even when only rudimentary, a fuller in- "count the grey barbarian lower than the Christian child.” And neither, on the other hand, are we wilvelopment,-by concentrating his attention ling to take a man who, by a one-sided deternal world, on what can be seen and felt,— almost wholly on the phenomena of the exwho, by starving the higher part of his nature, ment and fruition of his being,—as a standhas cut himself off from the full developard of what may be intuitively perceived by those who have given their spiritual faculties re-fuller and fairer play. As a matter of fact, we find that while some will accept as true nothing which cannot be scientifically or remain blind to spiritual truth; by others, the logically demonstrated, and must, therefore, existence of a God is intuitively felt; while, to others still, the divinity of the voice which speaks to their hearts in Revelation is What follows? If we pursue the same so self-evident as to require no further proof. be desired for themselves and the whole world. Dr. McLeod Campbell is cited as an instance to the contrary, on the foundation of a few words said about him, which, however, were never meant to assert that the words in question were not a petition as well as a response. But Mr. Le Sueur seems to have forgotten a statement of Dr. Campbell's own on this very point, already quoted by the present writer:-"Were all our prayers gathered into the Lord's Prayer-and to this prayer tends more and more as the mind of Christ is formed in us-prayer would still be prayer, and not simple praise. Our attitude in looking forward to the hallowing of the Father's name-the coming of His kingdom-His will being done on earth as it is in heaven-would be a waiting in the faith that our prayer was hastening that which we had prayed for." This is a sufficient answer at once to the objection, and to the reference to the author of these profoundly true words. A few words next about the intuition which leads men to pray. Mr. Dawson ferred to the truth that mathematical science, like all science, and like Christian faith, must begin with something which is to be believed not proved. It is true that moral and spiritual intuitions have not in all minds the uniformity which belong to mathematical intuitions, just because man's moral and spiritual sensibility is, owing to moral causes, far more variable than, up to a certain limit, is his intellectual capacity. Even mathematical intuition, however, varies in different individuals. There have been mathematical geniuses to whom the truth of a complicated proposition was self-evident, while some minds might not see at once that all right angles must be equal, more especially if unaided by the sense of sight. For mathematics, though an abstract science, is concerned with the relations of visible and tangible things, and so its axioms are much more likely to be uniformly recognised than is truth which belongs not even to the intellect alone, but to the intellect and spirit combined. When we find that a certain number of rational and intelligent persons see as self-evident truth that which is not so seen by certain others, as, for instance, the harmonies of music are recognized by those who are gifted with a musical ear, we do not conclude that the insight of the former is less but more true. And we know that by the cultivation of certain faculties, "The cause, I believe to be, in the case of many men of science, an unequal development of their nature, in other words, a want of uniform culture. They give up their whole life and all its energy to the study of physical phenomena. The combinations of the elements do not speak of the union of the soul with the Eternal Son of God, and the nerves they will not discover faith or love or in the convolutions of the brain and interweaving of reverence; or not being able to deny their existence, they say that they dissolve with the nerve matter of which they are modes of motion. Not only do they study nothing but these things, but they put aside any suggestions of spiritual feeling which may come to them, in their work as distributing elements, as dimming the day-light' in which they toil. It is no wonder, then, that their spiritual faculty becomes dwarfed or paralyzed, till, not finding its motions in themselves, they are ready to deny their existence elsewhere. On the other hand, their peculiar habit of mind becoms abnormally developed, and even their imagination is only If a man cannot see red, we used in one direction. do not let him impose on us the statement that red is not to be seen, even if he be a perfect musician.” -Rev. Stopford Brooke. ་ course that we do in other departments of truth, we shall not assume that the man who sees least beyond the visible is the safest guide, but will rather admit that the more developed and cultivated spiritual insight sees farther than that which has been unnaturally stunted by the development of the merely intellectual at the expense of the spiritual. But the intuition which leads men to pray is almost, if not quite, universal-one of the strongest impulses of our human nature, which, as Froude says of the consciousness of free-will, "exists within us and refuses to yield before all the batteries of logic." No philosophy will ever check the instinct which impels the suffering human being to apply to the unseen Father, as surely as the child in trouble seeks its mother's ever ready help and comfort. "There is no God' the foolish saith, In bitter need will borrow; Who ne'er said, ' God be praised.'" True the cry is often a blind and mistaken one, but He who hears it is pitiful to human blindness and weakness, and it is one of the greatest safeguards of our human nature, that, with all its