01.C 03. Prayer and The Reign of Law
III. PRAYER AND THE REIGN OF LAW “The thing that is done upon the earth He doeth it Himself.”
Another difficulty presents itself thus, Are not all things controlled by law? How, then, can God interfere to bring about any change for my sake without causing confusion and disaster? How can God, in order to answer prayer, interfere with the fixed and immutable laws that reign in the universe?
Thousands of earnest, praying Christians are troubled at this point.
Better trust God and pray on as He has told you to. But think for a moment. What do you have in mind when you think or speak of law? You mean by law? Mean, do you not, a regularized mode of action; you mean an observed order of sequence; a rule by which the same effect always follows the same cause. But something must be responsible for all this exact regularity.
What is it? Is it some self -sustained invisible force? If so, then the nature of God is impugned and the universe is robbed of its Deity.
Think but a little further and this will be plain. Either the self-sustained force in question is self -originating, in which case there is no Being responsible for all the universe contains, and if such be true, there is in fact no Supreme Being — no God at all; or, such force having originated with God has been voluntarily surrendered to itself and the creatures of this world to it, which in the last analysis resolves God into a heartless monster whose offspring are left to rail with embittered soul against the inevitable from which there is no hope or help; or, such force, if self-sustained, originating with God, has gotten altogether beyond His control, which means that you must divest God of the name Almighty, for He has plainly set in motion machinery that He cannot manage. How such a view holds God up to ridicule! How much it makes Him like the fabulous inventor who prepared an automobile which, when started, would run for days and weeks; but he neglected to provide any way of stopping it, or of regulating its speed. He mounted it, but found he could not control it; he got hungry, thirsty and sleepy, but the machine carried him on until he perished.
If, on the other hand, we see in the responsible agent back of all the workings of nature God Himself, then what are these various modes of action which are so regular and so immutable and which we call Law, but expressions of God’s own will? Law is the expression of God’s Will. It is the way God decides that force shall act upon matter. In itself it has no existence; it is simply our name for expressing God’s mode of working. It is the way God does things. The only thing science can say is, certain effects follow certain causes because they do: the Christian says they do because God ’provides for their so doing. In other words, “the thing that is done upon earth He doeth it Himself.”
’ Since this is true, where is the folly of asking God to control the forces of either the natural or spiritual world for the benefit of His trusting, praying children? “As if,” says Boyd Vincent, “ God had somehow created the world like a great clock, and set it a-going, and were now afraid to touch it lest, like some meddlesome boy.
He should get His fingers into the works and stop it.”
Surely God would leave room for the freedom of His will without necessarily violating the order He established. More than this, who will dare say that God cannot, if He choose f without disaster, modify, suspend or even change what we call a law. But to answer prayer no such heroic measures are necessary. Every result which even man produces is brought about by the combination and adjustment of forces existent about him. Science has proven beyond a shadow of doubt that every force in the world is wholly inoperative unless certain conditions are fulfilled and that when these conditions are fulfilled that force begins to work its wonders. Shall the creature be privileged thus to utilize the forces which he found here at his coming and the like prerogative be denied the Creator who brought them into existence.^ Has man any good reason for believing that his will is more closely linked with these things than is the will of God? For instance, if man had but the means, he could make it rain whenever he wanted to. Rain is condensed vapor falling in drops to the earth. It is produced by known physical agencies, the more apparent of which are heat and air currents.
Now, if man could generate sufficient heat to alter the atmospheric currents what would hinder him from bringing rain to the earth at his will? And in case he fired some vast plain or mighty city to effect his purpose, could we say that in producing rain he had violated nature’s established laws? No, he had simply used them. Shall we now admit that man can make it rain and God cannot? By no means, but when God, in answer to prayer, wills that it shall rain He simply provides that the natural forces over which He has control and which are productive of such result be brought into operation.
