Prayer
and
Healing
__________________________________
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
__________________________________
1
Electronically
typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. I can be
contacted at pc93@bellsouth.net. I will be greatly indebted to the individual
who can put me in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of
the following works:
The
Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Tree of Knowledge, The
Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis,
The Law of the Two Truths, At Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and
the Actual, Immortality: Yes - But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of
the Four Elements, Through Science to Religion, Creation in Six Days?, Rudolph
Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti
and Theosophy, A. B. Kuhn's graduation address at Chambersburg Academy
"The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished autobiography, Great
Pan Returns.
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FOREWORD
"The more I think of it",
said Ruskin, "I find this conclusion more impressed upon me--that the
greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something,
and tell what it saw in a plain way." In the pages which follow,
the scholarly mind of Dr. Kuhn tells us a few of the things which it has seen;
things which every thinking mind should look at
and consider.
Every adult might well distinguish
between "religion" and "theology"; we need to separate the
two in our minds and realize that many of the doctrines and beliefs we have
inherited were formed centuries ago for the purpose of strengthening and
perpetuating the powers of the priesthood. The real Truth hurts, but it
is time we seek it, for, as has been wisely said, "there
is no religion higher than Truth."
* * * * * *
Behind the universe with its
multitude of suns and worlds and underlying all the cosmic activities, guiding
the evolution of life itself, is a Power, Force or Mind which is recognized as
First Cause. This "Supreme Being" is spoken of as "God".
Philosophers in all ages have pondered the problem and have come up with the
conclusion that "God" is "unknowable".
Yet theology teaches that if one
will pray, entreat, solicit or beg to this "God" vigorously enough
and with sufficient "faith", "He" may be persuaded to grant
one's requests, irrespective of their merits. But this "God" whom the
priesthood claims to represent is not a God within human reach. That Infinite
Power and Mind must reside in the center of creation, no one will doubt. It
touches all forces and all life flows from It. But man
has no communication with it, i.e., none that can be initiated from this end.
Dr. Kuhn makes it clear that the assumption that prayers are heard and answered
by a Cosmic Divine Power is entirely groundless and should be abandoned for a
saner hypothesis. He provides us a clue to such hypothesis.
Within each individual is a
"spark" or unit-share of "God's" own life. This inner
spirit is "nearer than breathing, closer than
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hands and feet". That is the
"God" with whom man can communicate. Both the human and divine
elements are within each person's range of cultivation. This inner spirit
resides within each individual person giving it life and consciousness. Call it
"soul", "subconscious mind", "superconscious
mind", "ego" or by any term you wish. When we address "Our
Father in Heaven" we address this inner spirit-life of ours, which is the
only Divine Spirit with which we have any communion, and as Dr. Kuhn
illustrates, may be said to be "talking to ourselves". To the extent
that the prayer is wholesome and serves to "suggest" to our
inner-self certain desirable conditions which our own conscious efforts might
aid in bringing to fruition, it is harmless and may even be
"answered"--if we do our individual part and duty.
A prime point in this recent work by
Dr. Kuhn emphasizes the value of righteous action and self-reliance. As
Arnold Bennett once wrote (in effect)--what the human individual needs most is
to take himself aside and give himself "a few
swift kicks in the seat of the pants" and make something of himself; we
would also add--"instead of begging to God to do his work for him and save
him from his own ignorance and errors".
Dr. Kuhn's remarks concerning
religious beliefs will no doubt displease many pious readers. Yet any thinking
person must conclude that there is much truth in what is said. It is not the
purpose of this work to undermine any form of religion but rather to point out
that the only true form of religious-living is the individual development and
perfection of one's own life. A major error of theology has been the teaching
that one may obtain blessings for the asking (in prayer), with insufficient
emphasis upon the obvious fact that no other person can do the work of
life-development for you; each person must do his or her own soul culture.
"BE YE
NOT DECEIVED", said Paul, "GOD IS NOT MOCKED: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." (Gal. 6:7). In his
attempt to avoid the troubles which his own mode of living has brought upon
him, man has fondly held the belief that an appeal to Divine Power will result
in a better and happier state. But whether such state arrives depends, in the
last analysis, upon what the man himself does to improve his mode of
life.
That this is a universe of
precision, of "cause and effect" cannot be denied. In its physical
operations, Nature responds with
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exactitude. In its spiritual operations it likewise has
no clumsy habits. No act nor deed, be it good or evil,
but receives its just reward or punishment in due season! If we want the
blessings and "rewards", the guide books of all major faiths say we
must earn them by the kind of a life we lead. It's as simple as that!
They do not come to us by any other method--not by prayers for forgiveness, not
by any request of ours asking that universal laws be suspended or set aside for
us, nor by any later gracious act of a "saviour",
for even He taught--"then shall he reward every man according to his
works."
The Law plays no favorites; the only
"fate" one ever encounters is the one he has made for himself. It's
time we snap out of our hypnotic-trance-state and do some straight thinking;
but don't take my word for it--continue reading the following pages.
LAURENCE P. FOLSOM, D.D., PH.D.
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PRAYER AND HEALING
A RATIONAL EXEGESIS
In his fine History of
Christianity Dean Milman speaks of "the
tyranny exercised over the human mind in the name of religion." This
tyranny has taken a wide variety of forms, imposing upon the collective mind of
the race a vast agglomeration of conceptions, beliefs and persuasions as to the
relation between man and deity which have proved to be psychologically
disastrous. Outstanding among these tyrannous impositions have been such ideas
as the existence of a personal devil forever working to defeat a divine plan
for mankind; an anthropomorphic creator and deity; the doctrine of the fall of
man and the consequent innate sinfulness of his nature; the total helplessness
of man to effectuate his own "salvation," and the necessity therefore
of his attaining that end by throwing himself on the tender mercies of his
creator, and accepting the provision by the latter of a way of escape through
the sacrificial blood of his own son, who volunteered to be the scapegoat for
man's sin; the belief in the soul's eternal future existence in a heaven or
hell, following a post-mortem judgment, with its enjoyment of everlasting bliss
in the one region or agonizing torment in the other; and a thousand major and
minor idiosyncrasies of tortured theology which wrought on the Occidental
consciousness for two thousand years an unconscionable stultification of the reason
that must in the total of its consequences, if ever its colossal ineptitude be
recognized, be rated as the most devastating psychological plague and scourge
of human sanity to sweep the race in all its history. Since at least the third
Christian century this besom of theological dementia has swept on through age
after age, blinding the eyes of the childhood of every generation with its
fatal dust and gripping the old age of every period with a mental palsy that
was thus made the unbroken heritage of every people. Its morbid obsession of
demoniac influence and sin consciousness settled like a pall of evil portent
over the souls of millions, driving them out of the very sunshine of life into
the darksome cubicles of convent and monastery. Not even the body of man
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escaped the impact of gruesome conviction, for it
was proclaimed the very instigator of evil impulse, the arch-enemy of the
spirit, the vile tempter, the foul denier of God, full of a lecherous
concupiscence that would seduce the very soul. So deadly was its subtle
enticement to sin that no color of a garment sufficed to cover its raw
indecency but the somberest black.
From the list of fateful
hallucinations enumerated above one has been withheld momentarily, to be
adduced now as the theme of the brochure,--the cult of prayer. There is
reason to speculate whether, in the full range and force of its universal
vogue, it has not proved to deserve rating as the most pernicious of the lot.
Perhaps it has not inflicted greater injury to the valiant natural spirit of
the race than has the spell of sin-consciousness. It stands so close in kinship
of mental affinity with the later that the power of the one is essentially the
power of the other. But it has been and eternally continues to be the most active
and persistent force in daily consciousness of the masses, never permitting the
soul of life to escape from its darksome shadow to bask in the open sun and air
of the world. Where religion has fixed its routine habitudes, with reminders of
a morning, a
A searching probe into the roots of
the human prayer cult would be an investigation of the most revelatory
character. It would take the mind into the profoundest recesses of the human
consciousness far back in its primitive development and would reveal man to
himself in the most intimate and elementary aspects of his being. Such an
investigation, we are prone to believe, would furnish intelligence today with
abundant reason for completely reversing the general view of prayer from its
commonly accepted status of a most exalted religious virtue to something
approaching the most abject and degrading human ignobility.
