The Kernel and the Husk/Prayer, Heaven, Hell

XVII

My dear ——,

You ask me whether one who has seceded from miraculous to non-miraculous Christianity still finds himself able to pray as before. But towards the end of your letter you amend your question. You are "quite sure," you are pleased to say, from what you know of me, that I shall "answer this question affirmatively, though in defiance of all logic:" and therefore, anticipating my answer, you state your objection to it beforehand, and ask me how I can meet your objection, which is to this effect: "If the laws of nature are never suspended, then it is absurd, or perhaps impious, to pray for that which implies their suspension. For example, a friend of mine may be in a stage of disease so fatally advanced that, without a suspension of the laws of nature, it is no more possible that he should recover from the disease than that his body should rise from the grave. According to the tenets of your non-miraculous Christianity, must I not abstain from praying that he may recover?"

I do not see any great difficulty here. Change the hypothesis for a moment. Suppose your friend to be no longer living, but dead. Are you willing—would you be willing, even were you the most orthodox believer in miraculous Christianity—to pray that the body of your dead friend might arise revivified from the grave a week after he had been laid in it? You know you would not be willing. Why not? You cannot say "Because it is possible," for you would admit (on the supposition of your being a believer in the miraculous) not only that it is possible, but that it has actually been done in times past. But you would feel, I am sure, that you dare not, and ought not, to pray for this object, because such a prayer would be a revolt against that established order of things which you recognize to be a manifestation of God's present will. I say "God's present will," because you do not (if you agree with me) regard death as being in accordance with God's future will: it is an evil, sprung, not from God, but from evil, out of which God is working good. But He bids us acquiesce in it during our present imperfect state of existence; and hence, though you believe He will ultimately destroy death, you do not feel justified in praying that its present operation may be neutralized by a suspension of the laws of nature.

Now to return to your own supposition that your friend is not dead, but merely in danger of death. Health and life are dependent upon many complex causes, among which (it will be admitted by all) are those mysterious fluctuations of the thoughts and emotions, which I believe in many cases to proceed—I speak in a metaphor—straight from God Himself. To one who believes that the spirits of men are in constant communion with the all-sustaining Spirit of the Creator, the thoughts of men may well seem to be as dependent upon their divine Origin as the air in my little room is at this moment dependent upon the changes of the circumambient atmosphere. Of course, if you are a thorough-going, scientific hope-nothing and trust-nothing, such a belief as this appears to you an idle dream. From your point of view, you are a machine; your friend is a machine; all men are machines; the world is a machine; the action and inter-action of all these animate and inanimate machines is predetermined, even to the minutest movement of a limb, or most fleeting shade of thought, in each one of the myriads of human mechanisms called men.

The thorough-going materialist, when he rebukes his son and tells him that he "ought not to have" told a lie, knows perfectly well that his son could not possibly help telling that lie, and that he was bound by all the laws of nature to tell it. The materialist father is, in fact, telling a lie himself; only more deliberately than the little son. He is using words which have no true meaning for him, as a kind of oil to grease the wheels of the little machine before him, having learned by accumulated experience that this lying phrase, "You ought to have," has for many thousands of years proved a very effective kind of oil, and that the true and scientific phrase, "It would have been better if you could have, but you could not," would be wholly inefficacious. But since it is obvious that this view of existence converts all moral language, and almost all the higher relations of life, into one gigantic lie, I make no apology at all for putting it by with contempt as being beneath the consideration of a child of ten—at which age, as far as I remember I grappled with this question of predestination, and settled it (so far as I was concerned, for ever) by coming to the conclusion that "it does not work." Now when you have once given up, as unworkable, the theory that all our thoughts and emotions spring necessarily from antecedent material causes, you have bidden good-bye to Knowledge, so far as concerns the origin of human thought, and you are thrown back upon Faith. I believe therefore, and I make no apology for my belief, that the mysterious fluctuations of human thought and will may sometimes proceed from God without the intervention of material causes, perhaps in virtue of the existence of some invisible law of union by which the souls of men are united to God and to one another. This being my belief—which at all events does not contain so many and such perpetually-recurring inconsistencies as the belief of your thorough-going materialist—you will understand, without much further explanation, when and why I should pray even for those of whom the physician is inclined to despair. Faith and hope, have, before now, worked such wonders in healing, that "while there is life there is hope" has passed into a proverb. I cannot be sure that my prayers might not have some kind of direct power—by a kind of brain-wave such as we have heard of lately—in affecting the emotions and spirits of the sufferer. It is seldom that even a physician can speak with certainty about the immediate issue of a disease: and whatsoever is uncertain is (if it be also right) a reasonable subject for prayer. But if I were myself absolutely convinced that there was no chance of my friend's recovery without a suspension of the laws of nature, I should feel that prayer rightly and naturally gave way to resignation.

