e strictest adherence to prescribed forms, whether of
actions or words, the prayers, when we first meet with them, have got
beyond the region of charm or spell, and are cast in the language of
petition; they show clearly a sense of the dependence of man on the
Power manifesting itself in the universe. There was here, perhaps, a
germ of religious development; but it was arrested in its growth by the
formalisation of the whole Roman religious system, and no substitute was
to be found for it either in the imported Greek ritual, or in the more
enlightening doctrines of exotic Greek philosophy. The prayers used in
the ritual of Augustus' great festival, which was almost as much Greek
as Roman in character, seem to us as hard and formal as the most ancient
Roman prayers that have come down to us. In the most emotional moments
of the life of a Roman of enlightenment like Cicero, when we can truly
say of him that he was touched by true religious feeling, as well as by
the spiritual aspirations of the nobler Greek philosophers, prayers find
no place at all.

But for St. Paul and the members of the early Christian brotherhood the
whole of life was a continuous worship, and the one great feature of
that worship was prayer. It has been said by a great Christian writer
of recent times that "when the attention of a thinking heathen was
directed to the new religion spreading in the Roman Empire, the first
thing to strike him as extraordinary would be that a religion of prayer
was superseding the religion of ceremonies and invocation of gods; that
it encouraged all, even the most uneducated, to pray, or, in other
words, to meditate and exercise the mind in self-scrutiny and
contemplation of God."[992] And, as the same writer says, prayer thus
became a motive power of moral renewal and _inward civilisation_, to
which nothing else could be compared for efficacy. And more than this,
it was the chief inward and spiritual means of maintaining that
universal law of love, which, so far as this life was concerned, was the
great secret of the new religion.

NOTES TO LECTURE XX

[956] P. Gardner, _The Growth of Christianity_, 1907, p.
2. Cp. some remarks of Prof. Conway in _Virgil's
Messianic Eclogue_, p. 39 foll.

[957] The phrase "enthusiasm of humanity" is, of course,
that of the author of _Ecce Homo_, a most inspiring book
for all students of religious history, as indeed for all
other readers.

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