prayer possesses superhuman and supernatural powers.[1] But in prayer he applies immediately to God. Thus God is to him the immediate cause, the fulfilment of prayer, the power which realizes prayer. But an immediate act of God is a miracle; hence miracle is essential to the religious view. Religion explains everything miraculously. That miracles do not always happen, is indeed obvious, as that man does not always pray. But the consideration that miracles do not always happen, lies outside the nature of religion, in the empirical or physical mode of view only. Where religion begins, there also begins miracle. Every true prayer is a miracle, an act of the wonder-working power. External miracles themselves only make visible internal miracles, that is, they are only a manifestation in time and space, and therefore as a special fact, of what in and by itself is a fundamental position of religion, namely, that God is, in general, the supernatural, immediate cause of all things. The miracle of fact is only an impassioned expression of religion, a moment of inspiration. Miracles happen only in extraordinary crises, in which there is an exaltation of the feelings: hence there are miracles of anger. No miracle is wrought in cold blood. But it is precisely in moments of passion that the latent nature reveals itself. Man does not always pray with equal warmth and power. Such prayers are therefore ineffective. Only ardent prayer reveals the nature of prayer. Man truly prays when he regards prayer as in itself a sacred power, a divine force. So it is with miracles. Miracles happen—no matter whether few or many—wherever there is, as a basis for them, a belief in the miraculous. But the belief in miracle is no theoretic or objective mode of viewing the world and Nature; miracle realizes practical wants, and that in contradiction with the laws which are imperative to the reason; in miracle man subjugates Nature, as in itself a nullity, to his own ends, which he regards as a reality; miracle is the superlative expression of spiritual or religious utilitarianism; in miracle all things
- ↑ According to the notion of barbarians, therefore, prayer is a coercive power, a chasm. But this conception is an unchristian one (although even among many Christians, the idea is accepted that prayer constrains God); for in Christianity God is essentially feeling satisfied in itself, Almighty goodness, which denies nothing to (religious) feeling. The idea of coercion presupposes an unfeeling God.