That such a sweeping revolution in
the estimate of the prayer feature of religion has not been suggested or
undertaken hitherto is due to the fact that it is an element in the general cultus of religion toward which the human mind has forever
oriented itself in a special and extraordinary manner. Religion can be not
inaptly defined as that department of human sensibility in which the mind, to
apprehend the values sought or to gain the experiences believed at-
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tainable, lifts out of its ordinary posture towards
reality and strives to project itself into a quite other world wherein a
completely different order of phenomena will manifest themselves. The faculties
by which the human mind evaluates its normal experiences in the world are set
aside and consciousness is opened to another mode of experience approached
through the media of a special and quite extraordinary set of perceptive modes
and psychological reactions, by which one is believed capable of receiving
intelligence and becoming susceptible to influences emanating from what is
deemed to be a higher world. This is commonly expressed by the statement that
religious experience, to be properly such, must have a transcendental character
and source; that is, it must elevate the sensibilities into a realm of
consciousness of a totally different character from that of our commonplace
daily posture of realism.
Almost universally religion has been
challenged to lift us out of the world of normal things into a domain of
miracle, magic and the supernatural. Therefore neither the ordinary norms of
reality nor the ordinary laws of nature, are held to
be the decisive criteria of experience in this exceptional field. These are
believed to be set aside, abrogated or "transcended" by other modes
and norms consonant with another coefficient of consciousness, another grade of
being. Religious experience has for this reason always been categorized as
"irrational," as transcending the rational. In religion one steps out
of the rational into the mystical, and in that province of experience the
spirit rises free of the conditions that govern conscious recognitions in the
commonplace everyday world and roams in joyous liberty in a world where events
of a supernatural character can supervene at any time. Hence the great field of
religion has in every age sprouted its abundant crop of the phenomena of
miracle, marvel and magic. And the prime key that has been believed and
utilized as the sesame to open the portals of entry into this wonderland of
magic and mystery is the divine efficacy of prayer.
One can suppose that the cult of
prayer arose out of, and therefore simply bespeaks, man's sense of dependence
upon his creator as naturally as a child turns with utter confidence to the
parental power that brought it into being and asks desirable gifts from it. So
man, as the child of his great Father, turns with the same confidence to the
power that gave him life and seeks all good things from that source. But that
pertains, not only by analogy, but by
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strict actuality, to childhood. Is man never to
emerge out of his childhood? "When I became a man," says
But surely man's psychological
motivation in childhood is destined to give place to a different posture and
course of action in his racial adulthood. The child would pray, if at all
formally, out of the simple need of aid and protection in its complete
dependence on creative power, with no rationalization of the relation. On the
other hand, the adult humanity, if it felt that formal expression of its sense
of dependence on cosmic power was necessary, would pray in the frame and aura
of intelligent recognitions, certain of which indeed might even cause it to
question whether any overt and formal petitioning was either necessary or in
any way productive at all. If prayer was ever pertinent to an elementary stage
of racial development, it would be just as natural that the habit should long ago
have given place to the sense of self-reliance and the habit of self-help, this
transition being as natural and necessary for the unit race as for the unit
individual. Obviously the persistent clinging of the religious world to the
cult of prayer bespeaks, therefore, the race's failure as yet to have emerged
from its childhood stage. We still must run to our heavenly Father with all our
little problems and perplexities.
Prayer is not too simply to be
defined. Its meaning is certainly to be allocated to several different levels
of mental understanding. If the ordinary child was asked for a definition he
would quite likely say that prayer is asking God for something. A somewhat
older child might venture: prayer is beseeching God to grant you blessings. The
answer of a still more reflective child might be: prayer is pleading with God
to make you better than you are. These forms of the definition come close to
expressing what the word
10
commonly connotes in the general mind. In this form
it certainly can be correctly stated to be man's petitions to God for
blessings.
But a definition of quite another
sort emanates from the side of mystical religion. Grounded on the subjective
experience of the human consciousness in its loftiest reaches of exaltation in meditation,
this definition makes prayer something far beyond the mere asking God for
benefits. From the heights of mystic rhapsodies and saint's ecstasies, this
view holds that prayer in its purest form is the human soul's rapturous delight
in its experience of a full free communion with the spirit of God himself.
Rather than an asking anything of God, it is in fact the soul's free and joyous
giving of itself wholly and unstintedly to God. It is
the breaking down the last barriers between its separate existence and the allness of God and the finding of its own completeness and
bliss in the recognition of its total unity with the cosmic Soul of all. In
this sense prayer, in what is considered its truest definition, is not a
pleading for favors from deity, but the soul's elevated communion with deity.
It is at this point that an
analytical critique of this subject should present some considerations in the
strongest possible terms. The need of a vigorous critique springs from the
confusion of two things that should be kept separate, or the inclusion of two
separate things under the one and the same term, or the failure to institute a
sharp distinction between the two, giving each of them its proper and
distinctive designation. The two things referred to are prayer and mystical
contemplation. In religious ideology the definition of prayer has been extended
so far afield as to be made to embrace the most
enraptured ecstasies of mystical exaltations. It is contended here that this is
illegitimate, because the two things are so utterly different that there is no
warrant for their identification, or their summation under the same name.
Surely the resources of language are adequate to the task of giving to each its
properly distinctive term. Prayer is an asking for favors from deity. No
denial of this can be successfully maintained. Mystical contemplation does
indeed rise above this level so far that no element of petition taints the
stainless purity of its enchanted spirit. Therefore the two have almost no
elements in common. Hence it is wrong to subsume them under the same one
name,--prayer.
It is necessary that this
distinction be clarified at this point, so that no ground is left on which to
base the charge that our critique constitutes an attack on one of the most
sacred aspects of
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man's religious nature. It is hardly likely that
any soul of deep sincerity, or any mind sensitive to the more exalted mystical
values, will register a protest against the high rating, the genuine evaluation
of the near-divine character of the run of spiritual experiences that have been
enjoyed by saintly souls from Buddhist monks through medieval contemplatives
like Tauler, John of the Cross, Ruysbroeck,
St. Martin, Madame Guyon, Jacob Boehme
down to modern devotees of Yoga, whether Eastern or Western. Such edifying and
sanctifying experiences are phenomena occurring to many individuals in the
higher stages of their ascent toward their divinization. For is it not said
that we are all to become gods? No single word shall find utterance in this
treatise derogatory to whatever mystic capabilities manifest themselves
in man's progressive unfoldment of his divine nature. Those who are susceptible
of such upliftments of consciousness record them as
yielding the most real experience of man's communion with the soul of deity. To
those blessed by their incidence they present their own unmistakable
credentials of authenticity and they therefore carry their own certification of
real value. This essay makes no attack on man's higher intimations of his own
soul's identity with the divine soul of the world.
But what is contended here is that
it is quite wrong to expand or stretch the definition of the word
"prayer" to include these lofty ranges of experience. For this word
has long since lost the right to be considered generically as their proper
designation. It must be insisted that generations of common usage have fastened
irrevocably upon the term "prayer" the connotation of a pleading with
deity for objects of human desire, gifts, favors, salvation, blessings.
Let mystical raptures bear their own appropriate
descriptive nomenclature. By dictionary definition prayer denotes the
suppliant's humble solicitation of benison from deity. Only by an outrageous
and unwarranted stretching of its meaning can it be made to include the
sanctified enchantments of a true communion with inner deity.
So it is to be set forth at the
outset that the dissertation on prayer here presented deals with the word in
complete disseverance from its claimed reference to high mystical communion
with God and strictly in its common definition as an asking of good things from
a cosmic power conceived as the giver of all good things to man. As taken in
this sense and so accepted in the common under-
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standing of the word, the treatise here undertaken
will advance the case against prayer as perhaps the most fatal and crushing thraldom of the human mind by a fatuous hallucination in
all the long cycle of history.
The first and most forthright count
in the accusation against prayer is that it is infinitely degrading to the
human ego. As it springs out of the ego's profound sense of his inferior and
dependent status, out of the recognition of his base and helpless nature in
relation to the power prayed to, these basic assumptions in the case and the
posture and habit of mind bent to conformity with them inevitably tend to
strengthen and more deeply ingrain on the subconscious life of the individual
so conditioned the dominant obsession of one's lowness and unworthiness. The
prayer consciousness thus endlessly renews and sharpens the self-infliction of
a most injurious psychological trauma upon the human psyche. In the simplest
form of statement prayer thus constantly beats down the human spirit. It
throws over it a heavy pall of depression, of negative cast of consciousness,
of self-accusation and self-depreciation. It in effect pleads with God to
accept man's rating of his own abject and wretched nature and condition. In a
mood that it incessantly re-emphasizes it even begs of God to certify to
himself this condign misery of the pleader, as the latter's only justification
for presuming to address the purity and majesty of God at all. Not the least
modicum of worthiness can it urge, but only the complete unworthiness of the
suppliant; and this alone provides the presumptive right of the sinning human
soul to bring its lamentable plight to the notice of deity. In the paroxysms of
this self-condemning mood it is expressly stipulated that the suppliant asks
not for justice. For a sinister theology has beaten the human spirit into the
persuasion that if God were to deal justly with the miserable worm groveling at
his feet, the case of the latter is lost from the start, his best righteousness
being as "filthy rags" in the sight of God. The self-damned soul in
effect expostulates: O Lord, I can not face justice; I am irremediably stained
with sin; my only hope of escape from the deserved fate of sinners is your
boundless mercy. If you insist on strict judgment, I am undone. Unless my
pitiable condition touch your heart with infinite
compassion, I am lost. Have mercy on me, a miserable sinner!
