Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/42



Nothing is more proper to man, or more enjoined by Scripture, than prayer to God. But there prevailed widely a very free and easy assumption of special and direct "answers to prayer," which, from the devout general or monarch on the battle-field, down to the devout leaders in more ordinary scenes of all kinds, were but too apt to involve the Divine Being in a perpetual succession of contradictory and impossible events and statistics. It is always good to pray, and every one gets good by so doing. But it is never safe, in modern experience, to assume special and direct answers. Even the apparently happiest hits, in this interpreting way, are apt to be the most laughed at, by religious people themselves, where there is variance in religious views.

The idea underlying "the worship of praise" is wholly at variance with modern advanced thought and moral perception. To praise any one, in order to please him or receive his favour, is too gross to the modern sense to be even thought of, and the higher the person thus addressed, the greater perhaps would be the affront. But by force of long unchallenged habit we can literally rant and bellow the praises of God without sense of the ludicrous grossness of the procedure. The words and example of Christ do not sustain this low ideal. The hymns our modern Churches are substituting for the old praising psalms, are a move-