perversion and imperfection, it still keeps this enduring link between heaven and earth. He who would destroy it would injure his fellows more deeply than he can now comprehend; though, happily, the attempt is as vain as King Canute's ap peal to the ocean tide. And the more spiritually-minded a Christian becomes, the more value does he attach to prayer, though much of the blindness and earthliness of his earlier petitions may be purged away as he learns to pray more truly in the spirit and the name of Christ. That much debasing superstition has been engrafted upon the intuition of prayer, is no more an argument against its intrinsic truth, than the superstitions of Polytheism are an argument against Theism, or than the Mohammedan vision of a sensual Paradise is a proof that immortality is a delusion. No! we believe that the divinely implanted and ineradicable instinct of prayer is no delusion, but is our Divine guide to the unseen and uncomprehended love which lies around and about us; just as the instinct that draws the child to its mother's breast is its guide to the uncomprehended mother-love, which is the necessary and blessed provision for its opening years. Mr. Le Sueur has himself, in a different connexion, appealed to the "law written on the heart." He has, therefore, no right to refuse the same appeal in the case of prayer. We turn now to the a posteriori argument founded on the difficulty of tracing the influence of prayer in the course of outward events. It is true that earnest prayers for aid often seem to be disregarded, just as it is true that, in some morbid moments, life seems to us a mere senseless procession of force and accident, destitute of a guiding mind and will altogether. Yet this, assuredly, Mr. Le Sueur would not maintain. The results of prayer can never be statistically tabulated, because true prayer is one of the heart secrets which can never be laid open for the satisfaction of the merely curious. How much prayer is true and trusting filial prayer, no human judge can decide. How much of the well-being of those who do not pray, may come in answer to the prayers of believing friends, must remain unknown till the secrets of all hearts have been disclosed. This much, however, we may venture to assert, that those Christian communities, in which true and intelligent prayer is most common, afford a higher ratio of health and even of outward success than others, as may easily be seen in the contrast between heathen communities converted to Christianity, and those still remaining heathen. It may be said that this is, at least, partly owing to the better observation of natural laws. But if this is brought about through the agency of Christianity, of which prayer is a prominent characteristic, why should even the natural cause be dissosociated from the spirit of prayer which has preceded it? And as they who have most faithfully used any particular means, are confessedly the best witnesses to its efficacy, it is no mean argument for the efficacy of prayer that they who, during a long life, have most earnestly and faithfully used this means, are just they who most earnestly and gratefully testify to the truth of every Christian promise in regard to it. Here, we apprehend, is the true prayer test, and we would earnestly recommend every sceptic to try it for himself. Mr. Müller, of Bristol, has lately recorded as his own experience, that out of thousands of instances of prayer for things he had need of, he had not known one unanswered. And we believe that the experience of all praying Christians-could it be recorded-would be found to corroborate this to a degree absolutely startling to sceptics.* Most Christians, indeed, could multiply, from their own experience and observation, instances of prayer for tem The following instance of answer to prayer at an important crisis, was gratefully related by the Rev. Mr. Allsopp, a Wesleyan Missionary among the Amapenda people, in south-eastern Africa. The reigning chief, Takee, though not a professed Christian, had been favourably disposed towards Christianity, and had refused during a long drought to call in the aid of the "rain-doctors," saying "It is of no use; only the missionaries' God can, I believe, give rain." The drought being prolonged, how ever, the king's heathen counsellors redoubled their doctors," and at last proposed to put the power of the "Missionaries' God" to the test, by asking Mr. Allsopp to appoint the following Sunday as a day of fasting and special prayer for rain. If the test failed, and the rain did not come, the rain-doctors must be propitiated, and a check thus given to the progress of Christianity among that people. entreaties that he should have recourse to the "rain Mr. "This appeal resulted in a message to the missionary, conveying the wishes of the Indunas. Allsopp sent word to Takee that this request did his heart good, for he and the converts had long prayed for rain, but now that the nation was turning to God and looking for His help, he believed their prayers would be answered. At the same time, Mr. Allsopp deeply felt how momentous a crisis had come in the history of the mission, and tenderly and trustfully was this feeling shared by the native con verts. "Truly a season of earnest prayer had from that time begun. and early on the following Sunday a crowded prayer meeting attested the general interest of the converts. Later in the day a still larger gathering took place, and the whole service was solemn and impressive. A prayer meeting was then announced for the afternoon, and near the time, as one and another kept dropping in, gathering clouds drew the attention of all, Before the meeting was half over, the great drops of rain began to fall, and at