The Hearts of Men

CHAPTER XXIII

PRAYER AND CONFESSION

What is the most general, the most conspicuous form in which religion expresses itself? Is it not in prayer? Where is the religion that is without prayer? There is none. And perhaps, too, it is the very first expression of religion, that when the savage fell and prayed the lightning to spare him, he was inaugurating the greatest religious form the world has known.

What a wonderful thing it is, wonderful in every form, beautiful wherever you see it – from the glorious masses sung in the cathedrals to the Mussulman spreading his mat upon the sand and bowing towards Mecca. There is nothing so beautiful, nothing that so touches the heart of man as prayer.

I have said that it is common to all religions, and so it is. Religions live not in creeds, but in the believers. Pure Buddhism knows not prayer, but does not the Buddhist know it? Go to any pagoda and see the women there praying to Someone – Someone, they know not whom – and ask if Buddhists know not prayer? I have written so fully of it in my other book that I will not repeat it here.

Prayer is common to all believers; it is the greatest, as perhaps it is the only expression common to all religions. And whence comes this custom of prayer? The Jew and the Mussulman and the Christian will answer and say, "It comes from our belief in God, it is an outcome of that belief. Our God has bade us pray to Him."

And the Hindu, how will he answer? He will say, "Our gods have power over us, they deal with us as they will. They listen to us if we pray. And therefore it is right for us to beseech them in our trouble. It comes from our belief in our gods." And the savage will answer, "I fear the Devil, so I pray to him." But what will the Buddhist answer?

For Buddhism knows no God. The world is ruled by Law, unchangeable, everlasting Law. No one can change that Law. If you suffer it is the meet and proper consequence of your sins. The suffering is purifying you and teaching you how to live. It would not be well for you to be relieved of it now if you could be. Therefore suffer and be silent.

A very beautiful belief. And yet the people pray. Why? When a Buddhist prays it is not in consequence of his belief, but in spite of it. It cannot be traced as the result of any theory of causation.

Therefore one doubts the Theist's explanation and one reflects. Was, indeed, prayer born of their beliefs? And then the doubt increases. Are these creeds older than prayer, or maybe is it not that prayer is older than the creeds? Did these creeds exist in men's minds first or did the necessity for prayer exist first? Which is nearer to man?

Let us consider what prayer is. It consists of three things mainly. Petition to be saved, to be helped from imminent danger; praise at being so saved; and last, probably last, but surely greatest of all, confession.

When men pray they are always doing one or other of these things. When the savage was caught in the thunderstorm or shaken in the earthquake and fell on his knees in fear, babbling strange things, do you think he had reasoned out a God behind the force first? Do you think his inarticulate cry for help was not involuntary? That if he had not first reasoned out the God he would not so cry? Have you ever seen people in deadly fear, how they will babble for help, crying unto the unknown? If there was ever anything that came forth absolutely spontaneously from the heart of man, which needed no belief of any kind anterior to its birth, it was prayer, the prayer that comes from fear, the prayer for help. It is the unconscious, unreasoned cry of the heart. If there is Someone to whom to direct the cry, well and good; but if not, the cry comes just the same.

When troubles fall upon the man, what is his first impulse? To tell someone. If the confidant can help, so much the better; but if not, still to tell. To ease the pent up heart by telling, that is what is wanted. And with joy, too. Have you not seen how, when good news comes to a man, he loves to rush forth and tell it? To whom? It does not matter. Tell it, tell it. Cry it aloud, if but the trees and rocks can hear. To keep secret a great thing is very hard. Remember the courtier who discovered that King Midas had asses' ears. He could not keep the terrible deadly truth to himself. He dared not tell it to man. And so, going softly to the river, he confessed the dreadful knowledge to the reeds: "Midas hath asses' ears." Can you trace here any cause and effect? And there is confession, to tell someone of our sins, to confess. Is that dependent upon any religious theory? Much has been written about confession, this necessity of the laden spirit, but never has anything been written like that study by Dostoieffsky called "Crime and Punishment." The "Crime" was murder, not an ordinary murder committed by a ruffian in passion or from sordid motives, but a murder by a student intended to result in good. The murderer is suspected – nay, is known by a police officer – and the motive of the first half of the story is not to gain evidence, not to unravel the story, but it lies in the efforts of the detective to induce Raskolnikoff to make a voluntary confession. And why? There was evidence enough, the offender could have been arrested and convicted at any time. But that would not do. Punishment alone will not always, will indeed but seldom, benefit the criminal. Punishment is for the protection of society. It is for the future, not the past. For the criminal to redeem himself he must confess. In that lies the only medicine for a diseased soul. It is a marvellous story, and it holds the truth of truths. Confess. There is no emotion of the human heart so strong as this, the eminent necessity to tell someone. No one who has had much to do with crime will doubt this. There is in all natural men a burning desire, an absolute necessity, to tell of what has been done. It comes out sometimes in confessions to the police or to the magistrate. All criminal annals are full of such stories. A crime is committed and there is no clue, till the man confesses. I have myself seen a great deal of this. I have received many confessions. But you will object that was amongst Burmese; and I reply, Wherein is there any difference? Criminals of all countries frequently confess. But as civilisation progresses the confession is not often to a magistrate. The fear, the terrible fear of punishment outweighs the natural impulse. But still the confession is made. If you read the cases in the papers you will see how often it is made. To a wife, to a companion, sometimes to a complete stranger. The men who can hold their tongues, who can stifle nature, are very few. With all but hardened criminals the tendency is always to confession, and those whose work has laid among them know that the denial, the defence, except with hardened criminals, is seldom theirs. If there were no relations to urge them, no lawyers to assist them, five out of six first offenders would confess openly.

