Raphael Sabatini - "The Strolling Saint"

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Upton Sinclair - "100%: The Story of a Patriot"

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Unspoken Sermons

G >> George MacDonald >> Unspoken Sermons




I would meet difficulties, not answer objections; I would remove
stumbling-blocks from the path of him who would pray; I would help him
to pray. If, seeing we live not by our own will, we live by another
will, then is there reason, and then only can there be reason in
prayer. To him who refuses that other will, I have nothing to say. The
hour may come when he will wish there were some one to pray to; now he
is not of those whom I can help.

If there be a God, and I am his creature, there may be, there should
be, there must be some communication open between him and me. If any
one allow a God, but one scarce good enough to care about his
creatures, I will yield him that it were foolish to pray to such a God;
but the notion that, with all the good impulses in us, we are the
offspring of a cold-hearted devil, is so horrible in its inconsistency,
that I would ask that man what hideous and cold-hearted disregard to
the truth makes him capable of the supposition! To such a one God's
terrors, or, if not his terrors, then God's sorrows yet will speak; the
divine something in him will love, and the love be left moaning.

If I find my position, my consciousness, that of one from home, nay,
that of one in some sort of prison; if I find that I can neither rule
the world in which I live nor my own thoughts or desires; that I cannot
quiet my passions, order my likings, determine my ends, will my growth,
forget when I would, or recall what I forget; that I cannot love where
I would, or hate where I would; that I am no king over myself; that I
cannot supply my own needs, do not even always know which of my seeming
needs are to be supplied, and which treated as impostors; if, in a
word, my own being is everyway too much for me; if I can neither
understand it, be satisfied with it, nor better it--may it not well
give me pause--the pause that ends in prayer? When my own scale seems
too large for my management; when I reflect that I cannot account for
my existence, have had no poorest hand in it, neither, should I not
like it, can do anything towards causing it to cease; when I think that
I can do nothing to make up to those I love, any more than to those I
hate, for evils I have done them and sorrows I have caused them; that
in my worst moments I disbelieve in my best, in my best loathe my
worst; that there is in me no wholeness, no unity; that life is not a
good to me, for I scorn myself--when I think all or any such things,
can it be strange if I think also that surely there ought to be
somewhere a being to account for me, one to account for himself, and
make the round of my existence just; one whose very being accounts and
is necessary to account for mine; whose presence in my being is
imperative, not merely to supplement it, but to make to myself my
existence a good? For if not rounded in itself, but dependent on that
which it knows not and cannot know, it cannot be to itself a good known
as a good--a thing of reason and well-being: it will be a life longing
for a _logos_ to be the interpretative soul of its _cosmos_--a _logos_
it cannot have. To know God present, to have the consciousness of God
where he is the essential life, must be absolutely necessary to that
life! He that is made in the image of God must know him or be desolate:
the child must have the Father! Witness the dissatisfaction, yea
desolation of my soul--wretched, alone, unfinished, without him! It
cannot act from itself, save in God; acting from what seems itself
without God, is no action at all, it is a mere yielding to impulse. All
within is disorder and spasm. There is a cry behind me, and a voice
before; instincts of betterment tell me I must rise above my present
self--perhaps even above all my possible self: I see not how to obey,
how to carry them out! I am shut up in a world of consciousness, an
unknown _I_ in an unknown world: surely this world of my unwilled,
unchosen, compelled existence, cannot be shut out from him, cannot be
unknown to him, cannot be impenetrable, impermeable, unpresent to him
from whom I am! nay, is it not his thinking in which I think? is it not
by his consciousness that I am conscious? Whatever passes in me must be
as naturally known to him as to me, and more thoroughly, even to
infinite degrees. My thought must lie open to him: if he makes me
think, how can I elude him in thinking? 'If I should spread my wings
toward the dawn, and sojourn at the last of the sea, even there thy
hand would lead me, and thy right hand would hold me!' If he has
determined the being, how shall any mode of that being be hidden from
him? If I speak to him, if I utter words ever so low; if I but think
words to him; nay, if I only think to him, surely he, my original, in
whose life and will and no otherwise I now think concerning him, hears,
and knows, and acknowledges! Then shall I not think to him? Shall I
not tell him my troubles--how he, even he, has troubled me by making
me?--how unfit I am to be that which I am?--that my being is not to me
a good thing yet?--that I need a law that shall account to me for it in
righteousness--reveal to me how I am to make it a good--how I am to
_be_ a good, and not an evil? Shall I not tell him that I need him to
comfort me? his breath to move upon the face of the waters of the Chaos
he has made? Shall I not cry to him to be in me rest and strength? to
quiet this uneasy motion called life, and make me live indeed? to
deliver me from my sins, and make me clean and glad? Such a cry is of
the child to the Father: if there be a Father, verily he will hear, and
let the child know that he hears! Every need of God, lifting up the
heart, is a seeking of God, is a begging for himself, is profoundest
prayer, and the root and inspirer of all other prayer.

