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judging a great moral action, such as true prayer is, from the religious and 

 moral point of view ; and their criticisms are only excused from profanity by 

 being convicted of blindness. 



On many grounds it may be -well that the battle for Eeligion has been 

 challenged on the field of Prayer ; because the issue mast be both clear and 

 comprehensiye. Let no one imagine (as in a late university sermon) that 

 there is any wisdom here in meeting the enemy half-way. On the side of the 

 materialists there is no concession, no modification of the chain of universal 

 necessity, no admission that a volition is conceivable in the '* economy of 

 nature." If they speak of prayer as the outlet of human emotions, they also 

 make these emotions to be as truly subject to necessary and invariable law, as 

 are the stars of heaven, or the winds and waters of earth. They know that to 

 admit prayer at all, in the Christian sense, is to admit the Object of prayer, 

 even God, as the moral Governor ; and the idea of God they pronounce 



unthinkable, (which may be said of all the precedentia of thought , as well as 

 of being Vfe can, on our side, admit no less than that to negative prayer, 

 on their ground, is to negative all religion. 



To show the denier of prayer that he is shut up to Atheism is to oblige both 

 sides in this controversy to understand their ground ; no slight gain for those 

 who would avoid meaningless wrangling ; such atheism, too, it will inevitably 

 appear, as must deny all morality, as weU as religion, — so far as morality 

 depends on volition, or the individual origination of action. We may press 

 this fearlessly home, because the facts of human life and action will eventually 

 always assert themselves and bear down the theorist. Our ethical philosophy 

 must stand on the facts of human nature ; fact alone can determine whether 

 there be a " moral world,'' in the Christian sense of the words. (See The 

 Whole Doctrine of Final Causes.") 



One illustration shall briefly express what we all mean by a mond world, 

 so that we may confidently leave any one to consider it and compare it with 

 all his experience. Every one may determine for himself whether there is a 

 class of facts not mechanical, or not distinctively or principally mechanical ; 

 a class which we usually express by the term moral Let the case be this : 



A man overtaken by some heavy and crushing calamity, overwhelming him- 

 self and all who were most dear to him, obtains a sudden and wholly xmlooked 

 for alleviation. He may have obtained it in a variety of ways. First, we will 

 suppose it may have come to him in a course of events imcontrolled by either 

 friend or stranger, and perhaps it had come as inevitably, in fact, as the 

 calituiity itself Lid previously seemed to come. Or next, it may have been 

 that the alleviation came through the intervention of the love of some one 

 who deeply cared for him. Or thirdly, the same alleviation may have reached 

 him through the gratitude of a dependent, or of one to whom he had formerly 

 been good ; or fourthly, through the stirring, in many ways, of a " sense of 

 duty," or supposed duty, in others ; or again, through a desire of some one to 

 repair a previous wrong ; or again, in recoil from some plotted malignity ; and 

 so on. There is no need to multiply hypotheses. The alleviation is a fact in 

 each case, we will suppose, quite complete ^d unequivocal. 



