it to the air, by making his sorrow a general existence. But nature listens not to the plaints of man, it is callous to his sorrows. Hence man turns away from Nature, from all visible objects. He turns within, that here, sheltered and hidden from the inexorable powers, he may find audience for his griefs. Here he utters his oppressive secrets; here he gives vent to his stifled sighs. This open-air of the heart, this outspoken secret, this uttered sorrow of the soul, is God. God is a tear of love, shed in the deepest concealment, over human misery. “God is an unutterable sigh, lying in the depths of the Heart;”[1] this saying is the most remarkable, the profoundest, truest expression of Christian mysticism.
The ultimate essence of religion is revealed by the simplest act of religion—prayer; an act which implies at least as much as the dogma of the Incarnation, although religious speculation stands amazed at this, as the greatest of mysteries. Not, certainly, the prayer before and after meals, the ritual of animal egoism, but the prayer pregnant with sorrow, the prayer of disconsolate love, the prayer which expresses the power of the heart that crushes man to the ground, the prayer which begins in despair and ends in rapture.
In prayer, man addresses God with the word of intimate affection—Thou; he thus declares articulately that God is his alter ego; he confesses to God as the being nearest to him, his most secret thoughts, his deepest wishes, which otherwise he shrinks from uttering. But he expresses these wishes in the confidence, in the certainty that they will be fulfilled. How could he apply to a being that had no ear for his complaints? Thus what is prayer but the wish of the heart expressed with confidence in its fulfilment?[2] what else is the
- ↑ Sebastian Frank von Wörd in Zinkgrefs Apophthegmata deutscher Nation.
- ↑ It would be an imbecile objection, to say that God fulfils only those wishes, those prayers, which are uttered in his name, or in the interest of the church of Christ, in short, only the wishes which are accordant with his will; for the will of God is the will of man, or rather God has the power, man the will: God makes men happy, but man wills that he may be happy. A particular wish may not be granted; but that is of no consequence, if only the species, the essential tendency is accepted. The pious soul whose prayer has failed, consoles himself, therefore, by thinking that its fulfilment would not have been salutary for him. “Nullo igitur modo vota aut preces sunt irritae aut infrugiferae et recte dicitur, in petitione rerum corporalium aliquando Deum exaudire nos, non ad voluntatem nostram, sed ad salutem.”—Oratio de Precatione, in Declamat. Melancthonis, T. iii.