If it be reasonable for me to cry thus, if I cannot but cry, it is
reasonable that God should hear, he cannot but hear. A being that could
not hear or would not answer prayer, could not be God.

'But, I ask, all this admitted--is what you call a necessary truth an
existent fact? You say, "It must be so;" I say, "What if there is no
God!" Convince me that prayer is heard, and I shall know. Why should
the question admit of doubt? Why should it require to be reasoned
about? We know that the wind blows: why should we not know that God
answers prayer?'

I reply, What if God does not care to have you know it at second hand?
What if there would be no good in that? There is some testimony on
record, and perhaps there might be much were it not that, having to do
with things so immediately personal, and generally so delicate, answers
to prayer would naturally not often be talked about; but no testimony
concerning the thing can well be conclusive; for, like a reported
miracle, there is always some way to daff it; and besides, the
conviction to be got that way is of little value; it avails nothing to
know the thing by the best of evidence.

As to the evidence itself, adduction of proof is scarce possible in
respect of inward experience, and to this class belongs the better part
of the evidence: the testimony may be truthful, yet the testifier
utterly self-deceived! How am I to know the thing as he says he knows
it? How am I to judge of it? There is king David:--Poetry!--old
poetry!--and in the most indefinite language in the world! Doubtless he
is little versed in the utterance of the human soul, who does not
recognize in many of the psalms a cry as true as ever came from depth
of pain or height of deliverance; but it may all have been but now the
jarring and now the rhythmical movement of the waves of the psychical
aether!--I lay nothing upon testimony for my purpose now, knowing the
things that can be said, and also not valuing the bare assent of the
intellect. The sole assurance worth a man's having, even if the most
incontestable evidence were open to him from a thousand other quarters,
is that to be gained only from personal experience--that assurance in
himself which he can least readily receive from another, and which is
least capable of being transmuted into evidence for another. The
evidence of Jesus Christ could not take the place of that. A truth is
of enormous import in relation to the life--that is the heart, and
conscience, and will; it is of little consequence merely as a fact
having relation to the understanding. God may hear all prayers that
ever were offered to him, and a man may believe that he does, nor be
one whit the better for it, so long as God has no prayers of his to
hear, he no answers to receive from God. Nothing in this quarter will
ever be gained by investigation. Reader, if you are in any trouble, try
whether God will not help you; if you are in no need, why should you
ask questions about prayer? True, he knows little of himself who does
not know that he is wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and
naked; but until he begins at least to suspect a need, how can he pray?
And for one who does not want to pray, I would not lift a straw to
defeat such a one in the argument whether God hears or does not hear
prayer: for me, let him think what he will! it matters nothing in
heaven or in earth: whether in hell I do not know.

As to the so-called scientific challenge to prove the efficacy of
prayer by the result of simultaneous petition, I am almost ashamed to
allude to it. There should be light enough in science itself to show
the proposal absurd. A God capable of being so moved in one direction
or another, is a God not worth believing in--could not be the God
believed in by Jesus Christ--and he said he knew. A God that should
fail to hear, receive, attend to one single prayer, the feeblest or
worst, I cannot believe in; but a God that would grant every request of
every man or every company of men, would be an evil God--that is no
God, but a demon. That God should hang in the thought-atmosphere like a
windmill, waiting till men enough should combine and send out prayer in
sufficient force to turn his outspread arms, is an idea too absurd. God
waits to be gracious not to be tempted. A man capable of proposing such
a test, could have in his mind no worthy representative idea of a God,
and might well disbelieve in any: it is better to disbelieve than
believe in a God unworthy.

