to bend, the proud to pray.' My answer is, the brutes
are much more forcibly impressed by natural phenomena than Man is; the
bird and the beast know before you and I do when the mountain will rock
and the ground groan, and their instinct leads them to shelter; but it
does not lead them to prayer. If my theory be right that Soul is to be
sought not in the question whether mental ideas be innate or formed by
experience, by the sense, by association or habit, but in the inherent
capacity to receive ideas, then, the capacity bestowed on Man alone,
to be impressed by Nature herself with the idea of a Power superior to
Nature, with which Power he can establish commune, is a proof that to
Man alone the Maker has made Nature itself proclaim His existence,--that
to Man alone the Deity vouchsafes the communion with Himself which comes
from prayer."

"Even were this so," said I, "is not the Creator omniscient? If
all-wise, all-foreseeing? If all-foreseeing, all-pre-ordaining? Can the
prayer of His creature alter the ways of His will?"

"For the answer to a question," returned Faber, "which is not
unfrequently asked by the clever men of the world, I ought to refer you
to the skilled theologians who have so triumphantly carried the reasoner
over that ford of doubt which is crossed every day by the infant. But
as we have not their books in the wilderness, I am contented to draw my
reply as a necessary and logical sequence from the propositions I have
sought to ground on the plain observation of Nature. I can only guess
at the Deity's Omniscience, or His modes of enforcing His power by the
observation of His general laws; and of all His laws, I know of none
more general than the impulse which bids men pray,--which makes Nature
so act, that all the phenomena of Nature we can conceive, however
startling and inexperienced, do not make the brute pray, but there
is not a trouble that can happen to Man, but what his impulse is to
pray,--always provided, indeed, that he is not a philosopher. I say not
this in scorn of the philosopher, to whose wildest guess our obligations
are infinite, but simply because for all which is impulsive to Man,
there is a reason in Nature which no philosophy can explain away. I do
not, then, bewilder myself by seeking to bind and limit the Omniscience
of the Deity to my finite ideas. I content myself with supposing that
somehow or other, He has made it quite compatible with His Omniscience
that Man should obey