Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/700

 —that the violated law can not be bribed to stay its arm by burnt offerings nor placated by prayers—it is a harmful doctrine, as tending directly to undermine understanding and to weaken will, to teach that either prayer or sacrifice will obviate the consequences of want of foresight or want of self-discipline, or that reliance on supernatural aid will make amends for lack of intelligent will. We still pray halfheartedly in our churches, as our forefathers prayed with their whole hearts, when we are afflicted with a plague or pestilence, that God will "accept of an atonement and command the destroying angel to cease from punishing"; and when we are suffering from too much rain we ask him to send fine weather, "although we for our iniquities have worthily deserved a plague of rain and waters." Is there a person of sincere understanding who, uttering that prayer, now believes it in his heart to be the successful way to stay a fever, plague, or pestilence? He knows well that, if it is to be answered, he must clean away dirt, purify drains, disinfect houses, and put in force those other sanitary measures which experience has proved to be efficacious, and that the aid vouchsafed to the prayer will only be given when these are by themselves successful. Had men gone on believing, as they once believed, that prayer would stay disease, they would never have learned and adopted sanitary measures, any more than the savage of Africa who prays to his fetich to cure disease does now. To get rid of the notion of supernatural interposition was the essential condition of true knowledge and self-help in that matter.

Many persons who could not confidently express their belief in the power of prayer to stop a plague or a deluge of rain, or who actually disbelieve it, still have a sincere hold of the belief of its miraculous power in the moral or spiritual world. Nevertheless, if the matter be made one simply of scientific observation, it must be confessed that all the evidence goes to prove that the events of the moral world are matters of law and order equally with those of the physical world, and that supernatural interpositions have no more place in the one than in the other; that he who prays for the creation of a clean heart and the renewal of a right spirit within him, if he gets at last what he prays for, gets it by the operation of the ordinary laws of moral growth and development, in consequence of painstaking watchfulness over himself and the continual exercise of good resolves. Only when he gets it in that way will he get the benefit of supernatural aid; and, if he rests in the belief of supernatural aid, without taking pains to get it entirely in that way, he will do himself moral harm; for if he can not rely upon special interpositions in the moral any more than in the physical world, if he has to do entirely with those secondary laws of nature through which alone the supernatural is made natural, the invisible visible, it needs no demonstration that the opposite belief can not strengthen, but must weaken, the understanding and will. It is plain that true moral hygiene is as impossible to the savage who relies