'But I want to believe in God. I want to know that there is a God that
answers prayer, that I may believe in him. There was a time when I
believed in him. I prayed to him in great and sore trouble of heart and
mind, and he did not hear me. I have not prayed since.'

How do you know that he did not hear you?

'He did not give me what I asked, though the weal of my soul hung on
it.'

In your judgment. Perhaps he knew better.

'I am the worse for his refusal. I would have believed in him if he had
heard me.'

Till the next desire came which he would not grant, and then you would
have turned your God away. A desirable believer you would have made! A
worthy brother to him who thought nothing fit to give the Father less
than his all! You would accept of him no decision against your desire!
That ungranted, there was no God, or not a good one! I think I will not
argue with you more. This only I will say: God has not to consider his
children only at the moment of their prayer. Should he be willing to
give a man the thing he knows he would afterwards wish he had not given
him? If a man be not fit to be refused, if he be not ready to be
treated with love's severity, what he wishes may perhaps be given him
in order that he may wish it had not been given him; but barely to give
a man what he wants because he wants it, and without farther purpose of
his good, would be to let a poor ignorant child take his fate into his
own hands--the cruelty of a devil. Yet is every prayer heard; and the
real soul of the prayer may require, for its real answer, that it
should not be granted in the form in which it is requested.

'To have a thing in another shape, might be equivalent to not having it
at all.'

If you knew God, you would leave that to him. He is not mocked, and he
will not mock. But he knows you better than you know yourself, and
would keep you from fooling yourself. He will not deal with you as the
child of a day, but as the child of eternal ages. You shall be
satisfied, if you will but let him have his way with the creature he
has made. The question is between your will and the will of God. He is
not one of those who give readiest what they prize least. He does not
care to give anything but his best, or that which will prepare for it.
Not many years may pass before you confess, 'Thou art a God who hears
prayer, and gives a better answer.' You may come to see that the desire
of your deepest heart would have been frustrated by having what seemed
its embodiment then. That God should as a loving father listen, hear,
consider, and deal with the request after the perfect tenderness of his
heart, is to me enough; it is little that I should go without what I
pray for. If it be granted that any answer which did not come of love,
and was not for the final satisfaction of him who prayed, would be
unworthy of God; that it is the part of love and knowledge to watch
over the wayward, ignorant child; then the trouble of seemingly
unanswered prayers begins to abate, and a lovely hope and comfort takes
its place in the child-like soul. To hear is not necessarily to grant--
God forbid! but to hear is necessarily to attend to--sometimes as
necessarily to refuse.

'Concerning this thing,' says St. Paul, 'I besought the Lord thrice,
that it might depart from me. And he hath said unto me, My grace is
sufficient for thee; power is made perfect in weakness.' God had a
better thing for Paul than granting his prayer and removing his
complaint: he would make him strong; the power of Christ should descend
and remain upon him; he would make him stronger than his suffering,
make him a sharer in the energy of God. Verily, if we have God, we can
do without the answer to any prayer.

'But if God is so good as you represent him, and if he knows all that
we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be
necessary to ask him for anything?'

I answer, What if he knows prayer to be the thing we need first and
most? What if the main object in God's idea of prayer be the supplying
of our great, our endless need--the need of himself? What if the good
of all our smaller and lower needs lies in this, that they help to
drive us to God? Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or
may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner.
Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need;
prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive
of that prayer. Our wants are for the sake of our coming into communion
with God, our eternal need. If gratitude and love immediately followed
the supply of our needs, if God our Saviour was the one thought of our
hearts, then it might be unnecessary that we should ask for anything we
need. But seeing we take our supplies as a matter of course, feeling as
if they came out of nothing, or from the earth, or our own thoughts,
instead of out of a heart of love and a will which alone is force, it
is needful that we should be made feel some at least of our wants, that
we may seek him who alone supplies all of them, and find his every gift
a window to his heart of truth. So begins a communion, a talking with
God, a coming-to-one with him, which is the sole end of prayer, yea, of
existence itself in its infinite phases. We must ask that we may
receive; but that we should receive what we ask in respect of our lower
needs, is not God's end in making us pray, for he could give us
everything without that: to bring his child to his knee, God withholds
that man may ask.

