it shameful to traffic with the divine. Prayer beautifully
illustrates a point previously noted, how speech oscillates
between the expression of feeling and the conveyance of ideas.
Beginning in primitive religion as a crude and cheap petition
for favors, it becomes in more spiritual religious experience, a
lyric cry of emotion, a tranquil and serene expression of the
soul's desire. Prayer is, moreover, "religion in act." That
deep sense of an awed relationship to divine power which was,
in the beginning of this discussion, noted as constituting
certainly one of the outstanding characteristics of the religious
experience, finds its most adequate emotional expression in
prayer.

Religion is nothing [writes Auguste Sabatier] if it be not the vital
act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the
principle from which it draws life. This act is prayer, by which I
understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain
sacred formulas, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting
itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of
which it feels the presence--it may be even before it has a name
by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there
is no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and
stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or doctrines, we have
religion.[1]

[Footnote 1: A. Sabatier: _Esquisse d'une Philosophie de la
Religion_ (ed. 1897), pp. 24-26.]

In prayer, furthermore, we may hope to find not the fulfillment
of our desires, but what our desires really are. We
are released temporarily from tension of temporal and selfish
longings. We hold a tranquil and reverential speech with a
power not ourselves, and in communion with the infinite
purge ourselves of the dross of immediate personal needs.
In such a peaceful interlude we may find at once clarity and
rest. Prayer, at its highest, might be defined as audible meditation,
controlled by the sense of the divinity of the power we
are addressing. So that the truly spiritual man prays not for
the fulfillment of his own accidental longings, but pleads
rather: "Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of
my heart be acceptable in thy sight, 0 Lord, my strength and
my redeemer."

FEAR AND AWE. Man's attitude toward the divine was
noted to have arisen partly in his feeling of dependence on
personal forces incomparably superior to himself, and in his
urgent need fo