Sunday, January 14, 2007
Sermons and Lessons
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Charles Gore, Bishop of Birmingham since 1905, was born in 1853. He was educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford (Scholar), and became Chaplain in Ordinary to the King in 1901, being appointed Bishop of Worcester in 1902. A leading social reformer, his sermons are largely devoted to a consideration of sociological problems; he was a worker on behalf of the poor, whose misery had drawn his active sympathies, arid a strong opponent of sweating in every form. His belief was that "the law should be so amended as to empower the Church with the right of progress, though, at the same time, a community must be secured against passing waves of feeling." Bishop Gore was a typical representative of that most modern of Anglican schools of thought, the wing of the clergy at once High and Broad. His preaching was eloquent yet simple, and he delighted in treating at one time some sociological problem, illuminating it with Christian doctrine; and at another some profound and controversial topic, handling this with acute acumen. His sermons were often dogmatic, but were always popularly intelligible, and he is recognized as being eminently a "people's prelate."
My subject is the Efficacy of Prayer. Prayer is asking. It is the creature asking the Creator. And by the efficacy of prayer we mean that something comes of our asking, for God hears and answers as we ask. And my desire is, if I can, to reinforce in you the will to pray by removing some of those obstacles which, in the minds of good people, very often impede them in taking pains about prayer. Therefore, I ask your attention to four plain points in regard to prayer, if, it may be, I may remove some of those obstacles, conscious or half-unconscious, which impede you and me from taking the pains and giving the systematic energy we might to this life of prayer, and finding what is always the consequence, our delight and our fruit therein.
Let your imagination grasp the vast place which prayer holds in the whole history of our humanity. Man, as you look at him broadly, does set his faculties to move in three directions. He moves out toward Nature to draw out its resources for his advantage; and that is civilization. Its history begins where the savage hunts his prey, or scratches the soil and throws in his grains for the beginning of agriculture. It passes through all that -varied history of industry which reaches up to that vast complexity of the modern system of civilization, by which the resources of the furthest corners of the earth are brought together to the centers where men live, for their convenience and for their luxury. Man moves out toward nature to appropriate its resources; but he moves out also toward his fellow-men, and that is the history of society. It has its rude beginnings in the tribe and in the family; it advances through all human history; it reaches to that point of infinite complexity in which the life of nations in themselves, and the life of nations one with another, is presented to our minds. Man moves out toward nature; it is the history of civilization. He moves out toward his fellow men ; it is the history of society. But he moves out also toward God. Look at the savage; look at man in every stage of civilization; it bridges over his rudest beginning up to the point of his greatest advance. Everywhere in the works which men work, in the structures which they build, in the language which they speak, you observe a good third part of their energy preoccupied with prayer. The religion of which prayer is the characteristic act sets its stamp everywhere on human history. It has, like civilization, like society, a checkered but a definite progress. It passes through that progress most conspicuously in the Old Testament; for at the beginning of the Old Testament you see a worship which has conspicuous affinity with the worship of a merely savage tribe; while at the top it reaches up to that supreme worship which is the worship of the Son of Man. It reaches there its climax. It is the heritage of that society which was founded by Jesus of Nazareth. It has its center in the Lord's Prayer; at the altar it radiates out to consecrate and to bring down blessing upon the whole of life. But contemplate the greatness of the place which prayer occupies in human activity, and ask yourselves, as you are reasonable men, whether you can possibly believe that an activity so regular, so constant, so progressive, so universal, can be based on any mere figment or dream of the imagination. It is one of the most solid results of scientific inquiry that no human faculty can develop or subsist unless it is what scientific men call in correspondence with its environment. That phrase means that no faculty can come into existence or maintain itself unless it is really useful, unless it really corresponds with some fact external to man, in real relation with nature as it is. The eye could not have developed or subsisted unless there had been the reality called light to evoke it and to make it useful. And all this activity of prayer, seen in its various strange forms till it reaches up to rational consistency in the prayers of the Son of Man - all this activity of prayer could not have been evoked, could not have developed, could not have subsisted unless man by praying had been really in relation to the God Who hears; unless all this activity of prayer had been in real correspondence with the fact, and the most fundamental fact on which the universe is built.
