who shall limit in his achievements Him who understands all laws, and who, by the simple act of his will, can adjust these myriads of laws to each other so as to satisfy the cry of every one of his creatures?

. Moreover, those who have arrayed science and prayer against each other have sometimes complacently sneered at those who still believe that God answers prayer as being honest enough, but pitiably unscientific. Now, such men ought not to complain, if we demand in them what they demand in others. No theory designed to account for any class of phenomena is worth anything unless it takes into consideration all the known facts and makes suitable provision for them. Those who contend that, on the basis of the immutability of natural laws, it is folly to pray, have never in their theory made full provision for the entire contents of the fact of prayer. If one thing in reference to man has been established beyond every other, it is the fact that he has distinctively a religious nature. Wherever found, be he savage or civilized, he is religious. He universally has his places of worship, rude or artistic; he has his shrines and altars, and offers to his god or gods sacrifices bloody or unbloody. Heathen, Mohammedan, and Christian alike pray. Even men who declare themselves atheists will sometimes pray, when they get into a pinch; and in their highest and best moods will utter words of praise to Him whom they declare not to exist. Now, a fact so universal as prayer must be in some way accounted for. Does it not carry the evidence in itself that there is an answer to it? We find it to be a general law of our being that satisfaction is provided for every natural and right desire. We hunger,-without us are manifold harvests and barns bursting with plenty; we thirst,— without us are lakes, bubbling fountains and purling brooks; we long for the beautiful,-without us in myriads of objects is beauty more subtle and delicate than was ever expressed by the brush of the painter or the pen of the poet; we crave the sublime, -and cataract, and mountain, and heaving ocean, and the awful storm, answer the inward desire. As, in these cases, the hunger, the thirst, the longing, and the craving are evidences within us of the satisfaction without us, so prayer, the deep longing or craving of man's religious nature, carries with it the decisive evidence that there is without an answer which will meet and satisfy it. If this be not so, then for our physical and intellectual cravings answers beautiful and complete have been provided,

while the cravings of our higher religious nature have been left uncared for and unsatisfied. This a school-boy could not fail to stamp as the rankest absurdity. Prayer is either answered, or else those desires which impel man to come into communion with God are, of all the desires of his being, alone a mockery. Is any one credulous enough to believe that?

Any sound theory of prayer must also take into account another fact, namely, that of testimony. Men affirm that God has heard their prayers. From the number of witnesses let us

exclude all those who might reasonably be accused of fanaticism; yet we have failed to see why the testimony of a fanatical Christian is not just as trustworthy as that of a fanatical skeptic. We will exclude, too, all witnesses who may be reasonably suspected of having had collusion with each other. Then we will sift the testimony of the clear-headed, unbiased witnesses, striking out every statement which may, with the slightest show of reason, be considered as an illusion of honest but mistaken men. Even then, the testimony gathered from the witnesses of all time that would remain, all bearing on this one point, would, if printed in books, make a vast library. Can any just theory in reference to prayer omit a fact of such magnitude? Would it be scientific to ignore all this testimony of the purest and best men that ever lived? If their testimony is declared fanatical, would that not prove too much, if mere assertion ever proves anything? Would it not show that the fanaticism of the ages has contained within itself the godliness, the purity, the virtue of the ages? No, there is no way in which we can scientifically thrust such testimony out of sight. It stands as solid as granite, as clear as crystal, and he who would be scientific in handling the fact of prayer must take it up into his theory and account for it.

If it should be said that prayer and its supposed answer is simply a happy coincidence, we might grant that in one, or two, or three cases it may be, and do no despite to science. But take fifty cases, or five hundred, or ten thousand, and declare in every case that we have only a lucky coincidence, and such a number of coincidences would tax our credulity far more than to admit that God in reality answered the prayers: so large a number of coincidences would be a thousand-fold more mysterious than the fact that these men cried unto the Lord, and that he, in mercy and love, heard their cries and satisfied their wants. By no device can we, with a strict scientific spirit and method,

brush aside the vast mass of testimony that God has answered prayer.

Our argument in brief, then, is this: from any proper definition of science and prayer, we cannot discover anything within them that brings them into conflict. Those who rule out prayer for physical blessings on the ground of the immutability of natural laws must, if consistent, rule out prayer for spiritual blessings also, since law is as fixed in the realm of spirit as in the realm of matter. Confusion often results from a lack of precision in the use of the term law-a physical law being, to our observation, only a process in the material world; but as we see that in the process beneficent ends are reached, that fact suggests that the process may be simply God's method of acting. By these very processes, therefore, God may answer prayer. As men, by adjusting to each other the few immutable laws of the material world which they have laboriously learned, reach all the varied and marvelous results which we see produced by mechanical contrivances, so God, who works in and through all the laws of his universe, by their adjustment, without in the slightest degree infringing them, may answer every prayer of his people. Any truly scientific theory of prayer must account for the fact of prayer, and deal dispassionately with the mass of testimony given, down through all the ages, that God has, in almost innumerable instances, answered prayer.

