Of the eminent writers who are the exponents of the spiritual movement of the nineteenth century, those whose influence is most widely acknowledged—Wordsworth, Shelley, Carlyle, Emerson—have two notable characteristics: first, they either give a very subordinate place to dogma or reject it altogether; secondly, they lay great stress on truths which from remote antiquity have most deeply impressed the Oriental mind and have been uttered with the greatest power in the East. The influence of Wordsworth as a spiritual teacher will ever be felt, in spite of the “Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” to lie, not in his championship of orthodox Christianity, but in his awakening men to a sense of the Infinite revealed in the finite and to a consciousness of the immanence of the divine Spirit in the outer and the inner world. These are the truths which inspire some of Shelley's noblest lines. They find utterance in Carlyle's wisest words. And they occupy the foremost place in Emerson's message to an unspiritual world. Hence the power with which Wordsworth and Emerson appeal to the Oriental mind. They translate into the language of modern culture what was uttered by the sages of ancient India in the loftiest strains. They breathe a new life into our old faith, and they assure its stability and progress by incorporating with it precious truths revealed or brought into prominence by the wider intellectual and ethical outlook of the modern spirit. Before I dwell at any length on the spiritual affinity between the teachings of the East and the mind of Emerson, it will be convenient to consider some of his intellectual traits, which give us a key to the right interpretation of his faith.

Many times during the past half-century the question raised by Strauss, “Are we still Christian?” has been asked by other persons. The vast changes in thought which have taken place within this period have led to this. The difference between the ancient and modern thought-worlds are numerous, far-reaching, and now acutely felt. We live in a universe infinite in extent, eternal in duration, dynamic in all its elements, law-abiding in all its forces and areas, developing through an immanent process of evolution by resident forces, and moving on to a far-off divine event when the purposes of God will be realized in a perfected humanity.

Our fathers, on the other hand, lived in a world recent in the date of its origin, small in extent, and made by fiat; its laws statutes to be set aside at the pleasure of its maker; its nature deranged by the sin of man; the historic process degenerative; and its end catastrophic.

It is these differences in world-view which have made many persons ask the question, “Are we still Christian?”

Systematic Theology used to be the acknowledged Queen of the Sciences, exacting allegiance and tribute in every district of human thought. By one of those cataclysmic upheavals of thought that now and then disturb society, the situation has been radically altered. The queen has been dethroned. Surveying this wrecked glory and these emblems of departed power, the faithful speak of a rebellion; the philosopher thinks of it as a revolution; the man of science calls it evolution.

In present theological conditions, one who is called upon to discourse concerning “natural religion as it is commonly called and understood by divines and learned men” finds himself embarrassed at the outset by the difficulty of defining his subject in accordance with the requirement, since the term is variously understood by “divines and learned men.” In a recent issue of the Harvard Theological Review Professor Knight of Tufts College described three specific uses of the correlative terms “nature” and “supernatural,” each of which, moreover, comprises many subordinate varieties. The late Dr. C. C. Everett, to whom, by the way, Professor Knight does not refer, defined the natural as “the universe considered as a composite whole,” the world of cause and effect, one might say, in which the laws of Haeckel's “Substance” prevail, or the natura naturata of Spinoza, and the supernatural as the non-composite unity, Spinoza's natura naturans, which manifests itself in and through the natural. If this use be accepted, and with it Dr. Everett's definition of religion corresponding to the stage in the development of the discussion where the terms first appear, namely, as “feeling towards the supernatural,” it is difficult to find any meaning for the term natural religion save as it may denote religion awakened by contemplation of nature. Otherwise, it becomes a contradiction in terms, the adjective cancelling the noun or vice versa. In substantial agreement with these definitions is the habit of regarding the supernatural as covering the realm of free personality, both human and divine, while the world of things, in which law uniformly and inexorably rules, is styled nature. Here too, since religion resides in personality and, at least among those who employ this terminology, involves a relation to personality, natural religion becomes meaningless.

Systematic theology is, and of right ought to be, primarily practical. In the first place, true religion is both one of the ends of an ideal human life and, in the long run, an indispensable means to the morality which is most essential to human welfare, inner and outer. In the second place, theology is necessary as an instrument for the proper control of the development and expression of religion—a special case of the function of ideas in the control of life. It follows, therefore, that a sound theology is a human necessity. The purpose of the theologian, whatever else it may or must include, must be to find those religious truths which are essential to the vitality and efficiency of the best type of human religion.

That this has really been the aim of theologians in the great formative periods of the history of Christian doctrine may readily be shown. The prevailing impression with regard to orthodoxy and excluded heresies is that the distinction between them is arbitrary and external. This is indeed to the modern mind true in large measure of the distinction between the old orthodoxy and heresy; but in their own day this distinction was neither arbitrary nor external. Then it was organically related to the most pressing of problems; it was supremely vital, for the issues involved were nothing short of spiritual life and death.

Prayer is the intercourse of the human spirit with a reality, or being, realized as greater-than-human and either conceived or treated as personal. This definition, it will be observed, leaves open the question whether the object of religion is always reflectively known to be personal; yet it regards prayer, the characteristic religious experience, as a personal and personifying consciousness, the worshipper's awareness of superhuman reality in vital connection with him, the worshipper. As William James has said, “The religious phenomenon, studied as an inner fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications has shown itself to consist, everywhere and at all its stages, in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related.” Or, to quote Jevons, “rites and ceremonies, sacrifices and altars exist” for the sake of “the prayer in which man's soul rises or seeks to rise to God.”

This paper considers the nature of prayer thus conceived as the expression of intercourse with God—or with the gods.