There is no doubt that a great many people recognize in a vague sort of way that somehow prayer is a real activity of human life. They can not so far separate themselves from the inner man as to deny that. But to kneel down and pray for this or that seems to postulate a knowledge of God about me, and attention of God to me in particular which, when I consider the vastness of the universe, appears altogether preposterous to suppose.
Brethren, there are a great many cases in which we need to distinguish between our imagination and our reason. This is one. True it is that the imagination of man falls absolutely baffled before the task of imagining how the conscience of God and the activity of God which are over all things absolutely can still comprise an individual knowledge, and an individual attention directed to every particular atom and part of that great universe. Our imagination, I say, is absolutely baffled. But you know quite well that if you take the elementary facts with which physical science deals, like the existence of ether, on which all modern theories of light and heat are based, or the vastness of the solar system, in the same degree your imagination is absolutely baffled. You may not be able to draw a mental picture of things which still your reason may postulate, may force you to believe. Now let your reason go to work, and you will find that it comes very near to postulating about God just this very thing which you find it so hard to imagine. For think a moment; in ourselves, as our knowledge or our activity grows to perfection, it passes out of being merely vague into being definite, detailed, particular. If I go into a schoolroom where there are boys, I know nothing about them except what vague and general knowledge I have of boys as a whole. But the schoolmaster knows them better; that means he knows them more particularly as individuals, with individual histories, with characteristics, and powers, and faults. Or ask in what the preeminent phy¬sician is distinguished from the ordinary doctor. It is, I suppose, in this - that he has, while possessing a broader experience, at the same time a more individual insight into particular cases. All human knowledge and action as it advances to perfection both widens in range, while at the same time it becomes more detailed in application. Carry up that thought until you can perceive the perfect consciousness of God, and you will find that it postulates that God's knowledge and action shall be at once over all His creatures whatso¬ever; but that the universal range and scope of the divine attributes shall diminish not one whit from their particular and personal application, so that God created us, and loves us, and knows us, and deals with us one by one as individually, as particularly, as if there were no one other created, or none so loved. Prayer is possible as the real request addressed by an individual soul out of its individual needs to the Almighty and Universal Father because that Fatherhood of God is not wider in its range than it is absolutely particular and individual in its protecting, in its creating, in its predestinating love.
But God knows so much better than I do what I want. That prayer, the asking God out of my short-sighted folly to give me this or that, is surely a very ignorant procedure. Had I not better put a general trust in God and go on my way submitting to His providence? That is one of the cases in which a thought can take very devout expression while at the same time it may cut at the root of practical religion. For, brethren, we all know that this appeal?we need not pray because God knows already what we want - allows even too easily of our going on our way and practically leaving God out of our lives. Our Lord knew well enough that the object of prayer was not to inform God; your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask it. The object of prayer is not to inform God ; but it is to train us in habits of personal intercourse with God, of personal sonship toward Him. We are made for sonship, sonship is personal correspondence, personal, intelligent cooperation with God. It is a gradually increasing power of familiarity with God: of intercourse with Him, of approach toward Him as person to person.
Well, then, prayer is made necessary for us simply in order that by this necessity for praying, for asking, we may be, as it were, constrained again and again to come before God and, by asking, familiarize ourselves with Him; and as we ask, and as we receive, grow into correspondence, intelligent personal correspondence with God our Father. Who that has prayed diligently, and experienced an answer, does not know that that one experience has done more for the life of religion in his or her soul than a great deal of reading or thinking. That consciousness of our relation to God is a thing which will develop through all eternity; but it has its beginning here, and the reason why God makes things depend upon our asking for them is that we may be thus educated into such personal intercourse with Him that that truth of sonship may never be merged and lost as it is merged and lost in all that direction of life which, unconsecrated by prayer, moved away from God.
But then, lastly, we get to what in a great many people's minds is the heart of the difficulty. I grant all you say about the meaning of prayer; I grant all you say, this or that man will urge. I grant all you say about its place in human history; I would fain pray, I should feel its reasonableness, I should indeed experience the spiritual exaltation which it would give my life; but surely prayer is one of those things which was possible in old days, but is not really possible now when once we have grasped that the world is governed by fixed, unalterable laws. If all this world is the seat of the operation of fixed laws, then surely it is, indeed, purposeless to think to bend down to the level of our wishes and our short-sighted ideas that fixed and unchangeable system. Surely fixed laws, once grasped by the imagination and the mind, render impossible the real action of prayer. To pray is, after all, to anyone who conceives the world as modern knowledge forces us to conceive it, to pray is, after all, only like a bird beating its wings against the bars of an iron cage.