And then follows the droning chant
of the litany: We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord--as if there was not too
much certainty that God was even listening.
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It has been the eternally reiterated
claim of Christianity, advanced at every opportune juncture, that it has
presented a code of principles and a humanizing influence that have operated to
enhance the "dignity of the human individual" beyond any other faith
in the world. It bolsters the claim by the specious logic of intimating that
out of its benign influence in this respect democracy was born, and that in
democracy the individual has come into a position of freedom to express his
personal prerogatives to a fuller degree than was the case under all antecedent
religions. It claims to have liberated the spirit of men from previous bondage
to priestcraft and sacerdotal tyrannies, so that now under its beneficent aegis
the human ego is able to approach God boldly and present its credentials to
full sonship with God, the eternal Father.
No doubt some influence stimulating
a sense of the dignity of the human ego has come from the historical working of
the elements constituting Christianity. In two thousand years it was inevitable
that Western humanity would have made progress toward more liberal mores under
whatever religion might have dominated it. Yet the advance in this regard has
undeniably at the same time been counterbalanced and rendered weak and often
been completely nullified by the endless reiterations of the abject spirit of
the prayer strain. So that as a matter of simple factuality, the Christian
system has done more to beat down that very dignity of the individual which it
claims to have so immeasurably elevated than any other faith on earth. It will
be hard to find in any other religion's literature expressions so unconscionably deprecatory of the status and the cosmic
worth of the human soul as are to be found prolifically advanced in
Christianity. As long as it sends that soul groveling on its knees at the feet
of deity, abjectly pleading to be considered entirely devoid of merit in its
own right, and brow-beaten to the point of making a virtue of its own destitution,
its own poverty, its own forlorn and hopeless condition, so long it is gross
impertinence, an outrageous falsity, for Christianity to go on flaunting its
arrant claim that it above all other religions exalts the dignity of the human
soul. No other faith could possibly trample it down to more supine and
humiliating degradation.
Not even is it content to have
hounded the soul of its people to shameful self-degradation; it will not let it
rest there, but drives it on to the further and deeper humiliation of
proclaiming its own outright and complete depravity. It shouts its own total
sinfulness
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and its inveterate and unmitigated obduracy in
error and evil. "We have continually done evil in thy sight, O Lord, and
our hearts are continually evil. In us there is no soundness
nor health. If thou shouldst deal with us
according to our deserts, O Lord, who should stand? Nay, not
one." So runs the professional testimony of the Christian faith to
the actual depravity of the Christian mind, under the influence of a prayer
habit generated out of the twisted mentality of sixty generations of a
frightfully perverted theology, itself based on a disastrously contorted
literal and historical interpretation of its so-called "sacred
Scriptures."
That this perversion of human sanity
and unsettling of human balance has dismally stultified the human mind that was
subverted under its influence is shockingly attested by over fifteen centuries
of a record of man's grossest inhumanity to man ever chronicled, a record of
idiocy, bigotry, superstition, hatred, war, persecution and red-handed butchery
that stain the pages of Christian history with the black horror of
inhuman savagery let loose from the right hands of warriors whose left hands
carried the cross. With the sweet love of the Christ on its lips, Christianity
carried in its hands the bloody sword, or the consuming firebrand, and sought
fatuously to advance the one by the power of the other. And ever does it bend
the knee to its God in sycophantic pleadings to increase its zeal for conquest,
the gentler restraints of love being lost in the fury of its zest for worldly
wealth and power.
All this gives the world ample
ground to bring against Christianity an authentic indictment of the most
serious character. It can be charged with thus having exalted to the dignity
and nobility of a sacred science two of the meanest and most ignoble traits of
human nature, never in their own character recognized or rated as virtuous.
These two low expressions of base character are begging and wishful thinking.
One must confront Christianity--as well as all religion that exalts the prayer
motif--with the stern challenge: when has begging ever been held to be noble or
sanctified in ordinary human society? Is it not, on the contrary, universally
regarded as base and degrading, beneath the accepted standard of common good
breeding and social ethics? The beggar has always been looked down upon with
pity, as having failed to measure up to the standards of social competence and
self-respect. Beggary is looked upon as the unfortunate necessity of people of
low grade, either the unlucky victims of hard circumstance, or so improvident
that dire
15
destitution has driven them to the sad state of
dependence upon charity. The beggar is the subject of pity and contempt. To the
beggar one tosses a coin in a momentary spirit of bartering for the appeasement
of one's own half-guilty conscience.
One has therefore to ask by what
ruse of insincerity does religious pietism justify the exaltation of the base
motivation of beggary in prayer to the category of the noblest virtue in
religious ethics? By what hypocrisy, by what sophistry
does the unctuous religious spirit transfigure this wretched trait of common
dishonor into the supreme virtue of a supposititious spiritual science?
More flagrant and more calamitous
for the soul of man is the companion transformation of wishful thinking into
the role of a principle of religious science. By what course of development has
come the common belief that the mere inclination to address oneself to
(presumably) listening deity and present a pious wish gives one the presumptive
right to expect assured fulfilment? On what ground of
plausible natural warrant does the praying soul build
its fixed presumption that some Power is either willing or cosmically obligated
to give ear and respond with appropriate action? If there is some degree of
legitimate warrant for it in the analogy of the human child pleading for
benefits from its earthly father, is it by any means certain that the analogy
will hold in its higher application?
To the last question there is to be
found some part of a legitimate answer in the psychology of childhood, already
discussed. Naive religionism will long cling to the
simple feeling that man does stand in the relation of the child to its heavenly
Father. And the instincts arising out of the child's dependence on the creative
Parent will ever tincture the religious mind with the natural fitness of the
begging attitude on the child's part. But, as said before, is man never
religiously, psychologically, to outgrow his infancy? There comes the time when
the human parent grows weary of the child's begging and adjures him to go out
and win the good things he desires--as he himself has had to do--by active
exertion instead of begging. The cycle of begging ends for
the child, the child eventually coming to realize that he must create his own
world, and then the cycle of resolute and prideful self-exertion begins.
It has to be wondered, therefore,
whether man, the child of his cosmic Father, has as yet come of age. Until this
consummation is achieved religion will remain impotently bound in the natural
help-
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lessness of childhood. It can well be imagined that
the heavenly Father impatiently wonders when his earthly children will realize
their divine birthright of creative self-activity and, standing in the might of
their own recognized divinity, relieve him of the burden of hearing and
"answering" their eternal pleadings. "I have given them,"
he might be thought reflecting, "all germinal
powers necessary to their carrying on their whole future evolution to the
highest glory. God they cannot be until they deploy all these mighty potencies
and exercise them in full self-conscious direction. When will they cease
bombarding my ears with their incessant bleatings and
begin to utilize the miracle of power I have placed in their hands?"
It will be perhaps forever
impossible to calculate the full extent of the psychological disaster wrought
upon the mentality of the Occidental world over the centuries by this
stultifying persuasion that begging and wishing are the two highest forms of
the mortal's communion with the cosmic creative Power. The prime and certain
objective of evolution being the self-development of innate divine powers by
the creature himself, anything that delays, diverts or blocks that unfoldment
must be catalogued as detrimental, injurious and calamitous. But as long as the
individual makes no gains by its own effort (the preachment of Christianity),
and that its sole recourse in its helplessness is to run to the predicated
higher Power with pleas for constant help and eventual salvation, so long will
a total paralysis of human effort afflict the entire personal initiative. The
creed of begging and yearning will but prolong the siren chant of the seductive
Circe and keep luring the sailor on life's main ever closer to the reef's of
destruction. The psychological damage inflicted by the prayer illusion arises
not only from its power to bind the devotee to a wholly inane and fruitless
expenditure of vital energy, but it courts disaster also by damming back the
healthful outflow of the positively creative energies. Stagnation and
corruption inevitably are generated whenever life's powers are unused,
unchallenged or impeded by sheer failure to call them forth in response to
outward need.