Is it otherwise with our children? What is it we teach them above all else? Never to do wrong? No! For we know that is impossible. Children, like men, will err. But, "when you have done wrong confess, for only so can you lift the weight from your heart." Confess, confess. Everywhere it is the same. If you have done wrong, only by confession can you remove the stain. But it must be voluntary. It must not be forced. Such a confession is of no value. Even our courts reject it.

It is an instinct of the heart that comes who can tell whence, that means who can tell what? And from this have grown many things. It has become part of all the greater religions, and the forms it has taken are significant not so much of the faiths, but of the people.

Among the Jews and the Mahommedans we hear little of it. They were a hard people when their faiths were formed, a strong people, and little advanced in the gentler feelings. They were warriors who lived greatly by the sword, and it was necessary for them to stifle all that might weaken or even polish them. For one man to humble himself to another is very hard, for a proud man to confess to another is almost impossible. And so into these Theistic faiths the confession was to God. If a man sinned it was to God alone he could confess. But with Christianity it has been different. There is in Christianity what exists in no other faith in the same way, an intermediary between God and man.

There are the priests.

This desire of the soul for confession, the absolute necessity with strong emotional people to tell someone their sins and their truths, has been one of the greatest cults of the Church of Rome. Man must confess, let him confess to the priests. Their tongues are tied, they will never reveal what they are told; they are the ministers of God. Therefore let the innate desire for confession be directed towards the priests. It is universal in Catholic countries. Whatever may be its abuses it is the great safety valve, the great help of the people, that as they must confess they should have someone to confess to.

With the Northern Teutonic nations it has been different. They got their Christianity from Rome, a Christianity that was built on the needs of impulsive Celtic natures. It suited not with the harder natures of the north. They could not confess to men, it galled them to be told to confess. Their natures were different. Had they no need of confession? Yes, but they were as the Jews and Mahommedans. They would not humble themselves to men. And so, for this and other similar reasons, they revolted from Rome and made their own church, where confession is only to God. But the necessity of confession still remains; our services are full of it. It is strange how very often we find the Christianity of Teutonic people nearer in observed facts to the faiths of Semitic peoples than to the Christianity of the Celts. All these peoples, all these Churches, recognise the need of confession. But, it may be said, all this is a difference of very slight detail. All confession is to God. The Roman priests are only representatives of God. If you believe in God you must believe in confession, because God has always directed it. Confession is in all the Churches because God ordered it. The need comes from God, who gives absolution.

Then how about the Buddhists? They have no God, but yet they confess. The Buddha himself many times pointed out how needful confession was, and how healing to the heart. There is no God to confess to, there is no representative of God. But there is the head of the Monastery. Let the younger monk who sins confess his sins to his superior. There is no absolution. Man works out his future himself, always by himself. There is no absolution, no help to be gained by confession. But the Buddha knew the hearts of man. He knew that confession was good for the soul. He knew that it needed no absolution from any priest to help the confesser, no belief in any God to pardon because of the confession. Confession, if it be made honestly and truly, brings with it always its own reward. It may be objected, that this is not general, but only applies to those trying to live the holy life. The Buddha taught that all men should do so. He meant it to be general. It is true that it is not, it cannot be general, or the world would cease. Only a few are monks. Is, then, the help of confession denied to the multitude? Perhaps by the stringent Buddhist faith it may not be urgently inculcated, and men and women in outside life cannot confess to monks. Do they then go without? Not so. Go to any pagoda at any time and you will see there kneeling many people, some men, but mostly women. They are there confessing, audibly sometimes, their troubles, their sins, their joys also. To whom? Ah! then I cannot tell you. "Someone will hear," they say, "Someone will hear." Religions are for the necessity of man, and if the narrow creed will not suffice it must be enlarged.

