The Essence of Christianity

Part 1 — CHAPTER XII. THE OMNIPOTENCE OF FEELING, OR THE MYSTERY OF PRAYER.

George Eliot translation

The highest idea, the God of a political community, of a people whose political system expresses itself in the form of religion, is Law, the consciousness of the law as an absolute divine power; the highest idea, the God of unpolitical, unworldly feeling is Love; the love which brings all the treasures and glories in heaven and upon earth as an offering to the beloved, the love whose law is the wish of the beloved one, and whose power is the unlimited power of the imagination, of intellectual miracle-working.

The ultimate essence of religion is revealed by the simplest act of religion—prayer; an act which implies at least as much as the dogma of the Incarnation, although religious speculation stands amazed at this, as the greatest of mysteries. Not, certainly, the prayer before and after meals, the ritual of animal egoism, but the prayer pregnant with sorrow, the prayer of disconsolate love, the prayer which expresses the power of the heart that crushes man to the ground, the prayer which begins in despair and ends in rapture.

Notes in this chapter

Note 1 · “The greater part of Hebrew poetry, which is often held to be only spiritual, is political.”—Herder. ↑Note 2 · Sebastian Frank von Wörd in Zinkgrefs Apophthegmata deutscher Nation. ↑Note 3 · It would be an imbecile objection to say that God fulfils only those wishes, those prayers, which are uttered in his name, or in the interes Note 4 · Ja-wort. ↑Note 5 · Also, on subjective grounds, social prayer is more effectual than isolated prayer. Community enhances the force of emotion, heightens confid Note 6 · In the excellent work, Theanthropos, eine Reihe von Aphorismen (Zurich, 1838), the idea of the sense of dependence, of omnipotence, of praye Note 7 · God is the Love that satisfies our wishes, our emotional wants; he is himself the realised wish of the heart, the wish exalted to the certai Note 8 · In prayer, man addresses God with the word of intimate affection—Thou; he thus declares articulately that God is his alter ego; he confesses Note 9 · Prayer is the self-division of man into two beings,—a dialogue of man with himself, with his heart. It is essential to the effectiveness of Note 10 · It is an extremely superficial view of prayer to regard it as an expression of the sense of dependence. It certainly expresses such a sense,