For centuries the religious mind has
been obtuse to a discernment that should have come to change the spirit and
tone of its entire functioning. This is the recognition that as long as the
human individual, by ingrained habit and want of better incentive
17
and knowledge, calls upon a power outside
himself in all contingencies of pressure or difficulty, so long will his
potential for inner realization of his own strength and resources continue to
lie fallow and produce nothing. To call unceasingly upon God's help is surely
to perpetuate, nay to constantly deepen, one's own helplessness. If help were
truly given in response to inveterate pleading, God would himself be accessory
to the crime of fastening the sense of helplessness ever more indelibly upon
his own children. By precisely as much as he continues to bless them in
response to their pleas, by just so much does he perpetuate their forlorn wretchedness. If they are ever to be torn loose from supine
dependence upon him, he must at some crucial point let them go unaided to fend
for themselves, and thus profit by the first occasion to learn their own
surprising capabilities. Never is his supporting and sustaining power withdrawn
from any of his creatures; but it is a matter of vast psychological consequence
whether the individual man acts consciously on the knowledge that infinite
divine resources have from the start been made available to him within the
deeper recesses of his own nature; or whether, failing such knowledge, the man
can only run in childish affright to cast himself upon a Power believed to lie
outside himself, and to be cajoled to help only by a bleating cry.
The evolutionary necessity of the
individual's soul breaking the bonds of its dependency upon outside help and
staking its further growth stoutly upon its own effort has been amply and
unequivocally stated in the literature of wisdom. Emerson puts it with positive
directness: "Man is weak to the extent that he looks outside himself for
help. It is only as he throws himself unhesitatingly upon the God within
himself that he learns his own power and works miracles. It is only when he
throws overboard all other props and leans solely upon the God in him that he
uncovers his real powers and finds the springs of success." And from the
pen of our age's most eminent psychologist, whose opinions rest mostly on
actual clinical demonstration, the psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung, come these words
of truly epochal significance: "The Imitatio
Christi will ever have this disadvantage; we worship a man as a divine
model embodying the deepest meaning of life, and then out of sheer imitation we
forget to make real the profound meaning present in ourselves. If I accept the
fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold.
I do not affect
18
him, nor does he affect me. But if I know, on
the other hand, that God is a mighty activity within my own soul, at once I must concern myself with
him."
It is a matter for consideration
whether these two statements, both from men who fully merit the title of
greatness, do not constitute the essence of the greatest practical wisdom
available to man. For they embody the basic principle of the most challenging
factual truth that man can known: what man does not use, as faculty or function
or organ, he will lose. This moral adage is so well illustrated by the parable
of the talents in the Gospels: the man who did not put his endowment out to use
lost it. While the devout soul is praying to an outside power for help or
benefit, his own powers are atrophying. The
transcendent ancient wisdom which the world is happily resurrecting from
desuetude at the present time, set forth in the clearest terms that myriads of
souls, residents of a divine empyrean, were despatched
to earth expressly for the purpose of putting them on their own initiative,
that so they would perfect the evolution of the spiritual nature implanted germinally in their constitution. The befogging of their
minds by such religious obsessions as the prayer cult blunts the pointedness of the whole incarnational
effort.
It has been said that "prayer
is the soul's sincere desire." It is the soul's divine nature to yearn for
deeper satisfactions and higher exaltations. But what is here subjected to
critique is the universal pious presumption that mere wishing and yearning
constitute the elements of a divine science that carries the certainty of
precise answer. How the wild and wanton, the willful and whimsical desires of
the human being, ranging over all levels from base to saintly, can be
formulated into the canons of a strict psychological science is beyond the
power of thought. Yet the basic persuasion that prayers are heard and answered
postulates a scientific status underlying the whole operation. One's mere wish,
if only it be pious enough, sets in motion the wheels of the cosmic prayer
mechanism which must turn out the answers. Pietism holds that prayer can be
rated as a science of exact calculability. Inject into the hopper of the psyche
a given quantum of unction and a certain beneficent resultant can be looked
for, is the belief. Every desire will generate a measurable cosmic response. It
is established in common human experience that it is almost childishly fatuous
to claim that every wish and prayer is bound to bring good results, for the most ex-
19
cellent reason that, as experience proves, many of
our desires lead us directly into evil consequences. How often we wish and pray
for things that prove not to be good for us at all! In our ignorance we often
pray for the wrong things! Need we ask for more positive demonstration of the
illegitimacy of erecting prayer into a positive science? It is the last degree
of irrationality to assume that sheer piety of wishing will guarantee its
goodness or its answer. To elevate wishful thinking into a dependable science
is nearly the last mile on the road to folly.
The likely truth, if it could be
known, is that human prayers have probably not in a single instance ever
induced "God" to deviate one step from the orderly course of his
universal operations. What would we have to think of a cosmic deity whose
ordained course of creative procedure would be subject to alteration a thousand
times every day at the behest of millions of praying children? Infinitely more
than answer to prayer, that which should rejoice the heart of humanity would be
the assured knowledge that our praying can not change the running of the
universe. For any thinking mind is confronted with the reflection, horrendous
when fully realized, that if the divinely prescribed course of cosmic
operation could be altered by the sheer verbal or mental expression of
human wishes, there would be constant chaos in the universe!
The prayer cult is indictable on
grounds of the most fantastic and grotesque irrationality. It seems impossible
to conceive that pious devotees of prayer have never exercised imagination
enough to sense the utter ridiculousness of the spectacle of millions of earth's
citizenry incessantly running up and tugging at God's coattails with pleas and
instructions to modify the order of his creation to conform to their momentary
whims. It presents a picture so inanely ridiculous that it might be presumed
that both the imps of Satan and the gods of
It has definitely been proved that
humans constantly desire and pray for things that are not good for them. If,
therefore, many prayers are bad prayers, a law of cosmic justice and balance
would have to see to it that they are not fulfilled, or man's fulfilled wishes
would ruin him. If there is any efficacy in prayer, we should pray that deity
should shield us against our own prayers. From the point of
20
sheer fulfilment it must
be an almost certain fact that the prayer exertions of billions of mortals over
many centuries have gone wholly for nought. It is
doubtful if any prayers have ever been answered, in the literal sense. It is in
itself an arrant presumption that God, considered in any sense as a unit
mentality, could have the patience and restraint to go along with the farce. If
the deity can be thought of as an intelligence that listens, investigates,
weights and responds with appropriate action, it is simply unthinkable that
even an infinitude of divine love would not lose
temper at the endless chorus of pleadings assailing his ears from this one
planet alone! Likewise it has never been a matter of rational concern to
"believers in prayer" to explain how the cosmic mind can pay
attention to all the intricacies, involvements and moral balances needing to be
taken into account for a just decision in the millions of different
supplications addressed to it at one and the same time every day. But--would be
the "explanation"--God has the "miracle wand" lying always
at his hand. It might be conceived that he would grow tired of picking it up.
The stolid stupidity of the prayer
assumption also comes to glaring view in the failure to observe that if
Providence gave to mortals any such power to gain their objects of desire by
the simple matter of asking, the human race would in a short time entangle
itself in such disorder that, like King Midas with his golden touch, it would
indeed pray that nature and law take the reins in hand and disregard the human
interference. This reflection alone reduces prayer to chimerical hallucination.
A universal factual answer to prayer would spell colossal world catastrophe.
The common mind even of the
uncritical masses catches a sense of the clash here indicated between the
assumptions of prayer and the order of cosmic law. For the two things are
absolutely incompatible. If prayers are answered, as piously believed, the
universe can not be held to be operating under a system of inviolable law. No
law can be held inviolable which is subject to alteration by human whimsies. If
sanity had ruled in both the philosophy and psychology of religion--and their
history reveals that it has not been so--humans should positively rejoice in
the knowledge that, beyond its effects upon the person praying, prayer is and
must be a total futility. Hypnotized by the allurements of miracle and magic,
the human mind under religious influence has been divided in its allegiance,
paying homage on the
21
one side to the undeviating rule of natural law,
but on the other side bowing down to superstitious belief in the supernatural.
Under the lure to human weakness and gullibility held out by religion, with its
promises of pardon, forgiveness and immunity through the operation of a
miraculous divine grace, human concern has been massively focused upon the
magical possibilities flaunted so constantly in this field. Religion has always
aimed to hold forth to believing humanity a prospect of some easier path to
glory than that indicated by the natural law, which seemed always to impose
terms hard, cruel and stern. It has invariably promised appeasement of the
inexorable rigors of the law; it told of an easy way, a path of escape, a happy
solution of all life's ills, infirmities and hardships. The natural law was the
order of bondage under the old dispensation; religion dangled the promise of
liberty in a new dispensation under the power of love and divine compassion.
Into this primrose valley of refuge
and consolation flocked the uncritical millions of religious innocents, swept
by the besom of a pitiable mass moronism. But it is
in reality a valley of illusion, its false glories emanating from the ignis fatuus of
Scriptural promise and theological fantasy. In this enchanted valley prayer was
the magic wand that would bring all wistful dreams to reality. The direful
consequence has been that the history of religion is the record of one pitiable
delusion after another. The prayer persuasion kept feeding the psyche of the
masses on fantastic hope when that psyche sorely needed the straight lessons of
real life.
