Or Must We Not Infer That The Fear Of The
Consequences Of Vice Or Folly, Together With An Earnest
Desire And Intention To Amend, Were Adequate In Themselves To
Account For The Good Results?
Reason compels us to the latter conclusion.
But what then?
Would this prove prayer to be delusive? Not necessarily.
That the laws of Nature (as argued above) are not violated by
miracle, is a mere perversion of the accepted meaning of
'miracle,' an IGNORATIO ELENCHI. But in the case of prayer
that does not ask for the abrogation of Nature's laws, it
ceases to be a miracle that we pray for or expect: for are
not the laws of the mind also laws of Nature? And can we
explain them any more than we can explain physical laws? A
psychologist can formulate the mental law of association, but
he can no more explain it than Newton could explain the laws
of attraction and repulsion which pervade the world of
matter. We do not know, we cannot know, what the conditions
of our spiritual being are. The state of mind induced by
prayer may, in accordance with some mental law, be essential
to certain modes of spiritual energy, specially conducive to
the highest of all moral or spiritual results: taken in this
sense, prayer may ask, not the suspension, but the enactment,
of some natural law.
Let it, however, be granted, for argument's sake, that the
belief in the efficacy of prayer is delusive, and that the
beneficial effects of the belief - the exalted state of mind,
the enhanced power to endure suffering and resist temptation,
the happiness inseparable from the assurance that God hears,
and can and will befriend us - let it be granted that all
this is due to sheer hallucination, is this an argument
against prayer?
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