Over the lake's end strikes the sun,

White, flameless fire; some purity
Thrilling the mist, a splendour won
Out of the world's heart. Let there be
Thoughts, and atonements, and desires,
Proud limbs, and undeliberate tongue,
Where now we move with mortal oars
Among

Immortal dews and fires.

So the old mating goes apace,

Wind with the sea, and blood with thought, Lover with lover; and the grace

Of understanding comes unsought

When stars into the twilight steer,
Or thrushes build among the may,

Or wonder moves between the hills,
And day

Comes up on Rydal mere.

THE RATIONALE OF PRAYER.

In the Library of LEWIS's house at Kensington where he and TREMAINE are conversing. Enter CATHCART.

LEWIS. What good wind blows you here? You will stay to luncheon, of course?

CATHCART. With pleasure. But you won't guess where I have come from. I have been attending a "Service of Intercession for our Troops," at a neighbouring Church. I wanted to see what it was like.

TREMAINE. Well, what was it like? I have had occasion to be present, a few times, at Anglican services; and I have always thought them dreary. But I suppose it is natural for me, as a Catholic, to feel thus.

CATHCART. I remember hearing an Anglican Bishop claim for the Book of Common Prayer that it was rationabile obsequiuma reasonable service. But could this Office of Intercession, which was largely taken from it, be so described? Was it reasonable to expect the Supreme Disposer of Events-that is the correct phrase, I believe to oblige us by acceding to our request on behalf of our armies, the more especially as the Germans are making similar petitions to Him on behalf of theirs, and, according to the Kaiser, He is "their ancient ally." What is the rationale of prayer?

LEWIS. It is a hard question. I doubt whether it occurred to the compilers of the Manual so long celebrated as "our incomparable Liturgy."

TREMAINE. And justly so celebrated if merely its diction be considered. It is a model of stately English. But it is incomparable in another sense. Cranmer and his crew treated the old Catholic Rituals much as Medea is fabled to have treated Jason. The result to a liturgiologist, as I may claim to be, in a small way, is amazing. There is nothing like it. It is sui generis: yes, incomparable.

CATHCART. Milton speaks contemptuously of it as "the skeleton of a Mass Book."

TREMAINE. The Anglican Eucharistic Office can scarcely claim to be even that, with its mutilation of the canon, its intrusion of the Ten Commandments, its Cranmerian preachments, its adulatory State Prayers. Of course the object of "the Glorious Reformers" was to turn the Mass into a Communion Service-and they succeeded.

LEWIS. Yes, they did. It is certainly curious that any Anglican

clergyman using this office, from which every trace of the sacrificial idea has been removed, should be able to persuade himself that he is saying Mass. But I don't suppose, Cathcart, that your Service of Intercession suggested to you these considerations.

CATHCART. No; but, naturally enough, it led me to reflect upon the rationale of prayer. I wondered whether the officiating clergyman had the least expectation that he would get what he asked for; and, if so, upon what that expectation was founded.

LEWIS. I don't suppose he thought much about it. The good man probably recited his prayers out of habit.

CATHCART. Well, it is his occupation, according to that line of Swift: "And the chaplain, for 'tis his trade, shall ever pray." Every occupation tends to become mechanical. For myself, like Tennyson's Northern Farmer, "I thowt a said wot a owt to à said an' I comed awäay "-revolving in my mind that question as to the rationale of his performance.

LEWIS. For the philosopher, a theory of prayer is one of the most difficult things in the world; for the devout man, the practice of it is one of the easiest.

CATHCART. A good sentence à la Gibbon. But the difficulty about prayer is not confined to philosophers. I came the other day upon the account given by a little French actress of the form which her orisons take "quand il m'arrive de prier Dieu."

"O mon Dieu! si toutefois vous existez, écoutez-moi si toutefois vous pouvez m'écouter, et ayez la suprême bonté, si toutefois vous êtes bon, de m'accorder la petite faveur que je vous demande, si vraiment vous pouvez faire tout ce que vous voulez."

LEWIS. The young lady would hardly be described by theologians as filled with the Spirit, but she was unquestionably the mouthpiece of the Zeitgeist. Here is a recent book by a grave divine which expresses the same dubiety. Its author is a Swiss Protestant pastor, M. V'ilfrid Monod, and its title Aux Croyants et aux Athées.

TREMAINE. I wonder whether he is any relation to Adolphe Monod, an excellent and much-esteemed clergyman of the same persuasion, whom I remember seeing and talking to at Geneva when I was a boy. I have never lost the feeling of his sweetness and winningness.

LEWIS. I think a son. He is evidently a sincere and good man whose open eyes desire the truth, though he appears to me a somewhat confused thinker. In all his perplexities he seems to find an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast, in what he calls the Gospel, that is to say, Luther's doctrine of justification--a doctrine certainly dependent on dogmas which he rejects.