No one however who is in the habit of praying will think it necessary to spend much time or thought in discriminating exactly between that which may be, and that which cannot possibly be. He must know that, very often, where his prayer trenches on the province of the material, the line cannot be drawn except by an expert in science, which he may not happen to be; and besides, in the mood of prayer, he will feel that the scientific and discriminating spirit is out of place. He is not thinking of things scientifically, but spiritually, putting his wishes before the Father in heaven, and content to couple each wish with an "If it be possible." Sometimes he learns, after constant repetition, that the prayer is an unfit one, and he discontinues it; in that case he has gained by his prayer a closer insight into, and conformity with, the will of God. In other cases he continues his prayer and receives an answer to it—either the answer that he himself desires, or some other perhaps, quite different from that which he expected, but one which he ultimately recognizes to be the best. But there will be cases where he will continue his prayer, feeling it to be right and natural, although he receives no answer to it at all, so far as he can discern. For he will feel quite certain that no genuine prayer is wasted. Our spirits, or our angels—to use the language of metaphor—are not on earth: they sit together in heaven, that is to say, in the heart of God; and whenever one of us can conceive a genuinely unselfish and righteous wish for a brother spirit and wing it with faith so that it flies up to heaven—a flight by no means so easy or so common as we suppose, and probably not often flown, unless the arrow is feathered by deeds and pains as well as words—then it not only brings back a blessing upon the wisher but also thrills through the spiritual assembly above and comes back as a special blessing to the person prayed for. But need I add that this is not a process to be performed mechanically? There is no recipe for effectual prayer.

But, to come down from metaphors, let me attempt to answer your question, "What difference of attitude in prayer will there be between the believer in natural, and the believer in miraculous, Christianity?" As far as my experience goes, there will be very little; except that the former will be rather more disposed to ask, before uttering a prayer, how far the granting of it might indirectly affect others. Logically and theoretically there ought to be a great deal of difference; for if the believer in the miraculous were consistent, he might naturally pray that a miracle might be performed for him, as it has been for others, for a good purpose. As a matter of fact, the prayers of children trained in orthodoxy are thus sometimes consistent. I dare say one might find a child who has prayed that the sun might stand still that he might have a longer holiday. And why not now—from the child's point of view—as well as formerly? But I suppose few men in England, now, even of the strictly orthodox, are in this puerile stage. Almost all full-grown English Protestants recognize that, although miracles were freely performed from the year 4004 B.C. to, say A.D. 61 or thereabouts—when St. Paul shook off the serpent and took no harm—yet "the age of miracles is now past." Yet I have heard of men of business who make a point of praying earnestly on the subject of commercial speculations, the rise and fall of consols, the price of sugar and the like. Will any one maintain that people are not the worse for such prayers as these, or that the believer in natural Christianity is not a gainer by losing the desire and the power to utter them? On the whole, I see but one subject of prayer mentioned in our English Prayer-book, as to which natural Christianity would probably dictate silence: I mean the weather. It might be argued that, "since the weather is affected by human action (by the clearing of forests, draining of marshes, and so on), and since prayers affect human action, therefore they do affect the weather indirectly, and may affect it directly." But from "indirect" to "direct" is a great leap; and I am moved toward resignation rather than prayer, by the thought that, in revealing to us more and more of the extent of the causes and effects of meteorological phenomena, God seems to be shewing us that, in asking for weather that suits ourselves, we may be asking for weather that may not suit others. I should be sorry to see harvest prayers excluded from our Church service; but I think they should express our hope and trust in God's orderly government of the seasons, beseeching Him to bestow on the husbandman patience and skill so as to meet and improve adversity, and on the nation thrift and frugality so as to avoid waste.

