Ill 



individual or national, could call one shower from heaven, or 

 deflect towards us a single beam of the sun (p. 33). 



11. It is true that these particular examples of misplaced 

 prayer are mentioned to caution us, lest in our prayers we 

 ^' ask amiss," and not definitely to prohibit all prayer. 



But this is a condescension, only for a time, to our tion^to p^yer 

 infirmities ; for a principle is asserted which Dr. cannot be par- 

 Tyndall certainly refuses to limit, though, in these 

 instances, it has only a particular application to one class of 

 prayers. He mentions in a note, that in so applying it (p. 38), 

 he had in view certain prayers for good harvest and fair weather, 

 then recently ordered in our churches, and he praises the dis- 

 cernment of a few advanced clergymen who declined to adopt 

 these prayers. If the uniformity of natural law is a bar to prayer 

 in some cases, it is difficult for us to see how to refuse the 

 principle in others. Some kind of prayer, indeed, as a sort of 

 " emotional " outlet, to which we will again allude, seems 

 allowed at times by Dr. Tyndall, as if an indulgence to almost 

 pardonable weakness, but by no means as relaxing his assertion 

 of a real physical necessity pervading all nature, inconsistent 

 with all prayer, as commonly understood or used, in any of the 

 conditions of human life. 



12. Let us now diverge for a moment from the atoms and 

 molecules, the attractions and repulsions and motions of the 

 universe broadly considered, to those which are to g^^. 



be found in the human organization, which Dr. ^^^^'Jtlou®^®^^ 

 Tyndall fully recognizes, of course, a little further our life as 

 on, but which he does not much dwell on till he has 

 rejected certain kinds of prayer. He says (p. 120) that ''for every 

 fact of consciousness" (he having examined, of course, a very few), 

 " whether in the domain of sense, of thought, or of emotion, a 

 definite molecular condition of motion or structure is set up in 

 the brain."" The relation '' of physics to consciousness being 

 invariable" (he continues), "it follows that, given the state of 

 the brain, the corresponding thought or feeling might be in- 

 ferred ; or, given the thought or feeling, the corresponding 

 state of the brain might be inferred." At the same time he 

 almost contradicts himself by saying that his " molecular 

 groupings, and his molecular motions, do not explain every- 

 thing. In reality (he adds) they eocplain nothing J' 



13. It passes our power to imagine how Dr. Tyndall, with 

 this admission that his science has no final explanation to oflPer 

 as to the primary action or motion of either atoms ungcientific 

 or molecules, and saying that " attraction " and character c 

 "repulsion" can only be described as "a pull" or ^^^^^ -bjeetior 

 " a push," a " pull " of which he knows not what pulls it^ 