CATHCART. What is the view which he takes about prayer? LEWIS. He is, as I explained, an earnestly religious man. He begins his Essay, "Le Problème de Dieu," by the sweeping assertion that faith in God, explicit or implicit, is the mainspring of all human life, and, in the last analysis, of all thought. Well, he finds the attribution of omnipotence to le bon Dieu quite untenable. Nature, he says, does not reveal it-though presenting traces of latent finality and organising intelligence. As little does history. More, it is only by rejecting the traditional apologetic of the Deity's actual omnipotence that we can reconcile the spectacle of humanity, as it is, with faith in Providence.

CATHCART. All this may be true but it is certainly not new. The gentleman has run his head against the old problem, "Unde malum?" Of what use? He certainly won't find a solution of it. He might as well try to jump off his own shadow, as Goethe said. He had far better not occupy himself in great matters which are too high for him, but cultivate his garden; attend to his preachings and prayer meetings and pious eared old ladies.

LEWIS. Unfortunately for him, perhaps, that is just what he can't do. He goes on to observe that one is led to identical conclusions in what he calls "le domaine de l'expérience religieuse par excellence, c'est à dire le terrain de la prière." The orthodox theory is that the Deity is all loving, all wise, and all powerful. He knows all the evils under the sun, and He could remedy them all-but He systematically abstains from doing so. That means, in the last analysis, that He wills the existing reality.

CATHCART. The argument is sound enough. Has M. Wilfrid Monod any reply to it?

LEWIS. He notices the reply sometimes made that God does not will but permits the evil, a formula which, he justly observes, means that things go on as if there were no God, and lands us in a dilemma which he expresses as follows:

66

'Ou Dieu a prévu ce monde sanglant et l'a voulu, auquel cas il est diminué moralement ou Dieu n'a pas prévu ce monde et l'a voulu, auquel cas il est diminué métaphysiquement."

CATHCART. It is an ugly dilemma, and logical enough. Does M. Monod find any way of escape from it?

LEWIS. He mentions one way of escape sometimes suggested— the hypothesis that God has designed a world which should be free, that is a world of which the course could not be foreknown. But so to think, he discerns, is to diminish God both metaphysically and morally metaphysically considered, it deprives Him of both omnipotence and omniscience, while ethically, what are we to think of a Deity who was not withheld from the creative act by the possibility of a sinful and suffering world?

CATHCART. M. Monod then, it would seem, believes in a Deity shorn of the Attribute of omnipotence: a sort of Platonic Demiurgus who made the world as perfect as He could. John Stuart Mill, I remember, thought such a Theistic conception might be tenable. But can this hypothetical God be the object of prayer? Is He not exposed to all my French actress's dubiety? Is it not true that "he that cometh to God must believe that He is and that He is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him"? If we are to pray, must we not believe in a real God who interests us, and is interested in us?

TREMAINE. Which means dogma. There can be no prayer, no worship, without dogma. One cannot adore, or pray to, what one can conceive of only as a possibility. There is a fine and true saying of Amiel, "Religion consists in personifying the Eternal." I grant you that neither nature, nor history, nor actual life reveals to us a God who can be an object of worship.

CATHCART. We must go elsewhere for that revelation. I fall back, as usual, on Voltaire, who, at all events, was a Theist and suffered reproach for the sake of the faith which was in him. Some more advanced spirits went so far as to call him a bigot. These are the lines with which he begins his poem, L'Existence de Dieu:

"

Tout annonce de Dieu l'éternelle existence,

On ne peut le comprendre, on ne peut l'ignorer;
La voix de l'univers annonce sa puissance,

Et la voix de notre cœur qu'il faut l'adorer."

TREMAINE. Masculine common sense was the great note of Voltaire, though his unconquerable love of persiflage often overpowered it. It seems to me that the propositions in these four lines are unquestionably true. The universe does reveal to us eternal Energy, incomprehensible, of course, and there is in the human heart an instinct to adore that First Great Cause. I say eternal Energy because I think that is the true account of the God of Voltaire.

CATHCART. "The God of Voltaire." I suppose the conceptions of God which obtain among men vary almost infinitely. Every man has his own God, so to speak. Who was it that said "Si Dieu a fait l'homme dans son image, l'homme le lui a joliment rendu "?

LEWIS. That is why so many people ask with Goethe "Who dare name Him? "Wer darf ihn nennen." I came the other day in Rothe's Stille Stunden upon a passage which seems like an echo of Goethe's question. "God is a great word. He who feels this and knows it, will judge more mildly and justly of those who confess that they dare not say I believe in God."