Brethren, this is one of those difficulties which find their strength in people's minds so largely because they do not have the courage or take the pains to think them out to the bottom. The answer to it lies, I think, in two directions. It is Indeed a complete destruction of the idea of prayer that the world should be governed by fixed laws, if prayer is in any sense conceived of as an attempt to bend down the wisdom of God to the level of our folly. But by law what do you mean? You mean the method by which things work. Law is not a power; it is only a method. The universality of law means that God works everywhere and in all things by constant and unchangeable method. This is observed not only in the wide things, in the vast movements of solar systems, but in the tiniest details of nature, so that all the intricacies of the wing of a butterfly are as much the result in each detail of the universal law or method by which God works in all things as the vastest cosmic movements. Everywhere God works by law, by order, by method. But if our Lord taught us anything He taught us this, that prayer is not the attempt to drag down the divine operations to the level of our folly; prayer is a method by which we lift up ourselves into correspondence with the methods of God. It is not the bringing of the methods of God down to our level; it is the lifting up of our will in correspondence with the method of God.
We shall have occasion to notice this at greater length when we come to think about the special lessons which our Lord taught us about prayer. But grasp now that if this be granted, that prayer is not an attempt on our part to make God work otherwise than by the method of law, but is simply one way in which we men correspond with the method of God in the universe; and you will see, I think, that all that difficulty about prayer and law is, if not destroyed and abolished, at least reduced to a position where it can have no reasonable effect upon our lives. For this we must grant God works everywhere by law. But that does not mean that He dispenses with our cooperation. God works everywhere by law. It is by law that gold comes into existence; it is by law that gold is drawn out of the earth; it is by law it is purified; it is by law it is put into circulation as a medium of currency; all that is by law, but it does not happen without human cooperation. The universe is a universe of law; but it postulates our cooperation if we are to receive its benefit. The world is a universe of law; but I shall get nothing of the good things I might get out of the world unless I show an active initiative; unless I take trouble and pains; unless by diligence and fruitful correspondence with the law of the world I obtain those things which are within my grasp. Now, here is a mystery. How is it that if the world is governed by law there is room for my free will, for my cooperation? How is it that if the world is governed by law I cannot simply sit still and say, Whatever comes to me will come to me; and whatever will not come to me will not come to me; I can do nothing. I am in a world of fixed law.
There is a mystery. At present I will not say a word in attempting to solve it. I say, let our freedom be, if you will, denied in theory, you must admit it in fact; you must day by day, moment by moment, act as if everything depended on your cooperation with the system of nature, and it is only in proportion to your initiative, your vigorous will, your constant energy, that you get what nature can afford to you. But I am sure that I am not exaggerating when I say this - there is in regard to prayer absolutely no more difficulty in connection with the reign of law than there is in regard to any other form of activity. There is the same mystery everywhere about human free will. We leave it altogether aside; but we know this, that there are multitudes of things in nature which are laid there in store for me, but which will not come to be mine unless I energetically work for them, unless I energetically correspond with the method of nature. Exactly as truly there are stores of blessings which God intends for you, but which He will not give to you unless you energetically correspond with His law, with His method, by prayer. Prayer is as fruitful a correspondence with the method of God as work?as fruitful and as necessary. Some things you can obtain by work without prayer; some things you can obtain by prayer without other work; some things by the combination of working and praying: but no things at all without your cooperation; and cooperation by prayer has no kind of rational difficulty attendant upon it which does not attend equally upon cooperation by the method of work. You have no kind of right to put the reign of law as an obstacle to prayer unless you are prepared to make the reign of law an obstacle to your doing anything to get your own living?.
It is true that the man of prayer who approaches the Father in the name of the Son, in intelligent correspondence with the divine kingdom and divine purpose, draws out of the largeness of the love of God infinite stores of good things which God wills to give to him, and thru him to his family, his Church, his nation, humanity - stores of good things which are there in the providence of God waiting to comfort him, but will not be given him except he prays.
