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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 Religion has been 
challenged on the field of Prayer ; because the issue must be both clear and 
comprehensive. 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 ”). We 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 well 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 moral 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 unlocked 
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 uncontrolled by either 
friend or stranger, and perhaps it had come as inevitably, in fact, as the 
calamity itself had 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 wroDg ; 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 and unequivocal. 