its conclusion, a steady down-pour had set in, and continued all that night and during the following day and night, so that no further meetings could be held. The windows of heaven were opened and the drought was ended." This termination of the test not only greatly in creased the influence of the missionaries, but led to a train of events by which some cruel and debasing heathen customs were abolished, and the conversion of the people to Christianity was largely promoted. A book entitled "Prayer and its Answers," recently published, contains a large number of instances of remarkable answers to prayer, some of which are so striking that they would be given here, but for want of space. poral blessings, so remarkably and promptly fulfilled, that they would not have refused to believe in the result as a direct answer to prayer; though, of course, there is hardly any result of such a kind which a sceptic could not find some way of referring to a natural cause, as if even such a natural cause could at all disprove the relation of the result to the prayer. But even where we see that prayer, however earnest, does not avert temporal ill, are we, who can see so little beyond the outward appearance in the lives of others, to judge whether any true prayer has been unanswered ? The Almighty Father has many ways of answering the cry for help. We may hear, in imagination, the wail of agony, which the winds and waves so quickly drown, but we cannot follow and trace the loving care that guides the sufferer through that parting pang of agony into the nobler life beyond. As George Macdonald beautifully says:-" "The man who creeps out of the drowning, choking billows into the glory of the new heavens and the new earth, do you think his thanksgiving for the mercy of God which has delivered him is less than that of the man who creeps, exhausted and worn, out of the waves, upon the dreary, surf-beaten shore? In nothing do we show less faith than the way in which we think and speak about death." And sometimes we have testimonies-almost from the grave—to the sustaining peace and trust, given in answer to prayer, in the prospect of an immediate and terrible death. Of course this is not, strictly Speaking, an answer to prayer, though even this involves physical effects. But it has been already sufficiently explained that Christian prayer' is an asking, not a demand, or the turning of a machine; that the very spirit of prayer implies that we are to acquiesce in a possible refusal of the special request; and, as all temporal requests cannot he granted, and as men must die sometime, and in the circumstances which God sees to be on the whole best, it must often happen that requests of this nature must seem to be disregarded. Such arguments as these, however, would be more in place in the plea of an atheist opposing theists, than of a theist opposing believers in prayer. For they belong to those mysteries of providence which have in all ages baffled the most earnest thought-to which the philosophers of all ages have vainly endeavoured to find the key. On the supposition of an all-wise, all-holy, all-powerful Ruler of the universe, it must appear as strange that iniquity, and tyranny, and oppression should maintain their cruel and debasing sway throughout ages and centuries, as that the cry of the down-trodden and suffering to infinite Love and infinite Justice, should seem to be unheeded. But "God is His own interpreter, And He will make it plain;" 66 and no one but an atheist will refuse to admit that we must trustfully wait for the solution of the problems which perplex us. But Mr. Le Sueur is no atheist, as he has clearly shown in this article, although he has answered somewhat vaguely Mr. Romanes' well-grounded assertion that any discussion of the efficacy of prayer, as a special development of God's providence, would be futile and absurd, except on the theistic hypothesis which Mr. Le Sueur admits, when he speaks of the unseen Power," towards whom our "gratitude naturally flows forth." For it would be absurd to speak of "gratitude," unless we conceive of that "Power "jas having relations to ourselves,in other words as a "personal Providence." He has, therefore, no right to bring forward, against prayer, arguments which he would not admit as against the existence and supremacy of a God, "infinite in goodness and wisdom." Such a line of thought, logically carried out, would end in the denial of theism, in the only sense in which it can be either intelligible or important to us, that of a personal God who cares for His personal, individual creatures ;-in the belief, instead, in a universe of blind and reckless forces, which, however, by some occult quality not characteristic of blindness and recklessness within the sphere of ordinary observation, has always been progressing to some wonderful and beautiful end,-perhaps, even, to some "far off Divine event." It must come to this, if the principle that "physical occurrences are governed exclusively by physical antecedents," be carried far enough. It has come to this with most of the materialistic philosophers, who object to prayer on this ground, and who tell us also that the conditions of physical law make immortality an idle dream, and that the thought of a God is to be retained only by weak and senti Mr. Le Sueur's implied objection to Mr.. Romanes' arguing in favour of the efficacy of prayer, while he has not yet come to any definite conclusion regarding the question, is one which was not to have been expected from an able and thoughtful pleader for truth. For it would seem to imply that no one has a right to argue for or against a disputed belief unless he has finally made up his mind on one side or the other, and that