Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 66:263 (Jul 1909)
Article: Is It Reasonable For The Modern Man To Pray?
Author: James Elmer Russell

BSac 66:260 (July 1909) p. 531

Is It Reasonable For The Modern Man To Pray?

James Elmer Russell

Chittenango, New York

By prayer I do not mean expressions of reverence, adoration, and thanksgiving addressed to God. The worth of prayers of this kind as voicing man’s deepest feelings is never called in question. What I mean by prayer in this note is

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petition, the making of definite requests to God; and I ask, Is it reasonable for a modern man to expect answers to prayers of petition?

The modern man is modern, and not a man of antiquity or a medieval man, because of his belief in the universality of law; because of his belief that the world is not capricious, but understandable. The modern man is thoroughly convinced that for every event there is a cause, and that under like conditions like results will follow. A statement of how things work,— that unlike poles of a magnet attract, or that the earth rotates once in twenty-four hours — is what the modern man calls a law; and while science has only begun its conquests, the modern man by faith claims the universe as the promised land of law. The question Is it reasonable for the modern man to pray? becomes, therefore, Is it reasonable for a man who believes in the universality of law to offer petitions to God?

A suggestive answer of a negative tendency appears in a volume of sermons by Rev. Hastings Rashdall, an English clergyman. He says: “We know that it is God’s will to govern the physical universe by general laws, … and if that is God’s will, … we have no right to pray for exemptions to the general course of nature… . No modern Christian thinks it right to pray that the sun should stand still, or that it should rise earlier in the winter months to save the poor the expense of candle light… . And we now know what the wisest men did not always know, that the apparent irregularities of the weather are just as much due to fixed and ascertainable general laws as the rising of the sun, or the course of the tides.”1

The polemic of Mr. Rashdall is here directed only against prayers concerning the external world; but if he were more thoroughgoing in his application of the idea of law, his argument would put a taboo on all forms of petitional prayer. For law is not found alone in the out-of-doors. Moderns find law everywhere. They believe that law is as absolute in the mental

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world and in the world where mental and physical meet, as it is in the realm of the purely physical.

If, therefore, a man may not pray for the weather because the weather is...