Had religion held fast to its
ancient basis in sage philosophy, it would have stamped ineradicably upon all
intelligence down the ages the precious truth of the beneficence of the reign
of natural law. It would have inculcated indelibly the
sense of the real miracle in the natural law itself, and saved man the
calamitous mistake of looking for miracle outside or in contravention of the
natural law. When religion shunted the mind from spontaneous marvel at the
magic of natural phenomena over to the expectation of wondrous occurrences
transcending or flouting the natural law, it opened the door to the well-nigh
universal hallucination of earth's millions. At one stroke it undermined man's
surest guarantee of his cosmic security and his chance at happiness, which lay
in his perfect trust in the inviolability of cosmic law. This confidence should
have been at all times his greatest and most joyous boon. It was the one
steadfast thing he could anchor to. Miracle was con-
22
tingent upon faith, and faith might prove too
feeble. The natural law was dependable. With inexorable impartiality and
justice it metes out its dispensations. Man's greatest interest was to be
exercised in learning how to meet its terms, for to meet them was to reap
happiness. The reward of obedience to law should have been seen as far more
real and genuine than any roseate expectations from miracle. But man was swept
off this firm rock of his potential felicity by his infatuation with the
glitter of Biblical promises. From his eternal safety in dependence upon the
salutary provisions of law, out into the hazardous hope of miracle, mankind has
been carried into the treacherous shoals and quicksands
of reliance upon the whimsical motivations of a deity pictured in the
Scriptures as capable of love and mercy one moment and vengeful wrath the next.
How sadly the evident divine intent for man has miscarried can be seen in the
spectacle of millions cringing with plaintive cries of helplessness at the feet
of deity, when instead of this chant of misery their voices should be sending
up to the throne the paeans of joy and gratitude in the words of the Psalmist:
"O, how I love thy law, O God! In thy law do I meditate day and night!" For an all-wise
Prayer has thus lured man away from
his wholesome contact with reality and led him off into a gay but tragic dance
with the iridescent forms of illusion.
While man prays to God to do his
work for him, his own innate powers atrophy. This has been touched upon, but
needs further emphasis. Prayer takes man's concern outside himself and away
from the inner arena where it should be focused. It is his own inner potential
that needs development, not his supposititious relation to a power outside.
Life furnishes the occasion for the exercise and unfoldment of divine
potential. But prayer injects itself as a sedative and narcotic and lulls the
soul into a false relaxation of initiative. It throws a stupefaction and palsy
over the natural sense of urgency to make headway with the major task of
achieving the divinity that lies before us. How can man attain his
glorification if he never ceases to appeal to God to do the work that his own
23
evolution demands? Not even God can save his creatures
from the necessary labor of saving themselves, for self-initiated effort is the
inescapable price of salvation.
Long lost has been that inestimable
knowledge that God has from the start implanted within the constitution of
every one of his children an agency of his cosmic purpose, a veritable part and
portion of his own universal mind, to be that very presence of himself at the
heart of all conscious being, instant to respond to every beck and call, eager
and vigilant to be the saving power in every exigency. The genius in man, says Heraclitus, "is a
deity." To this deity within, not to any supposed power outside, religion
should have unfailingly taught man to turn. To ignore it, to pass by it to
appeal to another power believed to be watching from the summit of the
universe, is simply to miss the aid made immediately available to all
creatures.
The cultivation of the relation
between the outer mind and this indwelling capability constitutes the true
"science of the soul." The yearnings of the personal outer self to
awaken and enjoy communion with this divine immanence would be the real
"prayer" that should be dignified by a worthier name. God has sent
this divine guest to share our house of flesh and our mortal natures with us,
to help us set both our house and our lives in order and beauty. This is the
arm of deity extended down to us from heaven above. In Galatians 4
Prayer assumptions run into asinine
unreason, which only escapes recognition because of the incredible mesmerism of
pious credulity. What could be more illogical than pleading for blessings from
a cosmic Father who has already, both in the obvious order of nature and in the
Scriptures attributed to his authorship, given positive assurance that he is
wholly committed to bestow upon his children all the wealth of blessedness they
can appropriate and
24
utilize? God does not waste his energies. Not even
he can pour benefaction upon his progeny which they have not as yet developed
the capacity to receive. He can not cram into a small vessel what only a larger
one can hold. Ancient systems of sapient wisdom--more particularly the great
Greek philosophy--steadily insisted that no creature in God's universe was ever
deprived of the full measure of the Father's bounty; but that each was allotted
his due portion in strict accordance with his measure of capacity. To lower
creatures flowed a tinier stream of life's dynamic; to the higher one went a
more copious voltage, but always a just measure to each.
This being so, is it not supreme
folly for man to think that anything can be gained by incessant bombardment of
the divine ear with pleadings for special exertion on God's part to enlarge the
current of beneficence flowing down upon the pleaders? Such praying carries the
tacit assumption that God is flagging in his attention to his business, is
dozing on his throne, is shirking his stint, and needs to be prodded to be kept
"on the job." In this light prayer must be seen as too stupid for
words.
Prayer likewise implies that God's
intelligence, too, is inadequate and that suggestions from the human side will
help him decide what were best to do. It presumes that such suggestion may save
God some labor by passing up to him useful information. Prayer seems to assume
that God will appreciate the convenience of having a list of good things and
the names of deserving faithful put into his hands. It seems to be thought that
God will be pleased to note his children's zeal in pressing him for blessings.
But the climactic imbecility of mind
and failure of reason is exhibited in the inherent implication that the earthly
child knows better than God himself what blessings ought to be forthcoming.
Many prayers expressly include the confession that God already knows infinitely
better than we what is needed, or what is best. "Your Father knoweth what things ye have need
of before ye ask him" (Matthew 6:5, 8). In his famous Life of
Jesus Renan, quoting the Lord's Prayer, follows
it with the statement: "He [Jesus] insisted particularly upon the idea
that the heavenly Father knows better than we what we need, and that we almost
sin against Him in asking Him for this or that particular thing" (page 131).
That so obvious and significant an
implication has not in seventeen centuries been able to introduce a note of
sanity into the praying habit of the world is testimony enough to the
devastation of
25
rationality superinduced by
religious infatuations in uncritical minds. It adds cogent force to our
contention that most values and motivations in the religious sphere are held in
flat defiance of reason and logic. Faith has usurped the field, and faith takes
no account of rationality. If logic had been given play in the counsels of
historic religion, the constant pressing God with requests for favors would
have been dropped as egregiously puerile.
The implicit belief that God hears
and answers prayers has already been catalogued as a very rash assumption. It
is almost demonstrably fatuous. The best philosophic wisdom of humanity has
affirmed that deity is simply cosmic intelligence in the most abstract sense,
though a reality. It is asinine to conceive or hypostatize "him" as a
being personalized in such form as to be capable of hearing a human voice or
"reading" a human mind. The idea of God as a being listening to
millions of uttered prayers is so infantile as to shame any adult that would
hold it in literal sense. Yet all common prayer rests on that childish assumption.
Nor has any thought been given to
the factor of time in the presuppositions on which prayer rests. Consideration of the part which it would have to play in the
factual hearing and answering of prayers makes a further mockery of the prayer
addiction. It is tacitly believed that God, who could not answer prayers
unjustly, will look into the minutiae of all cases presented, will go over a
rapid review of the past history of the persons prayed for and then
weigh carefully the elements of justice involved. It must be asked what magical
type of consciousness that is which could thus investigate and judge millions
of complex cases every hour of every day! How could God equitably be judge,
jury and executive to try thousands of cases every hour if his mental processes
required any time? The stock answer of course is that God's
consciousness is timeless. Even at that his decisions reached by a timeless
process have to be implemented to man in a three-dimensional time measure. The
answer must again invoke "miracle." And if deity gave all his
"time" to answering endless prayers, when would "it" have
any time to do anything else! Christians and Buddhists, Mohammedans and Taoists
tie their God down to slavish drudgery on their petty behalf; they give him no
rest. His chief cosmic business is to attend to their wants. One could not be
accused of irreverence in suggesting that it would be only natural if such a
God would lose patience and be disposed to shout down to his people:
"Cease
26
pestering me with your little cares and prayers; learn
to look after yourselves; I have work to do."
It must be narrated as a most
singular circumstance that after the last sentence above was written in
first draft, attendance at a Methodist church brought to notice precisely such
an utterance of deity in the Scriptures. In this church one can count on
hearing prayer fervent and soulful, intimate and unctuous. Imagine, then, our
delighted surprise at hearing the minister in his sermon make the positive
statement that while he wholly believed in prayer, he also realized that there
come times when, under the stress of special circumstances, prayer ceases to be
appropriate, becomes in fact entirely useless, and must give way to action.