no one would take the trouble to refute arguments which he deemed erroneous, unless he could firmly profess himself an advocate of the view against which such arguments are directed. Surely we have not arrived at such partyism in our search for truth! If our object really is truth, why may not any one, in discussing a question which he believes to be an open one, bring forward all the sound arguments that he can against those which he considers fallacious? Nay, as a searcher for truth, is he not bound to do this? Surely there can be but one reply. Mr. Le Sueur, in referring to Mr. Romanes' position in regard to prayer, falls into the very common but confusing fallacy of using an indefinite negative in two very different senses at once. When he says, "it is evident that Mr. Romanes does not believe in the physical efficacy of prayer any more than I do," he uses the expression "not believe," at once in the sense of suspended judgment, and in that of positive denial, as is apparent if we alter the sentence to "Mr. Romanes disbelieves the physical efficacy of prayer as much as I do." For Mr. Romanes has expressly said that he does not know whether to believe it or not-while Mr. Le Sueur maintains the belief to be erroneous and injurious. He is unjust, also, to Mr. Romanes in saying that he "has not unfolded" the reasons for his suspended judgment. Mr. Romanes has explicitly done so in saying that the question of belief in prayer hinges mainly on a belief in the Christian revelation, and the fact that his judgment is suspended as to the larger issue, necessitates its suspension on the minor one which depends on it. This very circumstance will, to most minds, give more weight to his arguments than to those of firm believers in Christianity, who are, of course, exposed to the imputation of having their view on the minor subject coloured by their belief in the larger one which includes it. The fact that the arguments of such an impartial writer have been found most serviceable by a "writer of unquestionable faith in the whole Christian theory of prayer," is surely so much favour of the rationality of that faith ;* and Mr. Romanes is thoroughly justifiable in saying, as he does in his preface to the Essay on the Physical Efficacy of Prayer, that "only if he disbelieved in the Christian system as a whole, should he feel that time was ill spent in refuting erroneous arguments against one of its leading doctrines." the fallibility of the human mind, that we thankfully look for guidance, in this and other matters, to the Divine voice which we recognise in Revelation, and in the corresponding teaching of the Holy Spirit, given to "them that ask it." And as the objections against the efficacy of prayer are merely human ones,-human suppositions, theories, and assumptions,-we can hardly be expected to give them much weight in a sphere which lies beyond them, and in which we have a higher guide, clear and distinct enough for practical direction, though not affording much satisfaction to mere speculative curiosity. We are advised to be "willing to reject, not predetermined to receive." This is good advice in regard to any still open question. But what if all the arguments suggested have previously been weighed and dismissed as utterly inadequate to justify rejection? What if all our consideration of the subject shows us more of the fatuity and short-sightedness of human reasonings against it, if the strong instinct of our hearts and the fuller experience of life make us feel more and more that we have no reason to reject it, but every reason to value and cherish it as our most precious privilege? Surely, then to reject would be in-not wisdom, but reckless folly! We have little hope of convincing by argument those who regard the difficulties which the subject must present to our partial comprehension as insuperable barriers to belief, however deeply we may regret their bearing the burden of life without availing themselves of this unspeakable privilege. It is not by argument or discussion that any truth can become the possession of the soul; and all that we would desire would be that they should fairly test the matter in their own experience, a test which would be of infinitely more value than many “doubtful disputations." Mr. Le Sueur has truly said in the beginning of his article that "there is no absolute screen from error for any human being." It is precisely because we so fully recognise + As the reference here alluded to would almost convey the suggestion that Mr. Romanes wrote on the subject merely for the sake of competition for a University prize, the present writer, without any communication on the subject with Mr. Romanes, is able, from previous knowledge, to dispose of any such idea. The nucleus of the essay on the Physical Efficacy of Prayer, appended to the Burney Essay, was originally written entirely independently of the Burney competition, as a contribution to the Contemporary Review. It was not, however, published therein, because, for private reasons, Mr. Romanes did not wish it then to appear over his name, and it was afterwards expanded into its present form in the volume containing the Burney essay. But far less can the reasonings of objectors shake the Christian's bewhich the objectors cannot touch and do not lief in prayer, founded as it is on a basis apparently comprehend. Nor can they eradicate the strong instinct of humanity to pray,though they may weaken and confuse the belief of some and keep them from availing themselves of the full blessedness of the privilege. While, therefore, there is much in the latter part of Mr. Le Sueur's article that we sympathize with, we cannot but regret that the writer of it should "spend his strength |