In regard, however, to the high necessities of our nature, it is in
order that he may be able to give that God requires us to ask--requires
by driving us to it--by shutting us up to prayer. For how can he give
into the soul of a man what it needs, while that soul cannot receive
it? The ripeness for receiving is the asking. The blossom-cup of the
soul, to be filled with the heavenly dews, is its prayer. When the soul
is hungry for the light, for the truth--when its hunger has waked its
higher energies, thoroughly roused the will, and brought the soul into
its highest condition, that of action, its only fitness for receiving
the things of God, that action is prayer. Then God can give; then he
can be as he would towards the man; for the glory of God is to give
himself.--We thank thee, Lord Christ, for by thy pain alone do we rise
towards the knowledge of this glory of thy rather and our Father.

And even in regard to lower things--what it may be altogether unfit to
do for a man who does not recognize the source of his life, it may be
in the highest sense fit to grant him when he comes to that source to
ask for it. Even in the case of some individual desire of one who in
the main recognizes the Father, it may be well to give him asking whom,
not asking, it would not benefit. For the real good of every gift it is
essential, first, that the giver be in the gift--as God always is, for
he is love--and next, that the receiver know and receive the giver in
the gift. Every gift of God is but a harbinger of his greatest and only
sufficing gift--that of himself. No gift unrecognized as coming from
God is at its own best; therefore many things that God would gladly
give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we
ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all gifts we
find him, then in him we shall find all things.

Sometimes to one praying will come the feeling rather than question:
'Were it not better to abstain? If this thing be good, will he not give
it me? Would he not be better pleased if I left it altogether to him?'
It comes, I think, of a lack of faith and childlikeness--taking form,
perhaps, in a fear lest, asking for what was not good, the prayer
should be granted. Such a thought has no place with St. Paul; he says,
'Casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you;' 'In everything
making your request known unto him.' It may even come of ambition after
spiritual distinction. In every request, heart and soul and mind ought
to supply the low accompaniment, 'Thy will be done;' but the making of
any request brings us near to him, into communion with our Life. Does
it not also help us to think of him in all our affairs, and learn in
everything to give thanks? Anything large enough for a wish to light
upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon: the thought of him to whom
that prayer goes will purify and correct the desire. To say, 'Father, I
should like this or that,' would be enough at once, if the wish were
bad, to make us know it and turn from it. Such prayer about things must
of necessity help to bring the mind into true and simple relation with
him; to make us remember his will even when we do not see what that
will is. Surely it is better and more trusting to tell him all without
fear or anxiety. Was it not thus the Lord carried himself towards his
Father when he said, 'If it be possible, let this cup pass from me'?
But there was something he cared for more than his own fear--his
Father's will: 'Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.' There is
no apprehension that God might be displeased with him for saying what
he would like, and not leaving it all to his Father. Neither did he
regard his Father's plans as necessarily so fixed that they could not
be altered to his prayer. The true son-faith is that which comes with
boldness, fearless of the Father doing anything but what is right
fatherly, patient, and full of loving-kindness. We must not think to
please him by any asceticism even of the spirit; we must speak straight
out to him. The true child will not fear, but lay bare his wishes to
the perfect Father. The Father may will otherwise, but his grace will
be enough for the child.

There could be no riches but for need. God himself is made rich by
man's necessity. By that he is rich to give; through that we are rich
by receiving.

As to any notion of prevailing by entreaty over an unwilling God, that
is heathenish, and belongs to such as think him a hard master, or one
like the unjust judge. What so quenching to prayer as the notion of
unwillingness in the ear that hears! And when prayer is dull, what
makes it flow like the thought that God is waiting to give, wants to
give us everything! 'Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of
grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of
need.' We shall be refused our prayer if that be better; but what is
good our Father will give us with divine good will. The Lord spoke his
parable 'to the end that they ought always to pray, _and not to
faint_.'




MAN'S DIFFICULTY CONCERNING PRAYER.


'--_and not to faint_.'--ST. LUKE xviii. 1.

'How should any design of the All-wise be altered in response to prayer
of ours!' How are we to believe such a thing?

