This, then, is the point we desire to emphasize. It is a fact of experience that prayer can give calmness, purity, and strength of soul. It can lighten perplexity and sorrow. It can empower us to resist temptation, and enable us to overcome sin. It can give "modesty, tenderness, and sweetness" to character. In a word, it can aid us materially in the formation of a noble human character. Noble character can only be formed under two conditions. First, it can only be formed under the condition of _freedom_. The unfree is the unmoral.[421] There can be no dignity and no moral worth in action which results from mere mechanical force. Personality alone has responsibility, dignity, and worth. If, then, moral personality has true freedom and self-determination, we are free to pray, and God is free to answer prayer. We may believe that the physical world is held in iron bands of necessary causation, but we can not believe that the moral world is so bound. The human will is free, and the Divine will is free. "The First Cause," says Mr. Spencer, "includes within itself all power"--therefore alternative power--"and transcends all law"--therefore it can not be necessitated. We can not doubt that Mr. Tyndall would freely accord this position. He might hesitate, he would unquestionably refuse to unite in "prayer for rain," for example, because he holds that the fall of rain is governed by changeless physical laws, and "no act of humiliation, individual or national, could call one shower from heaven;" this would be a miracle, and "the age of miracles is past."[422] But we do not see how he could refuse to unite in the prayers of the National Church for the forgiveness of sins, for strength to overcome sin, for fortitude to endure, and for consolation under the afflictions and sorrows incident to human life.