And, quoting from the 15th verse of the 14th chapter of Exodus, he cited
the Lord's evident irritation in his rebuke to Moses over the panic into which
the sight of the pursuing Egyptians had thrown the children of
The god within us is not challenged by
lip begging; but he must respond when the human goes forward with
action. When man acts the immanent god must exert himself to readjust the
balance which action disturbs. Though acts are determined by thoughts, it is
the acts rather than the thoughts that engineer the run of destiny. The seed of
deity is in man for the very purpose of having it grow in response to the
experiences of the personality in which it is housed. The Zohar,
Kabalistic work of the ancient Hebrews, emphasizes the point that the divine
soul of man's higher nature will not respond in blessing until the lower
personality challenges it by overt action. In this situation the realization
that the divine potency subject to call resides within instead of somewhere
outside is itself the most forceful spur to the energization
of unawakened divinity. When man realizes that he is himself both the pleader
and the source of response, he will stand in far greater possibility of
receiving a downpour of spiritual unction. The release of such dynamic from
within is so wonderful an experience that it has through ignorance been
mistaken for an influx from an external source. Man never knows what he can do,
or what the infant god within him can do, until he tries and thus challenges
the god to try. The only ultimately true prayer is action.
27
It is the lesson of religious
history that whenever the abstruse conceptions of cosmic truth and the highest
realizations of mystical experience are purveyed to the masses for their
presumed edification, they pass through a mill of stupid literalization
and gross misconception that render them substantially untrue to their real
connotation. This has egregiously been the case with the prayer message. From
being originally experienced as a mystical communion of the human with the
divine part of man's own constitution, it has been weirdly caricatured into the
belief that a mortal may talk to an enlarged personality of essentially the
same order as himself. This being an absurdity, does one risk untruth in
asserting that the historical run of the prayer motive has been the most
colossal hoax in all the world? What is there to
disprove that all prayer directed out beyond the theurgic
power immanent in man himself has been the expenditure of so much empty breath,
completely wasted upon the praying individual himself?
This essay does not aim to assert
that prayer is totally devoid of psychological value. The thesis advanced,
however, is that whatever psychic value it may have, is generated through the
operation of forces all of which are present in the nature of man himself. If
it is an exercise aimed to relate man harmoniously with both the physical
reality of his outer world and the spiritual reality of his inner potential of
consciousness, it is to be accorded the rank of a genuine psychic science. But
the crux of the matter, and the criterion of its final value, centers in the mode
of understanding by which the individual apprehends the mystical
experience. It is a matter of crucial difference whether we believe that we are
calling to awaken a power slumbering within ourselves, or calling out to a
forever nondescript Intelligence ensconced somewhere above the cosmos. The
assurance that it is the former and not the latter must in the end supply the
dynamo of power that gives the only efficacy the practice engenders. Certainly
a far better result will be achieved when the intelligence of the operator
knows precisely the forces he is endeavoring to manipulate. The cosmic deity
must remain forever unknown to mere man; but the deity within himself can come
to be known intimately. To work at a problem of the sort on principles utterly
erroneous must be eternally futile; to work with
28
knowledge of the forces at play will promise glorious
success. The wrong conception must lead to a misdirection of effort. Man pays
penalties for proceeding on false premises. Thought is creative in the life of
the being endowed with it; and if it is not in full harmony with the principles
of the larger Intelligence of which it is an element, there will be clashing
and discord until harmony is attained. The smaller unit of world consciousness
must in the end fall into perfect accord with the will or law of the more
inclusive whole. Only suffering corrects the damage done by erroneous thinking.
That prayer is a
ferment in the elements within the human and not a communication with
infinite cosmic deity is endorsed by a very high religious authority indeed,
the dean of the great New York Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Very Rev.
James A. Pike, reported in the New York Times. Speaking on the festival
of Rogation Day, described as the "season when prayers are offered for
rain and the fruits of the earth, and the planting of a tree . . . 'is a symbol
of our dependence on God and our cooperation with his creation,'" the
eminent dean declared that "people who doubt that prayer changes things
have never really tried it. If they had, they would know that at the least, prayer
changes the one doing the praying." The burden of his address was that
prayer changes, not things, but the people praying. It is from
this angle that prayer is to be competently studied. In this purview it could
be brought within the pale of a strictly human science of psychology. If it is
known to be an affective relation between the elements composing the total
human psyche, and not a supposititious relation between the total human and
some cosmic consciousness completely aloof from our estate, then we must, as
Jung so keenly notes, give it due attention as a full-fledged branch of our own
humanistic science. Dean Pike corroborates this view when he added that
"psychosomatic medicine suggests real relationships between physical
condition and mental and spiritual states." This concedes that both
elements concerned are within man, not one in him and the other somewhere aloft
in heaven.
If this is not so it can be asked
pointedly in what way the prayer cult of modern "intelligent" man
rises above the habitudes of primitive tribal religionism,
in which prayers, incantations and other forms of magic were invoked to
influence powers outside and above man. We now hold those things to have been
"primitive superstition." Yet the dean admitted that the motive of
prayer for
29
rain was still considered an element of the
Rogation Day ceremonial. Prayer to influence gods is now taboo, yet the tacit
assumptions of it still lurk in today's praying. When will it be made an
exercise of spiritual self-culture?
The deleterious influence of prayer
reaches perhaps its climactic point of disservice in its disastrous inhibition
of man's impulse to overt action in all contingencies in which resolute
action is crucial. It strikes at man's truest interests when it persuades him
to pray instead of acting. When prayer steps in to paralyze the spirit of
resolute self-exertion and causes him to stand as an impotent beggar when
prompt action alone will save, it is of all things most damaging. Cromwell's
"Ironsides" prayed before they went into battle, or prayed as they
charged the enemy. How much the praying contributed to their victories must be
left to conjecture. But what would have been the altered course of history if
they had not fought but only prayed? It is the contention here that the prayer
habit leading men to substitute prayer for needed action is the cause of
untold evil, wreckage, defeat and tragedy in the run of history. Prayer puts a
specious value on cowardice, or offers a tempting resort to it. And mankind
suffers the consequences of its failure to act.
There are tides in the affairs of
men which they must ride to a fortuitous outcome, or lose the opportunity
forever. It spells disaster when prayer palsies spiritual initiative and
inhibits action. And deferment of decisive action only makes more desperate
action necessary later. In the end the man who will be content to pray when he
ought to fight must fall under the moral condemnation of all the more heroic
instincts of our nature. The soul is sent to earth to profit by meeting the exigencies
of experience. If it seeks to dodge the trying ordeals by prayer, it misses and
wastes the very essence of its instructive experience. Revelation promises
its seven rewards to "him that overcometh,"
not to him that prayeth. No prayer or sanctified wishing
can obviate for souls the necessity of learning and obeying the laws ordained
for their evolution. Prayer operates at the level of the mental or the psychic.
In fact life attaches penalties to failure to bring ideal conceptions out into
their final form of concrete actualization. The mere dreamer, the idealist, the
visionary suffers the fate of negation and eternal futility. Continuance in
such a state will lead to a life of unreality, to neurosis
30
and finally to disease. Verily, affirms the Baghavad Gita, action
is better than inaction, than dreaming and wishing.
The lesson wrapped up in this survey
is indeed a challenging one. It carries the realization that health, balance
and happiness can flow only from a life of endeavor to make visions, hopes,
ideals come true in concrete form. The soul that eternally teases itself with
wishes and dreams--with prayers--and does not go to the limit of active
exertion to actualize them will forever be penalized by missing those wholesome
influences that flow in only from positive resolute action. It will never revel
in the satisfaction of reaping the due reward and enjoying the rich fruits of
endeavor. He will have created nothing to look upon and pronounce good. He who
prays and does not act is not in line with the creative spirit of the universe.
Then if performance is the final
criterion of success, the question arises: can prayer have any value whatever?
If action is the final determinant, prayer can have but incidental and minor
value, to be studied by psychology. All conscious experience of the race
testifies to the crucial value of action and to the indecisive value of prayer.
The happy repercussion from vigorous exertion is infinitely more satisfying
than the pious wrestling in prayer. Can it be expected that God will be moved
to utter his final "well done, thou good and faithful servant" if the
servant has done nothing beyond praying? Is God likely to reward a man for what
not he but God himself had done for him?
The intelligent ancient Egyptians called
the human body "the crucible of the great house of flame." The
mingled fires of the four grades of consciousness, sense, feeling, mind and
spirit flare up in a constant "burning" in the body of man, and the
product is as certainly determined by the nature and properties of the mixture
as is any chemical compound in a test-tube. The true science of the psyche
would be that which gives a knowledge by which one would mingle the proper
elements in proper proportions. It is therefore as idle for a mortal to pray
for results other than the one which the law of divine chemistry inexorably
prescribes from the mixture, as it would be for a chemist to pray that certain
combinations should give a result different from the known one.
