(_d_) Since God’s will is the link between prayer and its answer, there can be no such thing as a physical demonstration of its efficacy in any proposed case. Physical tests have no application to things into which free will enters as a constitutive element. But there are moral tests, and moral tests are as scientific as physical tests can be.
Diman, Theistic Argument, 576, alludes to Goldwin Smith’s denial that any scientific method can be applied to history because it would make man a necessary link in a chain of cause and effect and so would deny his free will. But Diman says this is no more impossible than the development of the individual according to a fixed law of growth, while yet free will is sedulously respected. Froude says history is not a science, because no science could foretell Mohammedanism or Buddhism; and Goldwin Smith says that “prediction is the crown of all science.” But, as Diman remarks: “geometry, geology, physiology, are sciences, yet they do not predict.” Buckle brought history into contempt by asserting that it could be analyzed and referred solely to intellectual laws and forces. To all this we reply that there may be scientific tests which are not physical, or even intellectual, but only moral. Such a test God urges his people to use, in _Mal. 3:10_—“_Bring ye the whole tithe into the storehouse ... and prove me now herewith, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it._” All such prayer is a reflection of Christ’s words—some fragment of his teaching transformed into a supplication (_John 15:7_; see Westcott, Bib. Com., _in loco_); all such prayer is moreover the work of the Spirit of God (_Rom. 8:26, 27_). It is therefore sure of an answer.
But the test of prayer proposed by Tyndall is not applicable to the thing to be tested by it. Hopkins, Prayer and the Prayer-gauge, 22 _sq._—“We cannot measure wheat by the yard, or the weight of a discourse with a pair of scales.... God’s wisdom might see that it was not best for the petitioners, nor for the objects of their petition, to grant their request. Christians therefore could not, without special divine authorization, rest their faith upon the results of such a test.... Why may we not ask for great changes in nature? For the same reason that a well-informed child does not ask for the moon as a plaything.... There are two limitations upon prayer. First, except by special direction of God, we cannot ask for a miracle, for the same reason that a child could not ask his father to burn the house down. Nature is the house we live in. Secondly, we cannot ask for anything under the laws of nature which would contravene the object of those laws. Whatever we can do for ourselves under these laws, God expects us to do. If the child is cold, let him go near the fire,—not beg his father to carry him.”