Since writing the last paragraph I was interrupted; and now, returning to my letter, I feel strongly inclined to cancel the last two or three pages of apologetic argumentation; arguing about prayer seems so absurdly useless. Yet perhaps my remarks may weigh for something with you in your present oscillation. They may possibly prevent you from giving up, in a moment of virtuous logic, a habit which, once discontinued, is not easily resumed. Let them pass then; but let them not pass without a protest that they by no means express my sense of the vital necessity of prayer for a Christian. To me it seems the very breath of our spiritual life, as needful for peace and union with God as communion between children and parents is needful for domestic concord. Without it, faith must speedily vanish. Even a comparatively dull and lifeless petition at stated intervals has some value as a sign-post, indicating the road on which we ought to be travelling though our feet may be straying elsewhere. But in truth real Christian prayer (mostly silent) should be, as St. Paul says "without ceasing;" for prayer is but aspiration and desire, emerging into shape. When a man has reached such a height that he has ceased to wish to be something better than he is, then and then only may he cease to pray.

One kind of prayer at all events I have felt able to retain which seems to me of far more value than the prayer for fair weather—I mean prayer for the dead. I do not deny that, when coupled with superstitious views about heaven and hell, the custom of praying for the dead may result in superstition, and even in the encouragement of immorality; and the hired and conventional prayers for the dead prevalent in the sixteenth century appear to me to have constituted an abuse against which our English Reformers did well to protest. But these abuses and corruptions seem to me accidental, and quite insufficient to deter us from use of the most helpful of spiritual habits. I do not propose to argue about it, but you may like to know the sort of accident by which I was led to form this habit, and the practical reasons for which I clung to it, and still cling to it, with the deepest conviction that it is not only spiritually useful, but also based on spiritual truth.

Many years ago a brother of mine was drowned at sea through the sudden capsizing of a vessel by night. When the news came, I was at first distracted between an intense desire to pray as before, and a kind of instinctive and general repugnance to all prayers for the dead as being "a Romanist practice." All the books I had read, and all the notions I had formed, about the fixed future of the dead, suggested that such prayers were useless, if not blasphemous. On the other side there was no argument at all, nothing but a vague strong desire to pray. The painful conflict of that night—a conflict, as it seems to me now, between true natural religion and the false appearance of revealed religion—is still present to my recollection. At last it occurred to me that more than a month had elapsed between the death and our knowledge of the death, and throughout all those thirty days my prayers had gone up to God for one whose soul was no longer upon earth. Were those prayers wasted? I could not believe it. Besides, we had not yet received full details of the loss of the vessel. It was just possible that my brother might have been saved in one of the ship's boats: he might be still living, and in sore need of help: how monstrous, if it were so, that I should in such a crisis cease to pray for him! So with doubt and trembling I still continued my custom, fashioning some kind of prayer to suit the emergency. While I was in this oscillating state of mind, news came that a second boatful, and almost immediately afterwards that a third, had been picked up at sea. My brother was not in either: but why might there not be a fourth? For some time, with less doubt than before, I continued to pray. Days, weeks, months rolled on, and now all hope had slipped away; but the habit was now fixed. I could not, or would not, break it. Praying day and night for one who was possibly living; just possibly living; probably not living; certainly dead—I had learned to realize the presence of my brother's spirit, as very near and close to me, as one with whom I was still in some kind of communion; and now to drop his name out of my prayers, simply because I should never touch his hand again in this world, seemed a faithless, a wicked, a cruel act. The prayer could not indeed remain the same in circumstances so completely changed; I could of course no longer pray that the dead might be restored to me on earth: but it was still open to me to make mention of his name, and to beseech God that he and I might meet again in heaven: and thus, with a curious kind of compromise, worthy of a less youthful theologian, I circumvented my own orthodoxy by still praying in reality for my brother while I appeared to be praying for myself. More than seven-and-twenty years have now passed away, but not a night or morning has passed without the mention of that familiar name; and I entreat you to believe me that, next to the power of Christ Himself upon the soul, I have not found, nor can I imagine, any influence so potent as this habit of praying for the dead, to detach the mind from petty and visible things, to unlock the spiritual world, to carry the soul up to the very source and centre of spiritual life, and to bring us into faithful communion with the Father of the spirits of all flesh.

