True and False Views of Prayer.

The scepticism of scientific men when called upon to join in national prayer for changes in the economy of nature is notorious. Those who devise such prayers admit that the age of miracles is past, and in the same breath they petition for the performance of miracles. They ask for fair weather and for rain, but they do not ask that water may flow up-hill; while the man of science clearly sees that the granting of one petition would be just as much an infringement of the law of conservation as the granting of the other. Holding this law to be permanent, he prays for neither. But this does not close his eyes to the fact, that while prayer is thus impotent in external nature, it may re-act with beneficent power upon the human mind. That prayer produces its effect, benign or otherwise, is not only as indubitable as the law of conservation itself, but it will probably be found to illustrate that law in its ultimate expansions. And if our spiritual authorities could only devise a form in which the heart might express itself without putting the intellect to shame, they might utilise a power which they now waste, and make prayer, instead of a butt to the scorner, the potent inner supplement of a noble outward life.—Professor Tyndall.