SCIENCE AND THE BISHOPS. 355 



as he evidently has been, by the objections which have often been 

 raised to prayer, on the ground that a belief in the efficacy of prayer 

 is inconsistent with a belief in the constancy of the order of Nature. 



The bishop appears to admit that there is an antagonism be- 

 tween the " regular economy of Nature " and the " regular economy of 

 prayer " (p. 39), and that "prayers for the interruption of God's natu- 

 ral order " are of " doubtful validity " (p. 42). It appears to me that 

 the bishop's difficulty simply adds another example to those which I 

 have several times insisted upon in the pages of this Review and 

 elsewhere, of the mischief which has been done, and is being done, 

 by a mistaken apprehension of the real meaning of " natural order " 

 and " law of Nature." 



May I, therefore, be permitted to repeat, once more, that the state- 

 ments denoted by these terms have no greater value or cogency than 

 such as may attach to generalizations from experience of the past, and 

 to expectations for the future based upon that experience ? Nobody 

 can presume to say what the order of Nature must be ; all that the 

 widest experience (even if it extended over all past time and through all 

 space), that events had happened in a certain way could justify, would 

 be a proportionally strong expectation that events will go on so hap- 

 pening, and the demand for a proportional strength of evidence in 

 favor of any assertion that they had happened otherwise. 



It is this weighty consideration, the truth of which every one who 

 is capable of logical thought must surely admit, which knocks the 

 bottom out of all a j^i'iori objections either to ordinary " miracles " 

 or to the efficacy of prayer, in so far as the latter implies the miracu- 

 lous intervention of a higher power. No one is entitled to say a priori 

 that any given so-called miraculous event is impossible ; and no one is 

 entitled to say a priori that prayer for some change in the ordinary 

 course of Nature can not possibly avail. 



The supposition that there is any inconsistency between the accept- 

 ance of the constancy of natural order and a belief in the efficacy of 

 prayer, is the more unaccountable as it is obviously contradicted by 

 analogies furnished by everyday experience. The belief in the effi- 

 cacy of prayer depends upon the assumption that there is somebody, 

 somewhere, who is strong enough to deal with the earth and its con- 

 tents as men deal with the things and events which they are strong 

 enough to modify or control ; and who is capable of being moved 

 by appeals such as men make to one another. This belief does not 

 even involve theism ; for our earth is an insignificant particle of the 

 solar system, while the solar system is hardly worth speaking of in re- 

 lation to the All ; and, for anything that can be proved to the con- 

 trary, there may be beings endowed with full powers over our system, 

 yet, practically, as insignificant as ourselves in relation to the universe. 

 If any one pleases, therefore, to give unrestrained liberty to his fancy, 

 he may plead analogy in favor cf the dream that there may be, some- 



