emoval of what had been long
considered essential to it. In our day the Antipodes are accepted;
the fixity of the earth is given up; the period of Creation and the
reputed age of the world are alike dissipated; Evolution is looked
upon without terror; and other changes have occurred in the same
direction too numerous to be dwelt upon here. In fact, from the
earliest times to the present, religion has been undergoing a process
of purification, freeing itself slowly and painfully from the physical
errors which the active but uninformed intellect mingled with the
aspirations of the soul. Some of us think that a final act of
purification is needed, while others oppose this notion with the
confidence and the warmth of ancient times. The bone of contention at
present is _the physical value of prayer_. It is not my wish to excite
surprise, much less to draw forth protest, by the employment of this
phrase. I would simply ask any intelligent person to look the problem
honestly in the face, and then to say whether, in the estimation of
the great body of those who sincerely resort to it, prayer does not,
at all events upon special occasions, invoke a Power which checks and
augments the descent of rain, which changes the force and direction of
winds, which affects the growth of corn and the health of men and
cattle a Power, in short, which, when appealed to under pressing
circumstances, produces the precise effects caused by physical energy
in the ordinary course of things. To any person who deals sincerely
with the subject, and refuses to blur his moral vision by intellectual
subtleties, this, I think, will appear a true statement of the case.

It is under this aspect alone that the scientific student, so far as I
represent him, has any wish to meddle with prayer. Forced upon his
attention as a form of physical energy, or as the equivalent of such
energy, he claims the right of subjecting it to those methods of
examination from which all our present knowledge of the physical
universe is derived. And if his researches lead him to a conclusion
adverse to its claims--if his enquiries rivet him still closer to the
philosophy implied in the words, 'He maketh His sun to shine on the
evil and on the good, and sendeth rain upon the just and upon the
unjust'--he contends only for the displacement of prayer, not for its
extinction. He simply says, physical nature is not its legitimate
domain.

This conclusion, moreover, must be