You see I have kept my promise of not arguing on this matter. I have simply told you how I have longed and doubted; how my doubts were dissipated by practice; and what strength I have personally derived from the practice. Probably this will seem to you, if interesting, at all events inadequate. "Logically," you will perhaps say to yourself, "he ought to have attempted first to convince me that the eternal state of the dead is not finally determined at the moment of death; so that prayer may reasonably be expected to have some power to change their condition. He ought to have told me whether he believes in a Purgatory, or in a limited Hell; whether he is a Universalist; or whether he believes in the annihilation of all who are not to be saved. In a word, he ought to have given me a full account of his theory about the condition of the dead, before he commends to me the habit of praying for them."

Here I fear I shall terribly disappoint you; but, at the risk of whatever disappointment, I will confess to you the whole truth. This part of my Manual of Theology has large print, large margin, and several blank pages. I believe some things with such force and clearness that I prefer to say I do not believe them—I see them: but about many other things which most people believe, I know little or nothing. Do I believe in a Hell? Yes, as firmly as I believe in a Heaven; but not in your Hell perhaps, and certainly not in the ordinary guide-books to Hell and Heaven. Perhaps some would call my Hell "merely retribution," or "an illogical and ill-defined Purgatory;" and from their point of view they could be right in complaining of its indefiniteness; for they profess to know all about it and to be able to define it. But from my point of view I am equally right in speaking indefinitely; for I profess to have only a glimpse of it. Of the principles of Hell and Heaven I am certain, but of the details I am entirely ignorant. I know nothing whatever, and I know that no one else knows anything whatever, about the state of the dead; except that they are just as much in God's hand when dead as when living, and that He will ultimately do the best thing for each; but what that "best thing" may be I cannot tell in detail, although I am very sure that it will be one thing for St. Francis and quite another for Nero. For the rest, all the elaborate structures and fancy-fabrics of Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, Limbo, and other regions, whether theologians or poets be the architects, appear to me built upon the flimsiest foundations, tags of texts, fragments of words, quagmires of metaphor, quicksands of hyperbole. No; such real knowledge—or shall we say such conviction?—as we have about the eternal future of the dead, is to be based, not upon argument or inference from minute and disputable interpretations of small portions of Scripture, but mainly upon our faith in the divine righteousness and power. You will not, I hope, misunderstand my words that "God will do the best thing for each," or draw from them the inference, "Then he is a Universalist after all." I took for granted—I hope I was not wrong—that you would remember the definition of justice which you have read in Plato. In fact therefore I merely expressed in those words my conviction that God would be "just" to us after death.[1] Might we not also define the highest mercy, in the same terms in which we define the highest justice, as being the feeling that prompts us to "do what is best for each"? And, if so, does it not seem to follow that in Hell God will not cease to be merciful, and in Heaven God will not cease to be just? And hence are we not brought close to the conclusion that Heaven and Hell are not really places, but the diverse results of the operation of the Eternal—the just Mercy, the merciful Justice—upon the diverse dead? But here the question widens and deepens into expanses and depths altogether too vast and profound for me, and I give up the problem. All that I know is, that there will be hereafter a just retribution.

