Philosophical Results of Denial of Miracles [pp. 85-94]

PHILOSOPHICAL RESULTS OF A DENIAL OF MIRACLES. 87
pronounced so good and so sufficient as to be beyond the trespass of a miracle, may still better be pronounced beyond the
trespass of a prayer. If this is our solution, that the prayer is
the product of natural law, and the answer the product of natural law, it is to be hoped that we shall have discernment enough
to see that the response has no dependence on the petition,unless we make our petition something more than a prayer, to
wit, an effort-and that our contrivance is an illusion of our own
which we have added to the simple on-going of the natural
world. Events are not altered by prayer, and prayer, when present, is mere vapor that plays about them.
We can hardly be willing to say that prayer, in the purposes
of God, is, in the original make-up of law, a condition of the
events which answer it, thus granting it precisely the same efficiency in the origin of things which we have refused to grant it
in their progress. Such a play of thought, however, is very common, and things are transferred to the beginning which are found
inconvenient in the progress of events. It is thus tacitly assumed
that time does make a difference with God; that he is not omnipresent in his work, and that relations are admissible in the era
of creation that are not so later. God may contrive laws to answer prayer, but cannot answer it in the very development of
those laws. Prayer may shape the entire law at the beginning,
but cannot meddle with it afterward. This is simply saying, that
a mechanism of means is a necessity with God, and so gets the
upper hand of him that it can suffer no possible modification by
him.
That origin of things when God was active, thoughtful, and
considerate becomes thus the only blessed era, and it is not
strange that our theology loves to get back to it. What we
should covet, rather, is an omnipresent God, the same yesterday,
to-day, and forever, with an ear at all times equally open to our
wants. It will be observed that it still remains true that variable wishes, even when we allow them in the very beginning to
reach to, and lay hold of, the divine will, cannot be wrought in
as parts of a uniform law. This is as impossible as that chance
and necessity should work the same results. Either the wish or
the law must bend. If the law bends, it is so far broken; if the
wish bends, we have no prayer.