Futility of Prayer
The great basic issue in all this must be faced and
it will not be squarely met until we throw off the false persuasions
of the religionist and bluntly put the hard question: what right
does the human violator of life's good laws have to expect healing
from sources outside himself? Life has remarkably equipped its
creatures with self-healing powers. The exigencies of existence
are designed to develop the creature's power to use those resources.
If religion persists in its protestations of the right to be healed
extraneously, then we must sadly bewail the wreckage of the moral
balance in the life of the world. We have eventually to make our
choice between these two positions. Are we going to learn to love
the law and seek happiness in obedience to it; or insist on our
right to violate the law and then run to the miracle-man to evade
its consequences? If by miracle we can dodge the consequences,
the moral order of life is shot to bits. Happily for man it must
be true that no law of life can be violated with impunity.
if mortals can commit crime against nature and then
run to deity or his self-constituted trustees and beg off, or
pay off, the just consequences, where would be the equity of the
universe?
That was the issue that was genuine and robust enough
to inspire and embolden the Protestant Reformation. Is it not
time that Protestants themselves--and all others--rise to protest
the sly, subtle, insidious continuance of the same treacherous
influence masked behind the disguise of prayer and healing? The
great physician sent to heal the ills of mortal man is the God-power
in man himself. Man must heal himself, through the Godhood that
is in him.
The next count in the case against the overweening
assumptions of the healing cult is the fact that, if such healing
were possible, life under law would be deprived of its
educative power and function. This would spell infinite tragedy,
again upsetting the moral stability of the world. Life can not
take us ahead unless it can teach and enlighten us. Only by burning
it upon our consciousness the consequences of our thinking and
our action can life instruct us in finality. If any influence
interposes to cut the link between action and consequence, nature
can not educate us. Her pedagogical power is snatched away from
her hands, her rod of discipline is stolen. She can not make her
demonstrations to us. She loses control of her school and her
pupils riot in disorder. They find they do not have to obey her.
Again chaos supervenes.
But nature can not resign her teaching prerogative
and stay in command. Is life to surrender to the caprice of human
nature and a fictitious religious magic? It is unthinkable; yet
the temple of all religious faith, prayer and healing rests on
this impossible foundation. Never has there been enough competent
mental power exercised in the counsels of cult religion to discern
the logical anomaly of holding up the claims made for prayer and
healing beside the doctrine of strict justice in the cosmic realm.
Justice and true healing can not be thought incompatible; yet
they have been set almost in opposition to each other. What must
be seen is that healing, if it comes truly and is not sheer mesmerism,
must come in ways that are wholly in accord with natural law.
Nature must be made healing's ally, and not be put in the position
of an enemy to be overcome.
It can be counted on as next to certain that a cure
which is superinduced from without registers no victory, spells
no gain, records no progress for the individual concerned. There
can be no real vicariousness in the world of life. (The popular
idea of vicarious atonement is only an exotericized distortion
of the true esoteric sense involved.)
No unit of life can perform the work of evolution for another, for only the one undergoing the strains and stresses can reap the instruction. If an individualized center of life's energy does not register its own gains, they simply are not made. Partiality and injustice would ride in on the life economy if it were otherwise. If one be healed by the offices of another, it will fade out and a true healing will still have to be made by the entity itself. It is admissible to think that others may help us to learn how to make our
own gains. But only the unit itself can do the work.
Modern psychoanalytic understanding and technique
have now gone far to introduce into this vast field the principles
of a definite psychological science. The good effect already has
been to bring the whole range of what were heretofore considered
special religious phenomena out into the open world of purely
secular character. There is nothing distinctly religious about
them. They can be subsumed under the laws governing the operation
of consciousness. It is to be hoped that the further perfecting
of knowledge and technique in psychology will diminish the area
still persistently allotted to religious magic and increase the
area of known secular science. The gains registered in the decrease
of hysteria and belief in angelic or demoniac supernaturalism
and in the increase of sanity and balance in religion will be
incalculable.
There is, of course, a spiritual healing that is
the thing religion should have inculcated instead of the hybrid
and spurious cult persuasions that have hallucinated the masses.
But this genuine cult achievement demands the knowledge and technical
skill of a stout-hearted and confident humanism, a sound faith
in man himself as the agent plenipotentiary of all the divine
power needed for his salvation. From the human standpoint the
procedure is elementary enough; it involves simply the development
of sufficient intelligence to cease violating beneficent law and
disciplining oneself to obey it. It means learning how to live
properly. The tacit implication in religion that any other shorter
or easier way than this is available is an empty delusion and
must give way to growing knowledge. A religious science that is
built on knowledge of the forces operative within the human psyche,
without the injection of magic from some extraneous source, is
indicated as the true spiritual science of an enlightened humanity.
For this science envisages the presence within man's
own constitution of a seminal power of divinity. It was sown as
seed of God's own essence in the garden bed of man's nature.
It must be reared from seed stage to maturity under the tutelary
influences of earth experience, which bring its mighty faculties
to function. As this principle is gradually unfolded in the individual
life, it begins its ministry of healing. Magical enough
is its potency to cure our ills and make us whole. All the "miracles"
of the Gospels and other ancient Bibles of revered authority are
allegories dramatizing the potency of the indwelling Christ power
to heal all man's ills. Sensational discoveries in scholarship
now authenticate this statement. When man ceases his childish
praying to God to perform miracles for him and turns to cultivate
the divine powers slumbering within his own temple of consciousness,
he will find at last the help, the comfort and the victory he
is intended to have. If prayers were answered as believed and healings
performed as claimed, there would be perpetual chaos in the life
of the world. Happily life's beneficent laws prevail. |