Yet if I am to tell you my own conjectural imaginations—for who can help at times imagining what the infinite unknown may be, however loth he may be to insist or dogmatize about it, or even to bestow much attention on it, when the urgent present presses its superior claims?—I will say for myself that I cannot believe I shall have served all my apprenticeship to righteousness in my brief life upon this earth, or that I shall be fit immediately after death, for that closest communion with God which appears to me the Heaven of Heavens. Some cleansing retribution, some further purification, seems to me necessary and likely for myself—and, I must add, for the greater number of those human beings with whom I have had to do—before we attain to that blessed consummation.

"So you believe in a Purgatory then?" How do I know? Say rather, I conjecture there may be many heavens. In any case, I find it very easy to imagine a retribution and a purification that shall be purely spiritual, without having recourse to any material flames or physical horrors. Some people find a difficulty in this notion: they consider it, but deliberately put it aside; as if mere remorse, sorrow, and self-condemnation, could never be bitter enough to constitute a just Hell. I do not think they have ever realized—perhaps they have never tried to realize—the pain that may be felt by a spirit sitting alone, away from this familiar world and every well-known face, and quietly judging and condemning itself. A mere accident, a ludicrous accident, once gave me a moment's experience of this feeling, and I have never been able to forget it, never been able to put aside the conviction that that feeling, intensified, might constitute Hell.

It happened in this way. Some years ago, before nitrous oxide had come into very general use among dentists, I went to have a tooth extracted, and determined to try the gas. Perhaps I had some misgivings that it was a little cowardly; perhaps I was a little nervous; in any case I remember at the last moment thinking that I should like to be conscious of the precise moment when unconsciousness came; I remember struggling to retain consciousness—even when a tell-tale throbbing in the temples shewed that something new was going on—protesting to myself that the gas had "no power," "no power at all yet," "I don't believe it's going to have any power';—till the portcullis came down. I suppose the consequence was that I inhaled rather more than was usual; and when I came to myself I heard the voices of the dentist and the physician—a long way off, as it seemed to me, but with perfect distinctness—saying that "he was a long time coming to" and they did not "quite like the look of things," and so on. Meantime I lay motionless and without power either to move or speak, but perfectly conscious. I took in the whole situation at once. I was dead. I had passed into another state of existence. I could think more clearly than before. I was a spirit. And then the thought came pressing in upon me, as I reviewed my whole life and the manner of my death, that to avoid a little pain I had done a wrong thing and had deserted those who needed me and would miss me. No fear possessed me, not the slightest fear, of any external punishment for the fault which I thought I had committed: but in a detached solitude I seemed to be quietly and coldly sitting in judgment upon myself, impartially hearing what I had to say in self-defence, rejecting it as inadequate, and passing against myself the verdict of Guilty. Painful, increasingly painful, the burden of this self-condemnation seemed to press and crush me down more and more past power of bearing, so that at last, when in one moment I recovered both power of motion and knowledge that I was alive again, I leapt up from the dentist's arm-chair, and, without taking the least notice of the two operators, I gave vent to my feelings by shouting aloud the well-known words from Clarence's dream—

"—and for a space
Could not believe but that I was in hell."

I shall not easily forget the look of mingled humour and horror with which the dentist replied, "Well, sir, considering you are a clergyman, I should have hoped it might have been the other place." I tried to explain. I assured him that it was a quotation from Shakespeare; that I had not really believed that I was in the place commonly called Hell; and so on. But I am quite sure my explanations were utterly ineffectual; and to this day I probably labour under the suspicion, in the minds of at least two worthy persons, of having committed some horrible crime by which my conscience is racked with agony. In reality, however, it was a small offence, if any, for which I suffered that bad quarter of a minute; and I have often since thought that, if the mind is capable of inflicting such pain upon itself for a venial error, those pangs must be terrible indeed with which our sinful souls may be forced to scourge themselves when we judicially review the actions of a selfish life with a compulsory knowledge of all the evil, direct and indirect, which we have wrought, and when we realize at last—ah, how differently from the dull, decorous, conventional contrition with which we droned out the words on earth, kneeling on the hassocks in the family pew—that "we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and done those things which we ought not to have done."

