Prayer and Politics (I)

Extract

Nobody wants to live in a world that is blind and insane; and if that is what we are heading for, then we had better try to do something about it. Aldous Huxley makes this very plain in his latest book, Grey Eminence. One of the main points he makes there is this : that a world totally without prayer would be a world ‘totally blind and insane.’ His actual phrase is a ‘totally unmystical world ‘; but I am going to keep to the simpler and less misunderstood word ‘prayer,’ because people sometimes think that mysticism means either a tendency to swoon away at odd moments, or else a sort of permanent woolly-headedness. I am going to use the word ‘prayer,’ but I don’t mean just ‘asking for things,’ and as I am going to define it, it wili agree with what Huxley has in mind. A world totally without prayer would be a world totally blind and insane. ‘Where there is no vision the people perish ‘; and Huxley’s judgment of our own world is tjhat we are dangerously far advanced into the darkness.

Now, the first thing to notice about this is that it is not an odd or uncommon view. It is not only Huxley’s view; it is the Christian view. It is also the view of all the great religious teachers of the world ; and more than that, learned men of all kinds are telling us that this society of ours, the modern Western world, is the only civilisation in the whole of the “world's history which has not held that view and based its life upon it.