Section LXXVIII. The Inner Revelation and the Conscience. (Concl'd) · SECTION CXV.

1. Prayer, as resting on faith in the personal God, is the free moral uniting of the believing heart with God, in such a manner that the moral personality is in fact not lost, but, on the contrary, exalted in and by God; it is the free and conscious recognizing that God knows all our thoughts, and the joyful wish that such be the case; it exalts our natural communion with God into a spiritual and moral one, the being of God in man into a being of man in God. As it is alone in this being at one with God that the true life of the rational spirit consists, hence in the moral man, at least a prayerful disposition, if not express praying in words, must be strictly unceasing. Prayer has only then moral worth when it really springs of a praying heart, and hence, when it is offered with devotion; and as it unites the person with the Father of all men, hence it leads to a communion of prayer, and the higher form of prayer is therefore social prayer.

In prayer man enters into personal communion with God, and in loving confidence expressly communicates to him as the All-knowing One, his pious thinking, feeling, and willing; only that which is pious can be communicated to God; a consciously unpious prayer is blasphemy. Prayer is absolutely conditioned on a believing recognition of the divine omniscience; it is not, therefore, so much a means of making our thoughts known to God,—for God knows our thoughts from afar, and of what we have need before we ask therefor,—as rather an expression of our belief that God knows, and our joyful willingness that he should know thereof. A prayer that should spring from the thought that God himself needed it in order to know our inward state, would be per se impious and in self-contradiction; but every thought and every act that we are not willing that God should know, and that we would hide from him, is impious, and the degree of our piety is measured by the degree in which we have the desire that all our acts and thoughts should be known of God. The intermission of prayer does not shut out our inner life from the divine knowledge, it simply shuts out the divine blessing from us. Prayer reveals not our being to the divine knowledge, but it reveals the divine all-knowing presence to us,—brings not God down to us, but elevates us to God; it is for us the means of uniting ourselves truly with God, inasmuch as thereby not only is God, as the Omnipresent One, with us, but also we, by a religiously-moral act of will, are with God; and only when God is himself with us, not merely naturally and without our desire, but upon our express prayer and seeking therefor, are we in real saving life-communion with him. Without prayer there can be only a natural, but not a moral and spiritual communion with God; and this merely natural communion is, on the supposition that it rises no higher, in antagonism to the essence of a moral creature, and hence leads to the casting off of man by God. For him who cannot pray, God’s presence is judicial and condemnatory. As in prayer man exalts himself to the highest object of the moral activity, so is prayer also the highest moral act; and all other moral action receives its moral worth solely from its relation to this,—solely as morally by prayer.

In prayer, man gives utterance to his highest moral privileges and to his free personality, inasmuch as thereby, with full and joyful freedom, he wills, recognizes and heightens that which already existed without prayer, though indeed only in an immediate, natural ante-moral manner, but which could not so remain without turning into antagonism and unblessedness, namely, the divine omnipresent domination. Only to those who desire it is God’s presence a blessing, and only by those who love is the loving communion of God experienced; “draw to God, and he will draw to you” [James iv, 8; comp. Psa. cxlv, 18, 19]. It is the sublime significancy of prayer that it brings into prominence man’s great and high destination, that it brings to expression his free personal relation to God, that it heightens man’s consciousness of his true moral nature in relation to God; and as all morality depends on our relation to God, prayer is, in fact, the very life-blood of morality. The true freedom, and hence also the true morality of man, manifests itself not in his arbitrarily choosing that which is fleeting or baseless, but in the fact that with conscious free-will and glad assent he recognizes and confirms that which lies in the holy constitution of the world itself. To the limited natural understanding, prayer seems useless and therefore irrational; for this understanding is not capable of comprehending the spiritual. It is true, God causes his sun to rise upon the good and the evil, gives rain to the just and the unjust, furnishes food to man and beast,—in a word, He “gives to all men their daily bread” even without prayer; but the significancy of such prayer is the fact of our recognizing Him as the Giver of all, of our receiving his gifts with thankfulness. That God’s presence and gifts be not only about us but also for us, that they become a blessing to us, a bond of love between God and us, a living fountain of godly-mindedness,—that they be not foreign to us, not in antagonism to us, but in fact our own and in harmony with us,—that God’s being in us be also our being in God,—all this is the fruit of prayer.

Prayer is so intimately connected with the morally-religious life that it appears, under some form, even among those nations where, because of the relative ignoring of the personality of God, it has almost lost all shadow of meaning, as, for example, in India. Greek and Roman philosophers often introduce their disquisitions with prayers (Socrates, Plato); the Romans prayed on occasion of all important state-events, on the of magistrates, the enactment of laws, etc. Of course in prayer there could never exist the proper earnestness, inasmuch as the idea of God was always imperfect; no could ever pray as could a pious Israelite. The first real opposing of prayer, if we except the frivolous Epicureans, was on the part of Maximus of Tyre, a Platonist of the second century after Christ; it was also opposed by Rousseau, though for very superficial reasons (because the order of the universe could not be changed by individual wishes), and, with astonishing lack of insight by Kant, who even finds in the Lord’s Prayer, as given by Christ, a very clear suggestion to substitute in the place of all prayer simply a determination to lead a good life (Relig. innerh., etc., 1794, p. 302). In Pantheism the rejection of prayer as absurd, is a matter of course.—The Scriptures present prayer as one of the most essential moral requirements [Psa. cxlv, 18, 19; Matt. vii, 7; Mark xi, 24; James i, 5 sqq.; 1 Tim. ii, 1-3; Eph vi, 18]. The injunction to pray without ceasing [Luke xviii, 1-7; 1 Thess. v, 17; Rom. xii, 12; Col. iv, 2; 1 Tim. ii, 8; comp. Psa. lxiii, 7] implies the constant aspiring of our heart to God as to Him whose will alone is our law, and who gives his blessing to whatever is done in his name.—Where sin is not yet dominant, any other than a devotional prayer is inconceivable. Devotion in prayer is not merely the absence of distraction, but it is the praying out of a true, earnest and upright heart-disposition. Devotion cannot be required as a special duty, for it is necessarily included in the very idea of prayer; the Scriptures simply allude to the earnestness of prayer, and to the liability of self-deception in well-meant prayer [Isa. xxix, 13; Psa. cxlv, 18; Matt. xv, 8; vi, 5-7; James v, 16].

It is not as a merely moral, but as a religious, activity that prayer leads to communion, for religion is essentially socializing, not directly, however, but in virtue of the communion which it establishes with God. Mere individual prayer has its proper as bearing on the personal relation to God; it is in fact the primary and most obvious form [Matt. vi, 6]; but prayer attains to its highest, though never exclusive, character as the single-hearted prayer of the believing communion or church-society. And this not simply because such prayer hightens the feeling of the unitedness of the faithful, but because, in virtue of the throwing off of personal isolation and of its flowing out of the holy spirit which pervades the society, it has a guarantee of greater purity, and consequently the promise of special blessing [Matt. xviii, 20; Acts ii, 42; Eph. v, 19; Col. iii, 16].—Christ himself gives the moral pattern of prayer; he prayed out of the full consciousness of life-communion with God, and consequently with full confidence of being answered [Heb. v, 7]; he prayed often in solitude [Matt. xiv, 23; xxvi, 36, 42; Mark vi, 32; Luke vi, 12; ix, 28], and often in the presence of others [Matt. xxvi, 39; John xi, 41 sqq.], and in communion with his disciples [John xvii, 1 sqq.].