But why do I thus discourse in detail upon a subject about which I have admitted that I know no details? It is in order to shew you that though I do not know much, the little I do know greatly influences me. The thought of a material Hell has probably contributed largely to insanity, and has exercised a baneful influence upon many women and children; but the majority of healthy men who profess to believe in a pit of flame are little influenced by it. It is so horrible, so unnatural, so unjust, that in their heart of hearts they feel sure the good God cannot mean it; He will let them off; or they will get off somehow—by absolution, by forensic justification, by baptism, by uncovenanted mercies, or what not. This is but natural. How can it not be natural to believe that an unnatural and arbitrary Hell may be dispensed with by an unnatural and arbitrary indulgence? I have no such consolations. With me, Hell is a different thing altogether: it is natural, it is inevitable, it is just, it is merciful. Not a day passes but I think of it and anticipate it in some sort for myself and my friends. Tout sepayera: this act, I say, or this neglect, was wrong, and must have been injurious: the doers cannot escape from the consequences of it; I do not wish to escape from the consequences of it. God will work good out of evil; but He will be just, not indulgent. I do not want Him to be indulgent. Thus Heaven and Hell, impending over the routine of my every-day life, become to me practical and potent realities; but they are real to me because the conceptions I have formed of them are in accordance with the profound laws of spiritual nature, and quite independent of the conflicting fancies of theologians.

Ask me what I trust to be in Heaven, and I can give you no answer save that one which I have often given you before—a being capable of loving and of serving God. Ask me the nature of Hell and Heaven, and my only reply is that they will be God's retribution. Ask me whether all will be hereafter "saved," and I am silent, or merely answer that God is good, and that I believe a time will come when we, in Him, shall look back, and around, and forward, and shall see that His work has been "very good." Enough for me to work and fight on the side of God and against Evil, that His righteous Kingdom may come and bring with it the time when His work will be seen to have been "very good." As for other details, I know nothing and delight in knowing nothing. I do not know whether I shall live again on earth or elsewhere; whether I shall be a being of three dimensions, or four, or of no dimensions at all; whether I shall be in space or out of space. It is far better to give up speculations about accidental trifles such as these: for accidents they are, as compared with the essence of the second life, which consists in Love. Do not give up the belief in that, at any cost; least of all, at the cost of a little banter. "But surely it is possible that our very highest and purest conceptions of Heaven may fall short of the reality." Granted: but we must hold fast to the belief that there is at all events a proportion between our best terrestrial aspirations and their celestial equivalents. We must reject, as from Satan, the suggestion (was it Spinoza's?) that there is no more likeness between God and our conception of God than between the constellation Canis and a dog. "God may not be Love:" I do not believe you: but if He is not Love, He will be some celestial form of Love, corresponding to our Love, only infinitely better. "You will not retain your individuality:" possibly not, but certainly we shall have something corresponding to individuality, only better. And so of the rest. We shall talk humbly, as beseems our microcosmic faculties; we are but the transitory tenants of a little world, which is to the Universe but as a dew-drop to the ocean: yet even a dew-drop exhibits the same infrangible laws of light and the same divine glories that are manifested in the rainbow and the sunset. So it is with a human soul: there are laws in it of righteousness and justice and retribution—laws which cannot be broken by the fictions and illusions of theology, but must be manifested in all places and in all time, now and for all eternity, on earth, in Heaven, in Hell.

  1. Has not some confusion of thought arisen from a habit of confusing "just" with "severe"? I believe some men would feel more reverently towards God, if they would speak, not of His "justice," but of His "fairness."