Religion has ever tended to persuade
that the forces of faith and prayer will override the laws of chemistry and
physics and work miracles. Phenomena without end have been claimed and
31
reported to substantiate the claim. Some of this
appears formidable and carries conviction to many. It is bluntly contended here
that it would be tragedy if special forces of faith
and pietism, of thaumaturgy or sorcery, or any sort of psychological mummery could
alter, negate or modify the laws of nature.
That such forces seem to be released
to contravene the laws of nature poses a problem for which a surprising
solution lies readily at hand in a phenomena well
known but never evaluated in its full significance. General world opinion
supports the conviction that the laws of nature can not be overruled or
nullified by faith, credulity, extravagant hope or intense yearning. Therefore
it must be guessed that there operates some power that induces the belief that
these marvels have taken place. There must be something that engenders the
persuasion that these extraordinary things do happen. Is such an agent of
conviction anywhere discoverable? Startlingly it can be declared that a power
exercising this very function has been in open operation and widely used. This
amazing power is hypnotism. It is so "magical" in its efficacy
that it can take a mind out of the world in which it normally functions and
project it into another world in which the mere suggestion of the presence of
an object makes the object a thing of full reality! A power which can so hallucinate the human psyche must be suspect as the real
deceiver in such things as "miraculous" cures, providential healings
and religious phenomena of spectacular sort. It is passing strange that this
power, which is most readily activated by gullible faith, has not been
recognized as the common denominator, causal factor and universal solvent of
the whole catalogue of religious prodigies.
In all likelihood hypnotism is the
continuing function of a faculty of consciousness evolved by life away back in
the animal stage of human evolution, apparently to render the weaker species
preyed upon by more powerful enemies insensible to the pain of physical
destruction when nature was "red in tooth and claw with ravin." The bird that confronted the beady eyes of the
stealthy snake, or that found itself helpless in the paw of a cat, or the mouse
that saw its feline devourer at hand, were driven by the overpowering force of
sheer terror into a state of superconsciousness
beyond the normal, were in fact transited to the realm of death consciousness
in advance of their actual demise, a condition which was dubbed "going
fey" (dead) by, particularly, the Scottish people. In this exalted grade
of consciousness they were
32
taken through the death agony with not only full
insensibility, but almost certainly in orgiastic ecstasy. Thus generated in the
psychic development of the body, it lingers still as an underlying potentiality
in human consciousness, and may be superinduced to
render us insensible to pain, and so deceive those so affected into the belief
that their pain or disease has been cured.
Truer knowledge of the seeming
miraculous potential of the psyche will spell a fatal refutation of all pious
belief in this field. What will come out of it as a great boon will be the certainty
that no real victory can come to the individual through hypnotism. There can be
no fulfilment, no gain, no real advance for the
individual ego until in full consciousness it itself becomes the master
manipulator of all its psychic forces. Until man makes a gain under his own
power, by his own intelligent self-mastery, he makes no real gain. No one can
profit ultimately through the exertions or at the expense of others. Nothing is
won that is not gained by the unit ego in its own right. No one will reap where
he has not sown, cultivated and watered. Hypnotism and hysteria can superinduce the impression of many things not real. Only
the obfuscations of religious abnormality have prevented sane human
intelligence from discerning this vital truth. Even the Scriptures affirm that
not one jot or tittle of the law shall be abated
until all be fulfilled.
Man needs no further demonstration
of God's power, for it is the marvel of every day and night. The ever important
crucial necessity is that man should see his power unfold in greater
degree. Prayer keeps this mighty power hidden, unexercised, untapped. Evolution
is only a slow blind drifting until the stage of self-initiated intelligent
action is reached in every life. "My Father worketh
hitherto, and I work," the Christ figure in ancient drama reminds us. The
Father works in his cosmos--when not interrupted by prayers--in which we are
cell units. Imitating him, we must work in our microcosm, and no unit can do
the work of another.
If the millions of prayers addressed
to deity to save us from a Third World War are "answered," the
influences that will have determined this happy outcome will have been
generated by the physical exertions of thousands of men on battlefields. Treaty
makers do not settle terms on the basis of prayers. They make adjustments on faits accomplis by
valor in action. George Washington is said to have prayed at
33
events. He did not substitute prayer for action.
Prayer without action would have left his cause open to defeat. Law and action
call the tune to which events dance. All sound religion has sharply
distinguished between the "prayer on the lips" and the "prayer
that is lived" in action. Praying must be integrated in living.
This survey presents the case
against prayer. It is necessarily incomplete. It would appear strong enough,
however, to suggest the cogent need of a revision of a religion that has held
its votaries for centuries in the grip of the spirit of beggary. With growing
insistence it is being proclaimed in the domain of psychology that religion is
predominantly an "escape mechanism." How true is this? Earth has been
pictured in religion as a place of tribulation and suffering. By contrast
heaven has been universally conceived as a "place," more properly as
a state, in which consciousness is buoyant, exultant, ecstatic.
If these views have taken form and color as a result of the soul's subconscious
memory of its antecedent happy celestial life and its unhappy present
experience on earth, there may indeed be some unconscious ground (for we are
now finding grounds for our motivations in an "unconscious" region of
our psyche) for the yearning to escape the hard grind of bodily existence by
resort to prayer, to miracle and magic. The fairy-tales of a wonderland where
the waving of a magical wand creates delectable enchantments must be a
dramatization of our unconsciously remembered heavenly life. And if, as is
intimated here, this longing is born of a remembrance of our former
hypnotization so magically and so blissfully experienced in our past animal
stage, there is at least a basis of understanding the inveterate propensity to
perpetuate the irrational and unworthy cult of prayer.
It becomes then a matter for
psychology to determine how far this is in line with evolutionary plan and
purpose; whether man's advance has brought him to the point at which the
hypnotic activation is to be resisted and overcome. It is for philosophy to decide
the issue as between psychic escape from life's realistic rigors through
retreat into the hope and yearning for divine surcease, and the possible
victory to be won by the soul's meeting the challenge of hard actuality at the
level of ordinary consciousness. The wisest of philosophies have given the
verdict on the side of facing the rigorous world in full realism and shunning
the avenues of escape into the unconscious.
34
the crown of immortal life. The Greeks called
this life the "Cycle of Necessity." If its function of beneficence is
to be performed, its experiences and its issues must be met in full realism and
in open consciousness, not evaded by retreat into the unconscious. To seek
escape by resort to prayer must be considered both anti-evolutionary
and--futile.
Aberrant as religion is thus seen to
be in the feature of prayer, perhaps even more grave is the indictment that can
be brought against it in respect to its position on healing. Healings and
"miraculous" cures have held as high a place of significance and
value as has prayer. Indeed demonstrations of healing have been made almost a de
facto evidence of divine endorsement of the cults that could produce them.
Any leader, group or system of religion that could cite a run of healings and
cures stood demonstrably accredited in the general mind. If a religion could, a
la Christ, heal the sick, make the lame walk, cast out demons and restore
sight to the blind, it was held certified of God. Attach a healing to any given
cult philosophy and it became cosmically authenticated.
Unquestionably the vogue of this
illogical hypothesis sprang from the supposed record of Jesus' miracles in the
Gospels. But it has gained further acceptance from the numberless phenomena of
similar character claimed in the history of religious cultism in every age.
Passing over the demonstrable fact that these so-called "miracles" of
the Gospels have been traced in the great researches of Massey and some others
to old Egyptian allegorizations and are in no sense
history, but depictions of potential spiritual history for all men, there would
seem to be enough veridical factuality in religious cult history down to the
present to have given the human mind some warrant for the presumption of
reality in the phenomena.
Protagonists of healing cultism may
argue that it should be a function of religion to heal people. Let is be
assumed that this may be true. The question then is--how? By
miracle? Or by the natural result of the operation of
a Christly consciousness in the heart and mind of the individual? Much
in human life and destiny hinges on the true answer. Our earlier dissertation
has ruled out miracle. The miracle that man needs to recognize and effectuate
in his own life is the miracle, perpetually enacted, of nature and divine law.
Any "miracle" that comes through the subversion of natural law is a
calamity,--if such can happen. Strange and extraordinary things, apparently
flouting natural law, may happen. But they
35
happen under law. Man may not know the law, and so
calls them miracles. And facing us is the realization, if we would but heed its
implications, that strange and extraordinary things
also happen under hypnotism.