We children of lesser ability look upon some great modern scientific thinker and wonder at his prodigious learning, but he must look very small in the eyes of God, though he does not seem to know it, when he ventures the gratuitous assertion that God can not at His pleasure manipulate or control the laws He has brought into existence. As, for instance, when Tyndall says it would be as unreasonable for a shower to come from heaven in response to a human prayer as for the St. Lawrence river to roll up the falls of Niagara; when in fact, the one is no more unreasonable than the other. What would be required to roll the St. Lawrence up Niagara Falls? Simply a force stronger than that of gravitation and the thing is accomplished, and that without the violation or even the suspension of any of nature’s laws. Pope in his *’ Essay on Man” voices the skepticism with which we are dealing, in these lines, “Think we, like some weak prince, th’ Eternal Cause Prone for His fav’rites to reverse His laws? When the loose mountain trembles from on high, Shall gravitation cease if you go by?” The only sensible answer is, Yes, if God so choose. That God would do a thing like that is not likely, but it is perfectly absurd to say that He cannot. Man’s arm is not so strong as God’s, else he could put out his hand and hold the mountain back himself. In smaller matters he is doing it every day. By an impulse of your will you order your hand lifted up and it goes right against the same force of gravity that is pulling the mountain down. By lifting your hand you temporarily overmaster the force of gravity. Every boy who catches a descending ball and every child who throws a dam across a laughing rivulet does the same. When the engineer reverses his engine and stops the onrushing train he has neither annulled nor violated any law; he simply overbalanced one mighty force by calling into play another. No violence has been done to the reign of law in any case. Everywhere in nature this overpowering of one force by another is going on.
Kinsley, in his little work on “Science and Prayer,” takes for illustration a tumbler of water. Says he, “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. Remove a part of the heat from the water and it will become a crystallized solid, showing that until now the heat force had been holding the crystalline in check. Lower still further the temperature and the sides of the tumbler will burst into pieces, the crystalline force overcoming the cohesive. Raise the temperature and the water will change to steam and a repellance between the particles will appear, the heat driving them asunder, despite all that cohesion and gravitation can do.”
If man by an effort of his will can thus exercise such power over the forces of nature, assuredly we cannot be unwilling to concede that God can do likewise. How did you lift your hand.^ Virtually by putting your will under it. Likewise the boy overcame the force of gravity by putting his will under the ball, and the little child by putting its will against the streamlet. And so could God if He choose put His will under the toppling mountain, as He did put His will under the floating axe in the days of Elisha, and in precisely the same way could God by a direct effort of His will deliver any one who prays to Him Natural law ^^^^m the Operation of any of and the will His natural laws. Just how God could so dispose His will is the real mystery after all, but who has ever discovered just how he gets his own will under his hand or just how a boy gets his beneath a ball? In short, the last is quite as mysterious as the first.
God often works indirectly through human agencies or natural forces whose operation is visible to us, but that He should work directly or invisibly does not alter the principle involved.
Tyndall, who has so laboriously opposed the Christian faith in this respect, admitted that prayer might avail for spiritual aid, but said that no good could come “ of giving it a delusive value by claiming for it a power in physical nature.” Dr. Patton has aptly remarked that, “A metaphysical philosopher might indeed exactly reverse the statement, with much greater plausibility. He might affirm that, knowing: from constant experience the power of free will over the laws of matter, and the ease with which it can overrule, or combine, or counterbalance them, to work out its own results, he was ready to concede that prayer might lead God to produce physical effects; but that the real difficulty lay in understanding how God could answer prayer by producing mental and moral changes, where He would have to deal not with dead matter but with living spirits; not with necessitated forces but with freedom itself.” In the presence of skeptical assaults on prayer, or the honest perplexity of one’s own mind, it may be gratifying to recall the life and the attitude of some of the world’s masters in matters of science.
Let one example here be enough — Agassiz, a man who studied nature as few have ever done. His was no common intellect, and yet he prayed. He knew the laws of matter as few have ever known them since, but he knew that mind was back of them all. He saw the unchangeable precision with which they ruled about him, but yet he prayed for he knew they were expressions of some master will. He is gathered with his pupils on an island shore; they have come for study and investigation.
Listen as he speaks to them and then watch him as he bows his mighty mind in the presence of nature and the God from whence all nature came. Whittier has described the scene, “Said the master to the youth, ’We have come in search of truth.
Trying with uncertain key Door by door of mystery;
We are searching through His laws. To the garment-hem of cause, Him, the endless, unbegun. The Unnameable, the One, Light of all our light the source Life of life and Force of force. By past efforts unavailing Doubt and error, loss and failing, Of our weakness made aware, On the threshold of our task Let us light and guidance ask.
Let us pause in silent prayer!’
“Then the master in his place, Bowed his head a little space. And the leaves, by soft air stirred.
Lapse of wave and cry of bird.
Left the solemn hush unbroken Of that wordless prayer unspoken, While its wish, on earth unsaid.
Rose to heaven interpreted.”
No, child of the kingdom, the reign of law does not make it impossible for God to answer your prayer. *’ It dissolves into thin air, as we look at it, this fancied barrier of inexorable law; and as the mists clear off, beyond there is the throne of the Moral King of the universe, in whose eyes material symmetry is as nothing when compared with the spiritual well-being of His moral creatures” (Liddon).