e material forces external to the individual
is a disputed point. If it cannot in some way do this, prayers for rain,
for harvests, for safety at sea, for restoration to health, for delivery
from grasshoppers[131-3] and pestilence, whether for our own benefit or
others, are hardly worth reciting. A physicist expresses the one opinion
in these words: "Science asserts that without a disturbance of natural
law, quite as serious as the stoppage of an eclipse or the rolling of
the St. Lawrence up the Falls of Niagara, no act of humiliation,
individual or national, could call one shower from heaven or deflect
toward us a single beam of the sun." "Assuming the efficacy of free
prayer to produce changes in external nature, it necessarily follows
that natural laws are more or less at the mercy of man's
volition."[132-1]

This authoritative statement, much discussed at the time it was
published, does not in fact express the assertion of science. To the
scientific apprehension, man's volitions and his prayers are states of
emotion, inseparably connected in their manifestations with changes in
his cerebral structure, with relative elevation of temperature, and with
the elimination of oxygen and phosphorus, in other words with
chemico-vital phenomena and the transformation of force. Science also
adds that there is a constant interaction of all force, and it is not
prepared to deny that the force expended by a national or individual
prayer may become a co-operating cause in the material change asked
for, even if the latter be a rain shower. This would not affect a
natural law but only its operation, and that much every act of our life
does. The fact that persistency and earnestness in prayer--_i. e._, the
increased development of force--add to its efficacy, would accord with
such a scientific view. It would further be very materially corroborated
by the accepted doctrine of the orders of force. A unit of electrical or
magnetic force equals many of the force of gravity; a number of
electrical units are required to make one of chemical force; and
chemico-vital or "metabolic" force is still higher; whereas thought
regarded as a form of force must be vastly beyond this again.

To render a loadstone, which lifts filings of iron by its magnetic
force, capable of doing the same by the force of gravity, its density
would have to be increased more than a thousand million times. All
forces differ in like degree. Professor Faraday calculated t