The Religion of Nature Delineated William Wollaston (my reading book .TXT) 📖

and beings in whom, all things considered, it would be less respect to be constantly in the formal act of devotion, than it is to address ourselves to Him with prepared minds, at certain times, or upon certain occasions. To be always thus engaged, if it could be, would be to make God what He is not: since it seems to suppose that He wants it and we merit Him by it; or that He is bound to give what we ask, without our endeavoring; or, at least, that He is a Being obnoxious to importunity and teasing. For these reasons I have also in the explication of my meaning inserted that limitation, “by some solemn and proper act.”

Though every man knows best his own opportunities and circumstances, and therefore may be most able to judge for himself how he may best perform this duty, yet in general it may be said that, to the doing of it solemnly and in the best manner we can, these things are required: an intent mind,328 proper times and places, a proper form of words, and a proper posture. For if the mind be absent, or attends not to what is said, it is not the man that prays: this is only as it were the noise of a machine, which is put into motion indeed, but without any consciousness of its own act. To repeat one’s prayers with moving lips, but alienated thoughts, is not to pray in the best manner we can, because it is not in a manner agreeable to what we are, or to truth. For this is to do it only as speaking, and not as thinking beings.

Upon this account, it will be certain that all times and places cannot be equally proper.329 Some times are engrossed by the business of life, and some places lie exposed to interruptions. Those of retreat and silence ought to be sought, and, as far as fairly it may be, contrived. And for this further reason: because the farther we are removed from the notice of others, the clearer we stand of all ostentation; that is, the more we do it upon the score of truth and duty; and this is, again, the more truly and dutifully we do it.

Our next care is a proper form of words. All prayer must either be vocal or mental. Now even that which is called mental can scarce be made without words,330 or something equivalent.331 (I believe that even the deaf and dumb form to themselves some kind of language: I mean something which supplies the room of language.) For thoughts in their naked state, divested of all words and taken merely by themselves, are such subtle and fleeting things as are scarce capable of making any appearance in the mind; at least of being detained, compared together, and arranged into sentences. If a sentence may be so made up of sensible ideas as to subsist in the mind by the help of those images which remain in the fantasy, after the manner of a sentence expressed in pictures or by hieroglyphics, yet such a sentence must be very imperfect⁠—through the want of grammatical inflections, particles, and other additions necessary to modify and connect the ideas, of which (particles, etc.) there can be no images332⁠—and indeed little more than a set of disjointed conceptions, scarce exhibiting any sense without the assistance of language to fill up the blanks; and besides that, a prayer cannot be made out of such sentences as those. It is by the help of words, at least in great measure, that we even reason and discourse within ourselves, as well as communicate our thoughts and discourse with others; and if anyone observes himself well, he will find that he thinks, as well as speaks, in some language, and that in thinking he supposes and runs over silently and habitually those sounds which in speaking he actually makes. This is the cause why men can scarce write well in any language but their own: for while they think in their own, their style and speech, which is but the portraiture of their thoughts, must have the turn and genius of their own language, to what language soever the particular words belong. In short, words seem to be, as it were, bodies or vehicles to the sense or meaning, which is the spiritual part,333 and which without the other can hardly be fixed in the mind. Let any man try ingenuously, whether he can think over but that short prayer in Plato, Τὰ μὲν ἐθλὰ, κ.τ.λ.,334 abstracted quite from those and all other words. One may apply his mind to the words of a prayer pronounced by another, and by taking them in make them his own; or he may be, as it were, his own reader, and pronounce them himself; or he may lay before him a prayer in writing, and so carry his eyes and his mind together through it; or he may go over a form of words imprinted on his memory; or he may put words together in his mind ex tempore: but still, in all these ways, words and language are used. And since to think over a set of words cannot be a more adequate manner of addressing to God (who neither speaks, nor thinks like us) than to speak it over and think too; and moreover, since the very sound of the words affects us, and, when the form is ready prepared, and the mind freed from the labor of composing, does really help attention:335 I say, since this is the case, it must be better, when we have opportunity, to pronounce a prayer,336 than only to think it over. But then it should be spoken no louder (I mean when we pray privately)