REFLECTIONS ON PRAYER AND NATURAL LA W 



97 



REFLECTIONS ON PRAYER AND NATURAL LAW 



1861 



AMID the apparent confusion and caprice 

 of natural phenomena, which roused 

 emotions hostile to calm investigation, it 

 must for ages have seemed hopeless to 

 seek for law or orderly relation ; and 

 before the thought of law dawned upon 

 the unfolding human mind these other- 

 wise inexplicable effects were referred to 

 personal agency. In the fall of a cataract 

 the savage saw the leap of a spirit, and 

 the echoed thunder-peal was to him the 

 hammer-clang of an exasperated god. 

 Propitiation of these terrible powers was 

 the consequence, and sacrifice was offered 

 to the demons of earth and air. 



But observation tends to chasten the 

 emotions and to check those structural 

 efforts of the intellect which have emotion 

 for their base. One by one natural 

 phenomena came to be associated with 

 their proximate causes; the idea of direct 

 personal volition mixing itself with the 

 economy of nature retreating more and 

 more. Many of us fear this change. Our 

 religious feelings are dear to us, and we 

 look with suspicion and dislike on any 

 philosophy the apparent tendency of 

 which is to dry them up. Probably every 

 change from ancient savagery to our 

 present enlightenment has excited, in a 

 greater or less degree, fears of this 

 kind. But the fact is, that we have not 

 yet determined whether its present form 

 is necessary to the life and warmth of 

 religious feeling. We may err in linking 

 the imperishable with the transitory, and 

 confound the living plant with the decay- 

 ing pole to which it clings. My object, 

 however, at present is not to argue, but 

 to mark a tendency. We have ceased 

 to propitiate the powers of nature 

 ceased even to pray for things in manifest 

 contradiction to' natural laws. In Pro- 

 testant countries, at least, I think it is 



conceded that the age of miracles is 

 past. 



At an auberge near the foot of the 

 Rhone glacier I met, in the summer of 

 1858, an athletic young priest, who, after 

 a solid breakfast, including a bottle of 

 wine, informed me that he had come up 

 to " bless the mountains." This was the 

 annual custom of the place. Year by 

 year the Highest was entreated, by official 

 intercessors, to make such meteorological 

 arrangements as should ensure food and 

 shelter for the flocks and herds of the 

 Valaisians. A diversion of the Rhone, 

 or a deepening of the river's bed, would, 

 at the time I now mention, have been of 

 incalculable benefit to the inhabitants of 

 the valley. But the priest would have 

 shrunk from the idea of asking the 

 Omnipotent to open a new channel for 

 the river, or to cause a portion of it to 

 flow over the Grimsel pass, and down the 

 valley of Oberhasli to Brientz. This he 

 would have deemed a miracle, and he 

 did not come to ask the Creator to per- 

 form miracles, but to do something which 

 he manifestly thought lay quite within 

 the bounds of the natural and non- 

 miraculous. A Protestant gentleman 

 who was present at the time smiled at 

 this recital. He had no faith in the 

 priest's blessing ; still, he deemed his 

 prayer different in kind from a request 

 to open a new river-cut, or to cause the 

 water to flow up-hill. 



In a similar manner the same Pro- 

 testant gentleman would doubtless smile 

 at the honest Tyrolese priest who, when 

 he feared the bursting of a glacier dam, 

 offered the sacrifice of the Mass upon 

 the ice as a means of averting the 

 calamity. That poor man did not expect 

 to convert the ice into adamant, or to 

 strengthen its texture, so as to enable it 



H 



