missible
practices. But on the {453} side of the sinner himself it seems as if
the need ought to have been too great to accept so summary a refusal of
its satisfaction. One would think that in more men the shell of
secrecy would have had to open, the pent-in abscess to burst and gain
relief, even though the ear that heard the confession were unworthy.
The Catholic church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted
auricular confession to one priest for the more radical act of public
confession. We English-speaking Protestants, in the general
self-reliance and unsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough
if we take God alone into our confidence.[307]

[307] A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent
work by Frank Granger: The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii.

The next topic on which I must comment is Prayer--and this time it must
be less briefly. We have heard much talk of late against prayer,
especially against prayers for better weather and for the recovery of
sick people. As regards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can
be considered to stand firm, it is that in certain environments prayer
may contribute to recovery, and should be encouraged as a therapeutic
measure. Being a normal factor of moral health in the person, its
omission would be deleterious. The case of the weather is different.
Notwithstanding the recency of the opposite belief,[308] every one now
knows that droughts and storms follow from physical antecedents, and
that moral appeals cannot avert them. But petitional prayer is only
one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as
meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power
recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism
leaves it untouched.

[308] Example: "The minister at Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture
in Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon
as the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said 'You Boston
ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to church
and pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under water.'" R.
W. Emerson: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 363.

Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
"Religion," says a liberal French theologian, "is an intercourse, a
conscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in distress
with the mysterious