t is illusory, and religion must on the whole be
classed, not simply as containing elements of delusion--these
undoubtedly everywhere exist--but as being rooted in delusion
altogether, just as materialists and atheists have always said it was.
At most there might remain, when the direct experiences of prayer were
ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential belief that the whole
order of existence must have a divine cause. But this way of
contemplating nature, pleasing as it would doubtless be to persons of a
pious taste, would leave to them but the spectators' part at a play,
whereas in experimental religion and the prayerful life, we seem
ourselves to be actors, and not in a play, but in a very serious
reality.

The genuineness of religion is thus indissolubly bound up with the
question whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not deceitful.
The conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this
consciousness is the very core of living religion. As to what is
transacted, great differences of opinion have prevailed. The unseen
powers have been supposed, and are yet supposed, to do things which no
enlightened man can nowadays believe in. It may well prove that the
sphere of influence in prayer is subjective exclusively, and that what
is immediately changed is only the mind of the praying person. But
however our opinion of prayer's effects may come to be limited by
criticism, religion, in the vital sense in which these lectures study
it, must stand or fall by the persuasion that effects of some sort
genuinely do occur. Through prayer, religion insists, things which
cannot be realized in any other manner come about: energy which but
for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in some
part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts.

This postulate is strikingly expressed in a letter written by the late
Frederic W. H. Myers to a friend, who allows me to quote from it. It
shows how independent the prayer-instinct is of usual doctrinal
complications. Mr. Myers writes:--

"I am glad that you have asked me about prayer, because I have rather
strong ideas on the subject. First consider what are the facts. There
exists around us a spiritual universe, and that universe is in actual
relation with the material. From the spiritual universe comes the
energy which maintains the material; the energy which makes the life of
each individual spirit. Our spirits are supported by a pe