DR. DALLINGER ON PRAYER AND SANITARY PRECAUTIONS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9064, 26 May 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

DR. DALLINGER ON PRAYER AND SANITARY PRECAUTIONS.

The Rev. W. H. Dallinger, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c, Governor of Wesley College, Sheffield, is well known in the scientific world as an eminent astronomer and also as President of the Royal Microscopical Society. During the small-pox epidemic which has been raging for some time in Sheffield, England, Dr. Dallinger declined to use a prayer which was Being offered in the churches }of the town. He did so on the ground that a people had no right to ask God to violate His own laws, or to prevent the consequences of persistent violation on their part. This action was severely, criticised by correspondents in the local press ; and as in Auckland we have had many cases of typhoid which were said to be almost entirely due to the neglect of ordinary precautions, we give Dr. Dallinger's reply to his critics, M'hich is based on the self-evident truth that " Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap." 1. Whatever maybe our judgem nt as to the relation of prayer to man's destiny, I presume that it will be universally admitted that Christ taught and employed it in its highest and truest form. That being so, we find that an essential element in what Ho taught as prayer was "Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven ;" and the sublimity of His own act of prayer in a moment of pending and unutterable agony was " Nevertheless not as I will but as Thou wilt." In short, as Christ taught it, the majesty and might of prayer is absolute and child-like submission to the will of God.

2. Now, it happens that in some things physical we know the will of God as absolutely and completely as we can know anything. We know, for example, that it is God's will—established for ever in heaven— that every living thing shall bring forth after its kind.

Show me, then, the farmer tliat sows turnips, and then calls his household together to pray to the Almighty that the turnip seeds may be caused to bring forth wheat ? The chemist has learned by experiment and induction that oxygen and hydrogen in certain proportions unite with immense expansion, determined by the presence of fire. In the house of a neighbour gas has escaped in dangerous quantities. Now, we know that to take a light there will be destructive of property and dangerous to life. Does any one believe that it would be'an act of piety on the part of any man, in these circumstances, to kneel and pray outside the house that the flame might not bo suffered to effect an explosion, and then to go in where the explosion would be inevitable? Are we to think of prayer as something that induces God to stultify the immutability of His will by countermanding the natural sequence of His physical laws, to prevent us from reaping the consequenco of having broken those laws ? That is not, and can never be, my view of the immutable Power whose laws are perfect. In all supplication touching the things of nature and the present life we pray, not to change God's will—that were blasphemy— but to be mentally and morally changed to His. But if we know His will, shall we pray to Him, as Christians, against it? I trow not.

3. Now, as certainly as we know the laws of eclipses, or the properties of triangles ; as certainly as we know the bacillus of anthrax and its deadly power, we know that patients Buffering from zymotic diseases, or immediately convalescent from them, are throwing off clouds of living matter that must be as inevitably perilous, if they are allowed to go amongst great masses of the people, to the welfare of a community, as we know that trichinised pork eaten raw, or only partially cooked, by large numbers, will mean agony for most and death for many. Should we be Christians if, with our eyes open, we ate trichinised pork and then went up to pray that we might not be trichinised. He may think so who likes, Ido not. I honour God, by honour of, and obedience to, His laws.

4. Then, I ask, if, in these days, when we all know of the contagious nature of small-pox, both during and for some time after the endurance of the disease, we have any justification, as a people, in allowing the stricken poor to be visited by their neighbours ; the convalescent, still pouring off clouds of contagion, to go to our museums, picture galleries, and places of amusement, and to travel in our omnibuses and railways daily ; or, what is nearly as bad, to allow persons from stricken homes to do the same for days and weeks ; and then to turn to Almighty God and pray that He will break His own laws and prevent these sources of contagion from doing us harm. ? It would bo as rational for a grazier to put one valuable beast to feed on the ground on which another had just fallen down in death with anthrax and expect no evil to follow if he only prayed that no evil might arise. I should tell him that in my judgment he insulted God by such " prayer." The essence of prayer is honour to God's will in all physical matters where we record what the will is, and supreme submission to it where we do nofc fully understand it. We all pray " Thy will be done on earth . . . . fjive us this day our daily bread." But men in the mass, have learned unmistakably that God's "will on earth" is that their daily prayer for bread shall bo answered by work; and none will pray more reverently and, I trust, devoutly than I " from plague, pestilence, and famine good Lord deliver us,"' while we work like men of God to obey His laws in relation to these. But it is difficult; to let pestilence walk in our midst, and then turn to God and implore Him to prevent the consequences of doing so from taking place. I tried to stir such of my fellow-townsmen as I could reach to their responsibility and their duty. Ifc is not required by those who know me that I should say it was not to prayer but to the object to which the prayer was directed that I pointed my declamation, and to which, with equal firmness, I still adhere.