It is a strange subject this of confession, and its ally, prayer. It is strange to follow it to its roots in the human heart, and to see that it is stronger, is older, is more persistent than creeds. Creeds come and go, they change, and man changes with them; he may have any religion or have none, but it makes no difference to this. Hindu and Christian, Mahommedan and Buddhist, Atheist and Jew, the heart of man is ever the same. Read that wonderful story of Balzac's, "La Messe d'Athèe," and you will see.

If you postulate God or gods, and try from that to deduce prayer and confession, you find yourself very soon as the boy found himself long ago. You are at an impasse. If God be indeed as stated, then can prayer and confession never be necessary. You cannot get round it, you can only hide yourself in mists of words like the scientific theologian. If God be as postulated, then can prayer and confession not be necessary, or even beautiful.

But you can see from daily life that they are so. Who can doubt it? There is in life nothing so beautiful, nothing so true, nothing that acts as balm to the heart like prayer and confession, and they exist naturally. They are there from the beginning; they need no religious theory to bring them into life. What, then, is the inference? Not perhaps exactly what it at first sight would seem to be, that God does not exist or has those qualities of prejudice, of favour, of partiality which religious books and religious people give to Him. It is, I think, this: That the truth, the original truth, is the necessity of confession and prayer, and that to explain this the theory of the nature of God or gods have arisen. Prayer did not proceed from God, but God from prayer —i. e., the theories of God.

No strongly religious man can reason about his own faith. Christians will say that the idea of the True God is inherent in man also, that if not earlier than prayer, it is co-existent. So be it. But how about false gods – the savage praying to a mountain, the Hindu to an image or a stone, representing who knows what? the Buddhist woman praying by the pagoda? Their prayer is beautiful. It is as beautiful as yours. Never doubt it. Go and see them pray. You will learn that prayer is beautiful, is true in itself. And can such a thing proceed from a false theology? See men pray and hear them confess and you will be sure of this, that prayer and confession, no matter by whom, no matter to whom, are always true, have always their effect upon the heart. Whatever is false, they are not. It is one absolute truth that all men will admit.

CHAPTER XXIV

SUNDAY AND SABBATH

I am not sure that in such an enquiry as this history is of much avail. I do not find that those who search into the past to write the history of it ever discover much that is of use to-day. It seems to me that in tracing an idea, or a law, or a custom, historians are satisfied with giving an account of its growth or decay as if it were the life of a tree. They do not enquire into the why of things. They will tell you that an idea came, say, from the East and was accepted generally. They do not say why it was accepted. And to have traced a modern belief back into the far past is to them sufficient reason for its presence, forgetful that whatever persists, whether a law or an idea or a belief, does so because it is of use. Living things require a sanction as well as a history, and therein lies their interest. And what I am writing now is of the sanctions of religions.

Still, there is sometimes an interest, if but a negative one, in the history of an observance or belief. It is useful sometimes to trace an observance back, if only to show that the reason generally given for its retention is not and cannot be the real one. Of such is the history of the observance of Sunday, or the Sabbath, in England and Scotland.

We have discovered from the inscriptions at Accad, upon the Euphrates, that in the time of Sargon, 3,800 years B.C., the days were divided into weeks of seven days, named after the sun and moon and the five planets, as they are now in places. And there were, moreover, "Sabbaths" set apart as days of "rest for the soul," "the completion of work." There were five of these Sabbaths in Chaldea every lunar month, occurring on the 7th, the 14th, the 19th, the 21st, and 28th of the month. That is to say, the new moon, the full moon, and the days half way between were Sabbaths, with the addition of a fifth Sabbath on the 19th day. On these days it was not lawful to cook food, to change one's dress, to offer a sacrifice; the king may not speak in public or ride in a chariot, or perform any kind of military or civil duty; even to take medicine was forbidden. It was a day of rest. And this was 3,800 B.C., nearly 2,000 years before Abraham lived, 2,300 years before Moses and the Ten Commandments, almost contemporary, according to the Bible records, with Cain and Abel. The day was already called the Sabbath. It had existed already for no one knows how long, probably thousands of years; it was a day of rest, and it was observed much as was subsequently the Jewish Sabbath. Without doubt the Jews only adopted a custom known to more civilised nations ages before, and they gave to it the sanction of their religion, as they and many other people have done to many matters. There is everywhere a strong tendency, if possible, to give religious sanction to every observance. The stronger emotions attract to themselves the lesser. So have the Jews and Mahommedans adopted sanitary precautions, the Hindus sanitary and marriage laws, and Christianity marriage laws also in their faiths. So did my friend mentioned in the preface include all civilisation in his religion.