After a calm, dispassionate examination of all that has been written by materialistic scientists about the impotence and folly of prayer, we may, without the slightest danger of being unscientific, still believe and obey Him who, speaking with unerring wisdom, said, "Ask, and it shall be given you."

GALUSHA ANDERSON.

MR. WAKEMAN.

THEOLOGY is the past tense; Science is king. Such is the conviction of thousands who lead or hope to lead the world. The reason is, that science has the only verifiable, and therefore the only reliable test of what is true, or good, or beautiful. The practical life of man, the arts, commerce, medicine, law, and even philosophy and ethics, have become firmly established only as they have been founded anew upon scientific methods and results.

Will religion be the exception? Or will science banish theology from that, as it did astrology from astronomy? Will the ultimate, the religious, conceptions of mankind be annexed to the scientific domain? If so, this new solution of the world will evidently supplant the ancient one and become the creed of the intelligent of the race, the basis of its higher integration, The rapid progress of science toward this result is the most astonishing phase of human history. This new solution of the universe-this idea of law, which is pushing will from the throne -dates not further back than three hundred years (A. D. 1600), when the Copernican astronomy, by the substitution of the heliocentric for the geocentric theory, presented man with a new heaven and a new earth, a new cosmogony, which necessitates a scientific religion, and will leave none other possible.

It may be replied that science cannot for ages reach the masses of the race who are still Fetichists, nor even the majority in civilized countries who are little better. Granted; but knowledge is power. Those who have this power will control the earth, although they may not have the numbers to inherit it. In the rational and spiritual world there is not equality. The law of evolution assigns rank according to courage and capacity. When the vanguard waits for the rear all progress will stop. The rear will never move until drawn forward by the advance. The blind will never see without the light. The highest duty is to tell the highest truth.

What, then, is the verdict of science upon prayer? Prayer is the essence of religion; is, indeed, practical religion under theology. But will the coming scientific, intelligent man pray at all? If not, from whence can he derive the reliance, comfort, and discipline that prayer has afforded to the past generations of men? If prayer is not a means of grace under the new and higher integration, what will take its place?

Evidently prayer is useless unless prayer is answered. Does not the scientific proof that prayer is answered wholly fail?

At the very first step, the fundamental laws of modern science seem to render prayer-answer a priori inconceivable. Those laws are: the indestructibility of matter, the correlation and equivalence of forces, gravitation, and the law of evolution. This last law is now recognized as the backbone of the organic, the social, the mental, the moral, and the religious sciences. The old rudimentary beliefs about the uniformity of nature, and

that like causes and conditions produced like effects, have been summed up and verified invincibly in these laws. They are the greatest acquisition of the human race, and together form the new solution of the world. All science is merely their repetition or extension; its literature is their illustration. They are not only drawn from the facts and events of the world inductively, but Mr. Spencer shows ("First Principles," chaps. 4-9) that, at bottom, they rest upon the law of correlation, the contrary of which is from the very constitution of our minds inconceivable. Thus, the indestructibility of matter and the persistence of force are not only proved by every observation and experiment, but upon ultimate analysis are found to be the condition of thought itself. All notions inconsistent with these laws are called by scientists pseudo-conceptions. They have been inherited in vast masses from the unscientific period prior to 1600, when accurate knowledge beyond simple mathematics was practically impossible.

Is prayer-answer, then, one of those pseudo-ideas? The answer is affirmative if prayer involves a break or variation of those laws.

The burden of reconciling prayer with those laws rests upon its advocates. Can it be done? Science seems to answer decisively, No! In the olden times, nothing was more easy than a belief in prayer-answer and miracles, for nothing was more "natural" under the will, or God, solution of the world. "Sacred" literatures are full of these events. The old world was plastic material for the working out of divine and human ends. In its will-science, matter and the laws and order of nature were violated, varied, adjusted, or changed for purposes personal or religious. For instance: water was made wine; or five fishes became a hundred; a storm was broken up; iron floated; or a sacrifice was set on fire in answer to Elijah's prayer. Every instance, and they might be collected by thousands, contains the same illusion; that is, that the matter, or forces, of the world may be changed or increased in violation of, or beyond, the correlate order. In that supposition only consists the value of prayer or miracle. But for this notion of power, over or beyond nature, neither would be sought or used. From the slightest glance at the history of prayer-answer and miracle it is plain, therefore, that both were valued only as they were directly in the teeth of the order of nature, and of what are now known to be VOL. CXXXVII.-NO. 321.

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