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mischance, such as the forced march, the wetting, the abstinence from
food, or the night exposure, any one of which was competent to develop
the fever that struck them down. We must not dwell upon the
circumstances of individual cases, and say “this was a providential
escape,” or “that was a salutary chastisement,” but we must take the broad
averages of mortality, and, when we do so, we find that the missionaries
do not form a favoured class.
The efficacy of prayer may yet further be tested by inquiry into the
proportion of deaths at the time of birth among the children of the praying
and the non-praying classes. The solicitude of parents is so powerfully
directed towards the safety of their expected offspring as to leave no room
to doubt that pious parents pray fervently for it, especially as death before
baptism is considered a most serious evil by many Christians. However,
the distribution of still-births appears wholly unaffected by piety. The
proportion, for instance, of the still-births published in the Record
newspaper and in the Times was found by me, on an examination of a
particular period, to bear an identical relation to the total number of
deaths. This inquiry might easily be pursued by those who consider that
more ample evidence was required.
When we pray in our Liturgy “that the Nobility may be endued with
grace, wisdom and understanding,” we pray for that which is clearly
incompatible with insanity. Does that frightful scourge spare our nobility?
Does it spare very religious people more than others? The answer is an
emphatic negative to both of these questions, The nobility, probably from
their want of the wholesome restraints felt in humbler walks of life, and
from their intermarriages, and the very religious people of all
denominations, probably from their meditations on hell, are peculiarly
subject to it. Religious madness is very common indeed.
As I have already hinted, I do not propose any special inquiry whether
the general laws of physical nature are ever suspended in fulfilment of
prayer: whether, for instance, success has attended the occasional prayers
in the Liturgy when they have been used for rain, for fair weather, for the
stilling of the sea in a storm, or for the abatement of a pestilence. I abstain
from doing so for two reasons.
First, if it is proved that God does not answer one large class of prayers
at all, it would be of less importance to pursue the inquiry. Secondly, the
modern feeling of this country is so opposed to a belief in the occasional
suspension of the general laws of nature, that an English reader would
merely smile at such an investigation.