Related Tags: sermon, lesson, Charles Gore
Charles Gore, Bishop of Birmingham since 1905, was born in 1853. He was educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford (Scholar), and became Chaplain in Ordinary to the King in 1901, being appointed Bishop of Worcester in 1902. A leading social reformer, his sermons are largely devoted to a consideration of sociological problems; he was a worker on behalf of the poor, whose misery had drawn his active sympathies, arid a strong opponent of sweating in every form. His belief was that "the law should be so amended as to empower the Church with the right of progress, though, at the same time, a community must be secured against passing waves of feeling." Bishop Gore was a typical representative of that most modern of Anglican schools of thought, the wing of the clergy at once High and Broad. His preaching was eloquent yet simple, and he delighted in treating at one time some sociological problem, illuminating it with Christian doctrine; and at another some profound and controversial topic, handling this with acute acumen. His sermons were often dogmatic, but were always popularly intelligible, and he is recognized as being eminently a "people's prelate."
THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER
My subject is the Efficacy of Prayer. Prayer is asking. It is the creature asking the Creator. And by the efficacy of prayer we mean that something comes of our asking, for God hears and answers as we ask. And my desire is, if I can, to reinforce in you the will to pray by removing some of those obstacles which, in the minds of good people, very often impede them in taking pains about prayer. Therefore, I ask your attention to four plain points in regard to prayer, if, it may be, I may remove some of those obstacles, conscious or half-unconscious, which impede you and me from taking the pains and giving the systematic energy we might to this life of prayer, and finding what is always the consequence, our delight and our fruit therein.
Let your imagination grasp the vast place which prayer holds in the whole history of our humanity. Man, as you look at him broadly, does set his faculties to move in three directions. He moves out toward Nature to draw out its resources for his advantage; and that is civilization. Its history begins where the savage hunts his prey, or scratches the soil and throws in his grains for the beginning of agriculture. It passes through all that -varied history of industry which reaches up to that vast complexity of the modern system of civilization, by which the resources of the furthest corners of the earth are brought together to the centers where men live, for their convenience and for their luxury. Man moves out toward nature to appropriate its resources; but he moves out also toward his fellow-men, and that is the history of society. It has its rude beginnings in the tribe and in the family; it advances through all human history; it reaches to that point of infinite complexity in which the life of nations in themselves, and the life of nations one with another, is presented to our minds. Man moves out toward nature; it is the history of civilization. He moves out toward his fellow men ; it is the history of society. But he moves out also toward God. Look at the savage; look at man in every stage of civilization; it bridges over his rudest beginning up to the point of his greatest advance. Everywhere in the works which men work, in the structures which they build, in the language which they speak, you observe a good third part of their energy preoccupied with prayer. The religion of which prayer is the characteristic act sets its stamp everywhere on human history. It has, like civilization, like society, a checkered but a definite progress. It passes through that progress most conspicuously in the Old Testament; for at the beginning of the Old Testament you see a worship which has conspicuous affinity with the worship of a merely savage tribe; while at the top it reaches up to that supreme worship which is the worship of the Son of Man. It reaches there its climax. It is the heritage of that society which was founded by Jesus of Nazareth. It has its center in the Lord's Prayer; at the altar it radiates out to consecrate and to bring down blessing upon the whole of life. But contemplate the greatness of the place which prayer occupies in human activity, and ask yourselves, as you are reasonable men, whether you can possibly believe that an activity so regular, so constant, so progressive, so universal, can be based on any mere figment or dream of the imagination. It is one of the most solid results of scientific inquiry that no human faculty can develop or subsist unless it is what scientific men call in correspondence with its environment. That phrase means that no faculty can come into existence or maintain itself unless it is really useful, unless it really corresponds with some fact external to man, in real relation with nature as it is. The eye could not have developed or subsisted unless there had been the reality called light to evoke it and to make it useful. And all this activity of prayer, seen in its various strange forms till it reaches up to rational consistency in the prayers of the Son of Man - all this activity of prayer could not have been evoked, could not have developed, could not have subsisted unless man by praying had been really in relation to the God Who hears; unless all this activity of prayer had been in real correspondence with the fact, and the most fundamental fact on which the universe is built.
