out, retirement within oneself, in order to have relation only with one’s own being. Only a trusting, open, hearty, fervent prayer is said to help; but this help lies in the prayer itself. As everywhere in religion the subjective, the secondary, the conditionating, is the prima causa, the objective fact; so here, these subjective qualities are the objective nature of prayer itself.[1]
It is an extremely superficial view of prayer to regard it as an expression of the sense of dependence. It certainly expresses such a sense, but the dependence is that of man on his own heart, on his own feeling. He who feels himself only dependent, does not open his mouth in prayer; the sense of dependence robs him of the desire, the courage for it; for the sense of dependence is the sense of need. Prayer has its root rather in the unconditional trust of the heart, untroubled by all thought of compulsive need, that its concerns are objects of the absolute Being, that the almighty, infinite nature of the Father of men, is a sympathetic, tender, loving nature, and that thus the dearest, most sacred emotions of man are divine realities. But the child does not feel itself dependent on the father as a father; rather, he has in the father the feeling of his own strength, the consciousness of his own worth, the guarantee of his existence, the certainty of the fulfilment of his wishes; on the father rests the burden of care; the child, on the contrary, lives careless and happy in reliance on the father, his visible guardian spirit, who desires nothing but the child’s welfare and happiness. The father makes the child an end, and himself the means of its existence. The child, in asking something of its father, does not apply to him as a being distinct from itself, a master, a person in general, but it applies to him in so far as he is dependent on, and determined by his paternal feeling, his love for his child.[2] The entreaty is
- ↑ Also, on subjective grounds, social prayer is more effectual than isolated prayer. Community enhances the force of emotion, heightens confidence. What we are unable to do alone we are able to do with others. The sense of solitude is the sense of limitation: the sense of community is the sense of freedom. Hence it is that men, when threatened by the destructive powers of Nature, crowd together. “Multorum preces impossibile est, ut non impetrent, inquit Ambrosius. . . . Sanctae orationis fervor quanto inter plures collectior tanto ardet diutius ac intensius cor divinum penetrate. . . . Negatur singularitati, quod conceditur charitati.”—Sacra Hist. de Gentis Hebr. ortu. P. Paul. Mezger. Aug. Vind. 1700, pp. 668, 669.
- ↑ In the excellent work, Theanthropos, eine Reihe von Aphorismen (Zurich, 1838), the idea of the sense of dependence, of omnipotence, of prayer, and of love, is admirably developed.
