Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/682

There are places where one does not want to be amused, and church is first among them. I shock myself sadly when I rear myself upright during the long prayer in the manner which I have confessed; but how can I help it if the spirit of the performance does not hold me from such demonstration? I never think of lifting my eyes during the first prayer, which they call the Invocation, or during the short, earnest, heartfelt prayer which follows the sermon. The truth of the matter seems to me that the long prayer is not a prayer at all, but a sort of address or statement, made nominally to the one great bourn of all prayers, but really to the congregation. The Invocation wings its way straight to heaven, but the long prayer goes the round of the pews.

I have said that it offends against reverence and humor. Yes, even although, and precisely because, it sometimes quickens mirth. Humor is too fine a spirit not to know its place in the world, and to resent any offer of privilege where it does not belong. It really hurts the cause of humor to laugh in church. As for reverence the good God must be very patient with us, if He sets the long prayer down only to the score of our stupidity.

The whole question of prayer is a difficult one. Of prayer as petition, that is; there can be no doubt of its dignity as a form of praise or a means of communion. If we believe that our needs are known, down to the obscurest necessity which we ourselves only half divine; if we are sure that our personal good is inevitably involved with the universal good which is slowly arriving, why, why, do we trouble deaf heaven with our bootless cries? Deaf? To be sure: since it sees the end from the beginning, and knows that end to be very good. The most majestic verse in the Bible, and the most comforting, is, ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’

However, the question is quite as vexed as it is difficult; and people have resolute views. I would not offend them. I would only ask them to think of the matter fairly the next time they bow their heads in church and embark on the long prayer.

Characters in Recent Fiction

By Margaret Sherwood

There is a certain thinness of quality, as of mere thought, about many of the vast assemblage of characters that emerge from my large pile of recent novels; and it is interesting, if somewhat dismaying, to see the variety of ulterior purposes which these imaginary personages serve. Has one a grievance? He seeks a wardrobe for it, and sends it forth in hat and feather, like Hawthorne’s Feathertop, to stalk the world, pretending to be alive. Has one a plea to make? It is straightway personified in an ideal human form, and projected into the world, to 'dazzle when the sun goes down,' like fair Inez. The embodiment of a grievance or of an ideal is, of course, an old, old liter-