There is no doubt that a great many people recognize in a vague sort of way that somehow prayer is a real activity of human life. They can not so far separate themselves from the inner man as to deny that. But to kneel down and pray for this or that seems to postulate a knowledge of God about me, and attention of God to me in particular which, when I consider the vastness of the universe, appears altogether preposterous to suppose.
Brethren, there are a great many cases in which we need to distinguish between our imagination and our reason. This is one. True it is that the imagination of man falls absolutely baffled before the task of imagining how the conscience of God and the activity of God which are over all things absolutely can still comprise an individual knowledge, and an individual attention directed to every particular atom and part of that great universe. Our imagination, I say, is absolutely baffled. But you know quite well that if you take the elementary facts with which physical science deals, like the existence of ether, on which all modern theories of light and heat are based, or the vastness of the solar system, in the same degree your imagination is absolutely baffled. You may not be able to draw a mental picture of things which still your reason may postulate, may force you to believe. Now let your reason go to work, and you will find that it comes very near to postulating about God just this very thing which you find it so hard to imagine. For think a moment; in ourselves, as our knowledge or our activity grows to perfection, it passes out of being merely vague into being definite, detailed, particular. If I go into a schoolroom where there are boys, I know nothing about them except what vague and general knowledge I have of boys as a whole. But the schoolmaster knows them better; that means he knows them more particularly as individuals, with individual histories, with characteristics, and powers, and faults. Or ask in what the preeminent phy¬sician is distinguished from the ordinary doctor. It is, I suppose, in this - that he has, while possessing a broader experience, at the same time a more individual insight into particular cases. All human knowledge and action as it advances to perfection both widens in range, while at the same time it becomes more detailed in application. Carry up that thought until you can perceive the perfect consciousness of God, and you will find that it postulates that God's knowledge and action shall be at once over all His creatures whatso¬ever; but that the universal range and scope of the divine attributes shall diminish not one whit from their particular and personal application, so that God created us, and loves us, and knows us, and deals with us one by one as individually, as particularly, as if there were no one other created, or none so loved. Prayer is possible as the real request addressed by an individual soul out of its individual needs to the Almighty and Universal Father because that Fatherhood of God is not wider in its range than it is absolutely particular and individual in its protecting, in its creating, in its predestinating love.
But God knows so much better than I do what I want. That prayer, the asking God out of my short-sighted folly to give me this or that, is surely a very ignorant procedure. Had I not better put a general trust in God and go on my way submitting to His providence? That is one of the cases in which a thought can take very devout expression while at the same time it may cut at the root of practical religion. For, brethren, we all know that this appeal?we need not pray because God knows already what we want - allows even too easily of our going on our way and practically leaving God out of our lives. Our Lord knew well enough that the object of prayer was not to inform God; your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask it. The object of prayer is not to inform God ; but it is to train us in habits of personal intercourse with God, of personal sonship toward Him. We are made for sonship, sonship is personal correspondence, personal, intelligent cooperation with God. It is a gradually increasing power of familiarity with God: of intercourse with Him, of approach toward Him as person to person.
Well, then, prayer is made necessary for us simply in order that by this necessity for praying, for asking, we may be, as it were, constrained again and again to come before God and, by asking, familiarize ourselves with Him; and as we ask, and as we receive, grow into correspondence, intelligent personal correspondence with God our Father. Who that has prayed diligently, and experienced an answer, does not know that that one experience has done more for the life of religion in his or her soul than a great deal of reading or thinking. That consciousness of our relation to God is a thing which will develop through all eternity; but it has its beginning here, and the reason why God makes things depend upon our asking for them is that we may be thus educated into such personal intercourse with Him that that truth of sonship may never be merged and lost as it is merged and lost in all that direction of life which, unconsecrated by prayer, moved away from God.
But then, lastly, we get to what in a great many people's minds is the heart of the difficulty. I grant all you say about the meaning of prayer; I grant all you say, this or that man will urge. I grant all you say about its place in human history; I would fain pray, I should feel its reasonableness, I should indeed experience the spiritual exaltation which it would give my life; but surely prayer is one of those things which was possible in old days, but is not really possible now when once we have grasped that the world is governed by fixed, unalterable laws. If all this world is the seat of the operation of fixed laws, then surely it is, indeed, purposeless to think to bend down to the level of our wishes and our short-sighted ideas that fixed and unchangeable system. Surely fixed laws, once grasped by the imagination and the mind, render impossible the real action of prayer. To pray is, after all, to anyone who conceives the world as modern knowledge forces us to conceive it, to pray is, after all, only like a bird beating its wings against the bars of an iron cage.
