count of ten per cent will be allowed. Books singly and 
 The Chautauquan separately if desired.* (To foreign 
 subscribers in countries included in the postal union. The 
 Chautauquan will be sent, postpaid, for 12.60, to South 
 Africa, for $3.24.) 
 
 Membership Fee. 
 
 1. To defray expenses of correspondence, membership 
 book, etc., an annual fee of fifty cents is required. This 
 amount should be forwarded to John H. Vincent, Drawer 
 194, Buffalo, N. Y., by New York draft, post-office order, 
 or postal note. 
 
 2. In sending your fee be sure to state to which class you 
 belong, whether 1894, 1895, 1896, or 1897. A special blank 
 is furnished to secretaries of local circles who forward fees. 
 
 * Subscriptions for The Chautauquan alone should be addressed to 
 Dr. T. L. Flood, Meadville, Pa. 
 
6 
 
 THE CHAUTAUQUA READING CIRCLE. 
 
 3. Keep a record of every order sent, including aate, 
 names, and amount. 
 
 4. Before forwarding a post-ofRce order or postal note, see 
 that it is properly dated, drawn for the right amount, and 
 made payable at Buffalo, N. Y. In regard to diploma fee, 
 see C. L. S. C. Hand-Book, § 9. 
 
 Fee for Graduates. 
 
 The following simple arrangement has been made for 
 graduates (Classes of '82-93) who wish to pursue the cur- 
 rent year's course of reading — with the undergraduates : 
 
 An annual fee of 50 cents will entitle a graduate to all com- 
 munications from the Central Office for that year, including 
 the twelve-page memoranda on the regular year's reading. 
 
 In this way two seals can be earned : 
 
 1. For reading the books of the regular course and filling 
 out the regular four-page memoranda, a special seal. 
 
 2. For filling out the twelve-page memoranda on the read- 
 ing of the regular course, a white seal will be given, if 80 per 
 cent of the questions are correctly answered. See also sec- 
 tions (1), (2), and (3) of " Memoranda " paragraph, page 4. 
 
 Recommended Order of Study for 1893=94. 
 
 {For Readers beginning October 1, 1S9S.) 
 
 Roman and Medieval Art— to page 
 194. 
 
 The Chautauquan. 
 JlarcJi. 
 
 Classic Latin Course in English- 
 Wilkinson— to page 90. 
 
 Roman and Medieval Art— con- 
 cluded. 
 
 Song and Legend from the Middle 
 Ages— McClintock— to page 37. 
 
 The Chautauquan. 
 
 A2yril. 
 
 Classic Latin Course in English- 
 to page 244. 
 Song and Legend— to page 112. 
 The Chautauquan. 
 
 Mai/. 
 Classic Latin Course— conchided. 
 Song and Legend— concluded. 
 Science and Praj^er - begun. 
 The Chautauquan. 
 
 June. 
 Science and Prayer. 
 The Chautauquan. 
 
 October. 
 
 Rome and the Making of Modern 
 Europe— Joy— to page 62. 
 
 Outlines of Economics. 
 
 The Chautauquan. 
 yove^nber. 
 
 Rome and the Making of Modern 
 Europe— to page 117. 
 
 Economics. 
 
 The Chautauquan. 
 December. 
 
 Rome and the Making of :Modern 
 Europe— to page 174. 
 
 Economics. 
 
 Thb Chautauquan. 
 Januari/. 
 
 Rome and the Making of Modern 
 Europe— to page 260. 
 
 Economics— finished. . 
 
 Roman and Medieval Art— Good- 
 year— to page 111. 
 
 The Chautauquan. 
 February. 
 
 Rome and the Making of Modern 
 Europe— concluded. 
 
THE CHA UTA UQ UA READING CIRCLE. 7 
 
 Local Circles 
 
 Individuals may i^rosecute the studies of the C. L. S. C. 
 alone, but their efforts will be greatly facilitated by secur- 
 ing a local circle of two or more persons who agree to meet 
 as frequently as possible, read together, converse on the 
 subjects of study, arrange for lectures, organize a library, a 
 museum, a laboratory, etc. A local circle may give 
 attention to the cultivation of taste, cleanliness, etc., in 
 towns and villages, and discuss sanitary and other questions 
 tending to public health and social progress. 
 
 All local circles should, as soon as organized, report the 
 names of their officers to John H. Vincent^ Drawer 194, 
 Buffalo, N. Y. Several pages of The Chautauquan are 
 devoted especially to the interests of the circles, but none 
 are recognized in the magazine unless they report to the 
 Buffalo Office. 
 
 Many circles include in their membership local members 
 — students who, not having paid the membership fee, are 
 not enrolled at the Central Office, but who, nevertheless, 
 read much of the prescribed course and attend the meetings 
 of the Circle. It is hoped that all interested in the C. L. 
 S. C. will become, if possible, regular members, that while 
 enjoying its benefits they may also contribute to its sup- 
 port. 
 
 Organizers of Circles. 
 
 The Central Office solicits correspondence with school 
 teachers, ministers, and others who wish to promote an 
 interest in intellectual work in their communities. Intelli- 
 gent, enthusiastic leaders are essential to successful local 
 work, and their cooperation is earnestly desired. 
 
 C. L. S. C. Mottoes. 
 
 " We study the Word and the Works of Ood.^^ 
 ^^Let us keep our Heavenly Father in the midst.'''' 
 '•'•Never he discouraged.'''' 
 
THE CHA UTA UQUA HEADING CIRCLE. 
 
 What the C. L. S. C. has Done for Some of 
 Its Members. 
 
 From a School Teacher. 
 
 " Last year I read alone, but this year I have succeeded 
 in getting three others to join me. We meet weekly, read 
 aloud a portion of the lesson, have informal talks and en- 
 joy it thoroughly. We are deriving great benefit as well as 
 establishing a custom of forming reading circles among all 
 classes of persons. I am a busy school teacher, and the 
 reading is as a tonic. It lifts me out of my old life. It fills 
 me with inspiration and determination to ' Look Up and 
 Lift Up.' I cannot say enough in praise of the C L. S.C." 
 , Kansas. 
 
 From an Isolated Reader. 
 
 " AVe have just finished our third course in the Chautau- 
 qua Circle — my two sisters and myself. Allow us to ex- 
 press our heartfelt gratitude for the great blessing this 
 Circle has brought to our home. It is indeed a great boon 
 to us. We live in a remote neighborhood where there are 
 no schools and have been deprived of the advantages of a 
 college education, and are great lovers of literature. From 
 this you may have some idea of the blessing the Chautau- 
 tauqua Circle is to us." , Alabama. 
 
 From Mothers. 
 
 " I am the mother of eight children, and have done my 
 own work during the four years with the usual amount of 
 sickness that follows such a family. My cares have been 
 great, yet I would not be the woman I am to-day had it 
 not been for the C. L. S. C. work that has employed my 
 mind in thinking of better things than the everyday cares 
 of life. I hope other tired mothers will be benefited as I 
 have been." 
 
 " I am the wife of a farmer who works 300 acres ; keep a 
 girl only six months in the year. I have a great deal to 
 see to and to do. I wanted to take up the C. L. S. C. course 
 two years before I did, but thought I would wait until I 
 could have more time. I gave up waiting for time and iust 
 took it." 
 
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