The observance of the Sabbath arose not from a religious command transmitted by Moses, but as the result of observation and custom thousands of years before, that a day of rest was needed for man.

When they reached a certain standard of civilisation all peoples seem to have had such a day set apart. It was a want that arose out of the keener struggle for existence, a mutual truce to the war of competition. But the day itself varied. The Greeks divided their lunar month into decades, having thus three festival days in a month. The Romans, we are told, divided it into periods of eight days, though I do not know how they managed their arithmetic or got eight into twenty-nine without some awkward remainder. And in the farther East it was usual to celebrate the full moon and the new moon and the days half way between as days of rest. A lunar month consisting of sometimes twenty-nine and sometimes thirty days, the period between rest days was sometimes six days as in a week, and sometimes seven days. Thus among the Burmese, although there are, as usual, seven days named after the sun, moon, and planets, the rest day goes by the day of the month, not by that of the week, just as it did with the Accadians. For in the East a month remains a month; it is the life of a moon. It begins with the new moon and ends with the fourth quarter, and is easily reckoned by any villager. With us in the North the age of the moon has ceased to be of any importance. Our life after dark is indoors, where we have lights and the moon is of no use to us. Our houses are lit artificially, and very few Europeans could tell at a moment's notice how old the moon is.

But in the East it is not so. With them the night is the time for being out of doors, and when they go to their houses it is only to sleep. The nights are cool after the hot day, and on the full moon nights the world is full of light. The night of the full moon, when the scent of flowers is on the still air and all about is full of magic, is one of the great beauties of this world. But of it we know nothing in Europe.

Therefore in colder climates the month by the moon was abandoned, and reckoning the year by the sun took its place. And as civilisation progressed it was inconvenient to be uncertain about which was the day of rest, so it became the custom to make it every seventh day, regardless of the moon. This seems to have obtained first in Egypt and to have spread over the civilised world, the seventh day being the Sabbath. But it still remained a day of rest, unassociated, except by the Jews, with religion.

The early Christians kept no Sabbath. They kept the first day of the week as a day of rejoicing, to celebrate the rising of Christ. Indeed, the Jewish Sabbath was considered as abrogated, and the first day of the week was kept, much as it is now kept on the Continent, as a day of rest, of rejoicing, of relaxation after work.

So it was observed till the Reformation.

The Reformers, whatever they altered, did not alter this. They gave no command to return from Christian observance of the day to Jewish observance, and all over the Continent, among those of reformed churches as among those of the Catholic church, Sunday is the day of rest, of worship, and of relaxation.

It was so, too, in England and Scotland.

The change back to the Jewish Sabbath seems to have come with the Puritans and to have been introduced by them to Scotland. And this is but one example of how Puritanism was practically a rejection of Christianity and a return to the codes of Judaism, which suited those iron warriors much better than Christian ethics.

In England the feeling has been tempered, but among the Scotch, who are in so many ways like the old Jews, it took root, it flourished, and it is the Jewish Sabbath both in name and observance that we see now there.

Why was there this reversion? For what reason has the Jewish Sabbath appealed more nearly to the Scotch than the Christian Sunday? What feelings were those that caused this?

If you turn to the people who have done this and look into their characters you will note one strong and marked instinct. It is the dislike to art of all kinds, to painting and music, to dancing and acting, their strong distrust of beauty and gaiety. They are a sober people, hard and stubborn and dour, to whom art and amusement appeal, as a rule, not at all; and when they do appeal it is too strongly. They would not have organs in their churches and cards were to them the devil's picture books. They had in them then, they have now, no single fibre that responds to the lighter and brighter things of this world. Their very humour is grim. Have they, then, no idea of pleasure? Do they never enjoy themselves? It would be a mistake of the greatest to suppose that. They, too, as all other men, have their times for relaxation, for enjoyment, for mental rest and refreshment. Only that what gives pleasure to them is different from what gives pleasure to other people. They take their pleasures sadly; the chords of their hearts are tuned to other keys than that of gaiety and art. These latter they cannot understand, they awaken either no echo or far too strong an echo; and, like all men when they cannot understand a thing, they hate it. There is no medium in these matters that appeal to the emotions. You must either like or hate. You may see this always. Either you enjoy Wagner's music or you abominate it, either you appreciate old masters or they are to you daubs, either you are in tune to laughter or it seems to you the veriest folly.