Brethren, this is one of those difficulties which find their strength in people's minds so largely because they do not have the courage or take the pains to think them out to the bottom. The answer to it lies, I think, in two directions. It is Indeed a complete destruction of the idea of prayer that the world should be governed by fixed laws, if prayer is in any sense conceived of as an attempt to bend down the wisdom of God to the level of our folly. But by law what do you mean? You mean the method by which things work. Law is not a power; it is only a method. The universality of law means that God works everywhere and in all things by constant and unchangeable method. This is observed not only in the wide things, in the vast movements of solar systems, but in the tiniest details of nature, so that all the intricacies of the wing of a butterfly are as much the result in each detail of the universal law or method by which God works in all things as the vastest cosmic movements. Everywhere God works by law, by order, by method. But if our Lord taught us anything He taught us this, that prayer is not the attempt to drag down the divine operations to the level of our folly; prayer is a method by which we lift up ourselves into correspondence with the methods of God. It is not the bringing of the methods of God down to our level; it is the lifting up of our will in correspondence with the method of God.
We shall have occasion to notice this at greater length when we come to think about the special lessons which our Lord taught us about prayer. But grasp now that if this be granted, that prayer is not an attempt on our part to make God work otherwise than by the method of law, but is simply one way in which we men correspond with the method of God in the universe; and you will see, I think, that all that difficulty about prayer and law is, if not destroyed and abolished, at least reduced to a position where it can have no reasonable effect upon our lives. For this we must grant God works everywhere by law. But that does not mean that He dispenses with our cooperation. God works everywhere by law. It is by law that gold comes into existence; it is by law that gold is drawn out of the earth; it is by law it is purified; it is by law it is put into circulation as a medium of currency; all that is by law, but it does not happen without human cooperation. The universe is a universe of law; but it postulates our cooperation if we are to receive its benefit. The world is a universe of law; but I shall get nothing of the good things I might get out of the world unless I show an active initiative; unless I take trouble and pains; unless by diligence and fruitful correspondence with the law of the world I obtain those things which are within my grasp. Now, here is a mystery. How is it that if the world is governed by law there is room for my free will, for my cooperation? How is it that if the world is governed by law I cannot simply sit still and say, Whatever comes to me will come to me; and whatever will not come to me will not come to me; I can do nothing. I am in a world of fixed law.
There is a mystery. At present I will not say a word in attempting to solve it. I say, let our freedom be, if you will, denied in theory, you must admit it in fact; you must day by day, moment by moment, act as if everything depended on your cooperation with the system of nature, and it is only in proportion to your initiative, your vigorous will, your constant energy, that you get what nature can afford to you. But I am sure that I am not exaggerating when I say this - there is in regard to prayer absolutely no more difficulty in connection with the reign of law than there is in regard to any other form of activity. There is the same mystery everywhere about human free will. We leave it altogether aside; but we know this, that there are multitudes of things in nature which are laid there in store for me, but which will not come to be mine unless I energetically work for them, unless I energetically correspond with the method of nature. Exactly as truly there are stores of blessings which God intends for you, but which He will not give to you unless you energetically correspond with His law, with His method, by prayer. Prayer is as fruitful a correspondence with the method of God as work?as fruitful and as necessary. Some things you can obtain by work without prayer; some things you can obtain by prayer without other work; some things by the combination of working and praying: but no things at all without your cooperation; and cooperation by prayer has no kind of rational difficulty attendant upon it which does not attend equally upon cooperation by the method of work. You have no kind of right to put the reign of law as an obstacle to prayer unless you are prepared to make the reign of law an obstacle to your doing anything to get your own living?.
It is true that the man of prayer who approaches the Father in the name of the Son, in intelligent correspondence with the divine kingdom and divine purpose, draws out of the largeness of the love of God infinite stores of good things which God wills to give to him, and thru him to his family, his Church, his nation, humanity - stores of good things which are there in the providence of God waiting to comfort him, but will not be given him except he prays.
Related Tags: sermon, lesson, Charles Gore
