ABSTRACT
And so we come to prayer, the crown of the whole adventure. To those parents who were brought up in religious homes it may seem a natural and easy step for the family gang to turn from the fascination of the story and from the discussion of the Charter to the simple act of prayer, but to others who are approaching the adventure from a more agnostic standpoint it may well be a step of almost impossible difficulty. Something fundamental is involved in the step, something that concerns their very sanity itself. Many of us have pretended, when we were amusing the children, to hold a conversation down a dead telephone with someone who was not there, but to do such a thing seriously, not as a game but in deadly earnest, savours of madness. It may be that some who read these words may feel that their intellectual integrity is involved in this matter, that to institute prayer as a part of their family adventure would be to compromise their honour. To such I can only say that honour must come first, under no circumstances must sincerity be sacrificed to expediency either in the secret inner life of the individual or in the community of the family gang. But I would beg them also to consider deeply and critically the reasons—perhaps the emotions—which appear to make prayer impossible to them. Are you quite sure that the fundamental reasons are not pride, or fear, or both? Neither pride nor fear are ‘respectable’ feelings, they belong to that type of emotion to which I referred in the first section of this book, the type that is not accepted by the censor enthroned at the threshold of our conscious mind and is therefore turned back and not re-admitted till it has camouflaged itself under some more acceptable guise. Both pride and fear are adepts at the art of camouflage, and intellectual honesty is a favourite—and a most successful—disguise for them. The little boy tiptoes along the dark passage on the top floor and 92lays his hand, hesitatingly, on the door-handle of an equally dark room. Then his heart fails him and he scurries down the stairs into the light and warmth of the lower regions. “I didn’t go in” he assures himself “because I knew there wasn’t anybody inside!” That is reasonable, his intellectual integrity is satisfied, but the truth is that he did not enter because he was afraid there might be some one—or something—there, not because he knew there wasn’t. So it is with prayer; many of us refuse to pray, not because we are sure that there is nobody to hear, but because we are afraid that there may be some one. A great deal of what we fondly imagine to be our intellectual honesty is really fear wearing one of his fancy dresses.