By reflecting that he is the All-wise, who sees before him, and will
not block his path. Such objection springs from poorest idea of God in
relation to us. It supposes him to have cares and plans and intentions
concerning our part of creation, irrespective of us. What is the whole
system of things for, but our education? Does God care for suns and
planets and satellites, for divine mathematics and ordered harmonies,
more than for his children? I venture to say he cares more for oxen
than for those. He lays no plans irrespective of his children; and, his
design being that they shall be free, active, live things, he sees that
space be kept for them: they need room to struggle out of their
chrysalis, to undergo the change that comes with the waking will, and
to enter upon the divine sports and labours of children in the house
and domain of their Father. Surely he may keep his plans in a measure
unfixed, waiting the free desire of the individual soul! Is not the
design of the first course of his children's education just to bring
them to the point where they shall pray? and shall his system appointed
to that end be then found hard and fast, tooth-fitted and inelastic, as
if informed of no live causing soul, but an unself-knowing force--so
that he cannot answer the prayer because of the system which has its
existence for the sake of the prayer? True, in many cases, the prayer,
far more than the opportunity of answering it, is God's end; but how
will the further end of the prayer be reached, which is oneness between
the heart of the child and of the Father? how will the child go on to
pray if he knows the Father cannot answer him? _Will not_ may be for
love, but how with a self-imposed _cannot_? How could he be Father, who
creating, would not make provision, would not keep room for the babbled
prayers of his children? Is his perfection a mechanical one? Has he
himself no room for choice--therefore can give none? There must be a
Godlike region of choice as there is a human, however little we may be
able to conceive it. It were a glory in such system that its suns
themselves wavered and throbbed at the pulse of a new child-life.

What perfection in a dwelling would it be that its furniture and the
paths between were fitted as the trays and pigeon-holes of a cabinet?
What stupidity of perfection would that be which left no margin about
God's work, no room for change of plan upon change of fact--yea, even
the mighty change that, behold now at length, his child is praying! See
the freedom of God in his sunsets--never a second like one of the
foregone!--in his moons and skies--in the ever-changing solid earth!--
all moving by no dead law, but in the harmony of the vital law of
liberty, God's creative perfection--all ordered from within. A divine
perfection that were indeed, where was no liberty! where there could be
but one way of a thing! I may move my arm as I please: shall God be
unable so to move his? If but for himself, God might well desire no
change, but he is God for the sake of his growing creatures; all his
making and doing is for them, and change is the necessity of their very
existence. They need a mighty law of liberty, into which shall never
intrude one atom of chance. Is the one idea of creation the begetting
of a free, grand, divine will in us? and shall that will, praying with
the will of the Father, find itself cramped, fettered, manacled by
foregone laws? Will it not rather be a new-born law itself, working new
things? No man is so tied by divine law that he can nowise modify his
work: shall God not modify his? Law is but mode of life-action. Is it
of his perfection that he should have no scope, no freedom? Is he but
the prisoned steam in the engine, pushing, escaping, stopped--his way
ordered by valve and piston? or is he an indwelling, willing, ordering
power? Law is the slave of Life. Is not a man's soul, as it dwells in
his body, a dim-shadowing type of God in and throughout his universe?
If you say, he has made things to go, set them going, and left them--
then I say, If his machine interfered with his answering the prayer of
a single child, he would sweep it from him--not to bring back chaos,
but to make room for his child. But order is divine, and cannot be
obstructive to its own higher ends; it must subserve them. Order, free
order, neither chaos, nor law unpossessed and senseless, is the home of
Thought. If you say There can be but one perfect way, I answer, Yet the
perfect way to bring a thing so far, to a certain crisis, can ill be
the perfect way to carry it on after that crisis: the plan will have to
change then. And as this crisis depends on a will, all cannot be in
exact, though in live preparation for it. We must remember that God is
not occupied with a grand toy of worlds and suns and planets, of
attractions and repulsions, of agglomerations and crystallizations, of
forces and waves; that these but constitute a portion of his workshops
and tools for the bringing out of righteous men and women to fill his
house of love withal. Would he have let his Son die for a law of
nature, as we call it? These doubtless are the outcome of willed laws
of his own being; but they take their relations in matter only for the
sake of the birth of sons and daughters, that they may yet again be
born from above, and into the higher region whence these things issue;
and many a modification of the ideal, rendering it less than complete,
must be given to those whose very doom being to grow or perish implies
their utter inability to lay hold of the perfect. The best _means_
cannot be the ideal Best. The embodiment of uplifting truth for the
low, cannot be equal to that for the higher, else it will fail, and
prove for its object not good; but, as the low ascend, their revelation
will ascend also.

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