deed he to whom sacrifice is made and
worship paid by the community, with whose interests and whose
morality--with whose good, in a word, he is from the beginning
identified. "In the absence of experience of good as one of the
realities of life, no one," Hoeffding says, "would ever have believed in
the goodness of the gods"; and, we may add, it is as interested in and
caring for the good of the community that the god of the community is
worshipped. It is in the conviction that he does so care, that
religious feeling is rooted; or, as Hoeffding puts it (p. 162), it is
rooted in "the need to collect and concentrate ourselves, to resign
ourselves, to feel ourselves supported and carried by a power raised
above all struggle and opposition and beyond all change." There we
have, implicit from the beginning, that communion with god, or striving
thereafter, which is essential to worship. It is faith. It is rest.
It is the heart's desire. And it is not fetichism, nor is fetichism it.

{138}

PRAYER

The physician, if he is to do his work, must know both a healthy and a
diseased body, or organ, when he sees it. He must know the difference
between the two and the symptoms both of health and disease. Otherwise
he is in danger of trying to cure an organ which is healthy already--in
which case his remedies will simply aggravate the disease. That is
obviously true of the physician who seeks to heal the body, and it is
equally, if not so obviously, true of the physician who seeks to
minister to a mind, or a soul, diseased. Now, the missionary will find
that the heathen, to whom he is to minister, have the habit of prayer;
and the question arises, What is to be his attitude towards it? He
cannot take up the position that prayer is in itself a habit to be
condemned; he is not there to eradicate the habit, or to uproot the
tendency. Neither is he there to create the habit; it already exists,
and the wise missionary will acknowledge its existence with
thankfulness. His business is not to teach his flock to {139} pray,
but how to pray, that is to say, for what and to whom. But even if he
thus wisely recognises that prayer is a habit not to be created, but to
be trained by him, it is still possible for him to assume rashly that
it is simply impossible for a heathen ever to pray for anything that is
right, and therefore, that it is a missionary's duty first to insist
that everything for which a savage or barbarian prays