682 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ers that the violated law can not be bribed to stay its arm by burnt- 

 offerings nor placated by prayers it is a harmful doctrine, as tending 

 directly to undermine understanding and to weaken will, to teach that 

 either prayer or sacrifice will obviate the consequences of want of fore- 

 sight or want of self-discipline, or that reliance on supernatural aid 

 will make amends for lack of intelligent will. We still pray half- 

 heartedly in our churches, as our forefathers prayed with their whole 

 hearts, when we are afflicted with a plague or pestilence, that God will 

 " accept of an atonement and command the destroying angel to cease 

 from punishing " ; and when we are suffering from too much rain we 

 ask him to send fine weather, " although we for our iniquities have 

 worthily deserved a plague of rain and waters." Is there a person of 

 sincere understanding who, uttering that prayer, now believes it in his 

 heart to be the successful way to stay a fever, plague, or pestilence ? 

 He knows well that, if it is to be answered, he must clean away dirt, 

 purify drains, disinfect houses, and put in force those other sanitary 

 measures which experience has proved to be efficacious, and that the 

 aid vouchsafed to the prayer will only be given when these are by 

 themselves successful. Had men gone on believing, as they once be- 

 lieved, that prayer would stay disease, they would never have learned 

 and adopted sanitary measures, any more than the savage of Africa 

 who prays to his fetich to cure disease does now. To get rid of the 

 notion of supernatural interposition was the essential condition of true 

 knowledge and self-help in that matter. 



Many persons who could not confidently express their belief in the 

 power of prayer to stop a plague or a deluge of rain, or who actually 

 disbelieve it, still have a sincere hold of the belief of its miraculous 

 power in the moral or spiritual world. Nevertheless, if the matter be 

 made one simply of scientific observation, it must be confessed that 

 all the evidence goes to prove that the events of the moral world are 

 matters of law and order equally with those of the physical world, 

 and that supernatural interpositions have no more place in the one 

 than in the other ; that he who prays for the creation of a clean heart 

 and the renewal of a right spirit within him, if he gets at last what 

 he prays for, gets it by the operation of the ordinary laws of moral 

 growth and development, in consequence of painstaking watchfulness 

 over himself and the continual exercise of good resolves. Only when 

 he gets it in that way will he get the benefit of supernatural aid ; and, 

 if he rests in the belief of supernatural aid, without taking pains to 

 get it entirely in that way, he will do himself moral harm ; for if he 

 can not rely upon special interpositions in the moral any more than in 

 the physical world, if he has to do entirely with those secondary laws 

 of nature through which alone the supernatural is made natural, the 

 invisible visible, it needs no demonstration that the opposite belief can 

 not strengthen, but must weaken, the understanding and will. It is 

 plain that true moral hygiene is as impossible to the savage who relies 



