The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceshows how independent the prayer-instinct is of usual doctrinal complications.Mr. Myers writes:—“I am glad that you have asked me about prayer, because I haverather strong ideas on the subject. First consider what are the facts.There exists around us a spiritual universe, and that universe is inactual relation with the material. From the spiritual universe comesthe energy which maintains the material; the energy which makesthe life of each individual spirit. Our spirits are supported by a perpetualindrawal of this energy, and the vigor of that indrawal isperpetually changing, much as the vigor of our absorption of materialnutriment changes from hour to hour.“I call these ‘facts’ because I think that some scheme of this kind isthe only one consistent with our actual evidence; too complex tosummarize here. How, then, should we act on these facts? Plainlywe must endeavor to draw in as much spiritual life as possible, andwe must place our minds in any attitude which experience shows tobe favorable to such indrawal. Prayer is the general name for thatattitude of open and earnest expectancy. If we then ask to whom topray, the answer (strangely enough) must be that that does not muchmatter. The prayer is not indeed a purely subjective thing;—it meansa real increase in intensity of absorption of spiritual power or grace;—but we do not know enough of what takes place in the spiritualworld to know how the prayer operates;—who is cognizant of it, orthrough what channel the grace is given. Better let children pray toChrist, who is at any rate the highest individual spirit of whom wehave any knowledge. But it would be rash to say that Christ himselfhear us; while to say that God hears us is merely to restate the firstprinciple—that grace flows in from the infinite spiritual world.”Let us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the beliefthat power is absorbed until the next lecture, when our dogmaticconclusions, if we have any, must be reached. Let this lecture stillconfine itself to the description of phenomena; and as a concreteexample of an extreme sort, of the way in which the prayerful lifemay still be led, let me take a case with which most of you must beacquainted, that of George Muller of Bristol, who died in 1898.Muller’s prayers were of the crassest petitional order. Early in life heresolved on taking certain Bible promises in literal sincerity, and on414