With this pronouncement there enters
into the discussion perhaps the most unexpected and significant clue to the
solution of the age-long mystery of extraordinary religious phenomena. It is an
odd circumstance that almost complete similarity between the phenomena of
religion and the processes of hypnotism has so far seemed to escape notice. It
is fairly safe to say that nearly all the "miraculous" cures of
religious history have been duplicated by hypnotic agency. But the religious
world has been slow to accept the hypothesis that the two things may be
operations of one and the same power.
Much has been made of the statement
attributed to Jesus in the Gospels to the effect that the dynamic agency in his
marvels of healing was the faith of those healed. "The faith hath
made thee whole." On the strength of this declaration of his, faith has
been virtually elevated, in the books of spiritual cultism, into the great
central principle of religious science. It is only necessary to believe long
and hard enough, and the intensity of the psychic force thus generated will
materialize the thing desired. If we had faith enough we could move yon
mountain, affirm the Scriptures.
The answer to this is the same as
that advanced in the case of the claims for the efficacy of prayer: if either
all prayers could be actually answered, or all afflations
of faith could reify the things hoped for, there would be chaos in the
world. For millions of differing objects prayed for would clash in endless
confusion. Unfortunately for spiritual cult philosophy, but fortunately for
humanity, both prayer and faith--which are really two facets of essentially the
same thing--are circumscribed and largely negated by inviolable natural law.
For God to answer all prayers and entify all the
projections of faith, would be tantamount to his
abdication of all his rulership and his turning the
world over to the capricious desires of humans in the mass. Both the prayer and
the faith philosophies practically assume this as a real possibility, or at any
rate logically risk it. Prayer expects God to dance as we pipe the lay. We
virtually dictate to him and make him our lackey. So in the tacit implications
of both these dynamics of religious schematism man is
introduced in two quite opposite and certainly
36
inconsistent characters: he is at one and the same time
both the worthless worm groveling at God's feet and the presumptive dictator to
God as to the terms on which God should bless him. Here must be seen the basic
absurdity of these religious hypothecations. Children do at times get their way
with parental authority by whimpering and begging; a weak character dominates
at times through the aggravated protestation of its helplessness. Religion
still builds on this analogy in man's relation to God. Is it not time to put
away childish things?
If religious healings are indeed a
form of hypnotism, and faith proves to be the dynamic element in the case, it
would seem demonstrated that faith is a hypnotizing power. If this is found to
be true, we will have discovered the nexus between the phenomena of religion
and true psychological science. This is a task for modern psychology. It presents
the chance to humanity to bring knowledge and sanity into the counsels of
age-old religious superstition.
The crux of the prime accusation
that is to be brought against the healing cultism in religion is its obvious
disregard of the principle of karmic justice, the great law of compensation and
balance, announced in the great Scriptures of the world: "As ye sow so
also shall ye reap." The religious devotee, enthralled by the spiritually
romantic idea of being healed by a miracle or a direct touch from God's hand,
considers that any person needing a healing is eligible to receive it, completely
irrespective of his deserts. As it could be expected to do, healing,
considered as a miracle, holds in contempt the law of justice in correlating
cause and effect, indeed takes no reckoning of it whatsoever. It is glowingly
assumed that God's reservoir of goodness is so superabundantly charged that it
will flow out in utter prodigality upon all wretched sufferers. In this spirit
it will be considered most rudely profane to introduce the question of merit at
all. Scripture is quoted to show that Jesus invited all to come and be
healed. Indeed it might be claimed that he seemed partial in bestowing his
magical benefactions upon those least likely to have been worthy. The more lowly and miserable the suppliant, the greater and more
copious the benefaction.
If this mental chicanery is
accepted--and ecclesiastical history evidences that it is nearly
universal--then it distinctly places divinity in the role of flouting its own
expressly announced principle of morality, the assurance of an inviolable moral
order in the world. Said Kant: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and
37
increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the
longer we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above and the moral law
within." If the moral law is thus found conclusively sanctioned in the
consciousness of the human, such authority must spring from its being the
counterpart in man of the same universal law of the cosmic mind. If the moral
law is sacred to man, it must be infinitely more sacred to God, and therefore
inviolable. Logically it can not be assumed that God can break, ignore or set
aside his own invincible principle of cosmic justice. He can not vouchsafe
benison indiscriminately. He can not permit any to reap where they have not
sown. He can not out of the compassion of his heart, flout the laws of
chemistry. He can not lavish blessings upon some and leave others unnoticed. We
simply can not think of deity as being so passionately compassionate that it
showers blessings without good judgment based on some principle of right.
That this view of spiritual or
"divine" healing will fall upon the minds of millions conditioned to
the sacredness of all such things like a frightful sacrilege, shocking to pious
sensibilities, is a strong index of how completely religious inculcations have
beclouded the mental skies of gullible mortals. Many would indignantly ask: Why
should Jesus stop to consult the merits of the poor suffering people who
followed him in multitudes? Healing power swept forth from his divine dynamo
and engulfed all. If so, then we have to be told what becomes of the also Scripturally sanctified great and inviolable moral law that
God established to mete out absolute justice, with the abatement of not one jot
or tittle from its strict operation. There is
involved here the question that is of nothing less than stupendous import for
all mankind--does divine love at any time override the moral law? If religion
would have us believe that it does so, then all principles both of justice and
of logic are flouted. For if divine love can violate divine law we have a clash
between two equally sanctified aspects of divinity, love and law, and both
logic and human reverence revolt at this possibility. If divine love and divine
law can not fall completely in sweet accord, there is again chaos in the courts
of the mind. Is it not as vital to the welfare of humanity that our reverence
for the moral law be held as sacred as our reverence for the principle of love?
It has to be insisted that if love
can step in to inhibit or abrogate the law of cause and consequence, the moral
law is at once
38
wholly nullified and rendered incapable of
performing its proper function. If some supposed superior power can interpose
between an act and its legitimate consequences, gone forever is the possibility
of life's holding its activities under the reign of
order and justice. Chaos is unchained once more. Life, law, justice and
eventually love itself stand powerless to bring their purposes to fruition. At
any stage the arbitrary impulses of love could step in to break the chain of
consequence.
Would pious religionists uphold the
proposition that in any realm the violator of beneficent law should escape penalty?
How could even a divine providence maintain order in its universe if it held no
whip hand over disobedience? The rabid endorsement of indiscriminate healings
commits one logically to the sanction of law-breaking. It approves the
principle that the evil effects of years of wrong-doing or wrong living are of
no consequence and can be wiped completely off the slate of life's record, if
only a healer with magical touch chances to come by the village. The doctrine
of the forgiveness of sins carries similar connotations.
To bring the issues involved into
clearer light, the matter can be illustrated with more concreteness. If people
are to be healed it is necessary that they should be sick, diseased or
crippled. The pious zeal for healing recks little of
the past life that has brought people to evil condition; the magic of love, or
the love of magic, sweeps all that away. Let us consider a person who has got
himself tied in knots with rheumatism, arthritis, high blood pressure,
arteriosclerosis, diabetes, cancer or other bad state. Obviously this is not
just chance, evil fate or divine wrath, but directly the result--in a vast
majority of cases--of wrong eating, intemperate indulgence, or at any rate some
violation of the laws governing the delicate balance of forces in the human
bodily economy.
It is critically imperative here
that we break through the walls of pious infatuations surrounding this
situation and face the real issues involved, which requires the asking of the
question--which again will be resented by pietism: what right does the person
suffering from the direct consequences of law violation have even to ask to be
healed--by some external magic--with no reference whatever to any change of
action or cessation of his evil habits of law-breaking? Concomitant with this
is the other question equally repugnant to pietistic feeling: what right would
a divine personage, as Jesus, have to step in and inject his supernatural power
into the
39
life or the body of such a violator of the laws
of right living? His assumed right would make him accessory to law violation,
an abetter of wrong living, intervening to save a
law-breaker from the just consequences of his action. He would be helping and
encouraging law violation. This makes an anomaly of the whole healing code of
so much religion, one that has in fact driven millions away from the temples of
such illogical faith.
It is probably true to say that
wrong habits of eating and the distorted attitudes of mind that are thereby superinduced--the two now constituting the psychosomatic
basis of disease--cause ninety percent of human ills, both of the body and its
psyche. How aberrant must then be the mode of human thinking which continues to
look to the intervention of some "divine" power or person to "heal"
the abnormalities produced, instead of working to eradicate the root cause,
wrong eating? In our effort to cure those ills we commit ourselves to the
absurdity of actually going into the world where their cause is not to be
found. We seek a healing through an extraneous force that has no connection
with the matter at all. If this is not as outrageous a form of religious
superstition as ever could be found in "primitive" society, it would
be hard to find one surpassing it.
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?
40
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 eso-
41
teric 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
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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.
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