280 galton.org
Shakespeare and other great names, that the sovereign of this country was
accustomed to lay hands on the sick for their recovery, under the sanction
of a regular Church service, which was not omitted from our prayer-books
till the time of George II. Witches were unanimously believed in, and
were regularly exorcised, and punished by law, up to the beginning of the
last century. Ordeals and duels, most reasonable solutions of complicated
difficulties according to the popular theory of religion, were found
absolutely fallacious in practice. The miraculous power of relics and
images, still so general in Southern Europe, is scouted in England. The
importance ascribed to dreams, the barely extinct claims of astrology, and
auguries of good or evil luck, and many other well-known products of
superstition which are found to exist in every country, have ceased to be
believed in by us. This is the natural course of events, just as the Waters
of Jealousy and the Urim and Thummin of the Mosaic law had become
obsolete in the times of the later Jewish kings. The civilized world has
already yielded an enormous amount of honest conviction to the
inexorable requirements of solid fact; and it seems to me clear that all
belief in the efficacy of prayer, in the sense in which I have been
considering it, must be yielded also. The evidence I have been able to
collect bears wholly and solely in that direction, and in the face of it the
onus probandi lies henceforth on the other side.
Nothing that I have said negatives the fact that the mind may be
relieved by the utterance of prayer. The impulse to pour out the feelings in
sound is not peculiar to Man. Any mother that has lost her young, and
wanders about moaning and looking piteously for sympathy, possesses
much of that which prompts men to pray in articulate words. There is a
yearning of the heart, a craving for help, it knows not where, certainly
from no source that it sees. Of a similar kind is the bitter cry of the hare,
when the greyhound is almost upon her; she abandons hope through her
own efforts, and screams- but to whom? It is a voice convulsively sent out
into space, whose utterance is a physical relief. These feelings of distress
and of terror are simple, and an inarticulate cry suffices to give vent to
them; but the reason why Man is not satisfied by uttering inarticulate cries
(though sometimes they are felt to be the most appropriate) is owing to his
superior intellectual powers. His memory travels back through interlacing
paths, and dwells on various connected incidents; his emotions are
complex, and he prays at length.
Neither does anything I have said profess to throw light on the
question of how far it is possible for Man to commune in his heart with
