adverted to, you can
picture to yourself a Being able and willing to do any and every
conceivable thing. You are right in saying that in opposition to this
Power science is of no avail--that it is 'a weapon of air.' The man of
science, however, while accepting the figure, would probably reverse
its application, thinking it is not science which is here the thing of
air, but that unsubstantial pageant of the imagination to which the
solidity of science is opposed.

********************

Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and
meanness.--EMERSON.

*****

III ON PRAYER AS A FORM OF PHYSICAL ENERGY.

THE Editor of the 'Contemporary Review' is liberal enough to grant me
space for some remarks upon a subject, which, though my relation to it
was simply that of a vehicle of transmission, has brought down upon me
a considerable amount of animadversion.

It may be interesting to some of my readers if I glance at a few cases
illustrative of the history of the human mind, in relation to this and
kindred questions. In the fourth century the belief in Antipodes was
deemed unscriptural and heretical. The pious Lactantius was as angry
with the people who held this notion as my censors are now with me,
and quite as unsparing in his denunciations of their 'Monstrosities.'
Lactantius was irritated because, in his mind, by education and habit,
cosmogony and religion were indissolubly associated, and, therefore,
simultaneously disturbed. In the early part of the seventeenth
century the notion that the earth was fixed, and that the sun and
stars revolved round it daily, was interwoven with religious feeling,
the separation then attempted by Galileo rousing the animosity and
kindling the persecution of the Church. Men still living can remember
the indignation excited by the first revelations of geology regarding
the age of the earth, the association between chronology and religion
being for the time indissoluble. In our day, however, the
best-informed theologians are prepared to admit that our views of the
Universe and its Author are not impaired, but improved, by the
abandonment of the Mosaic account of the Creation. Look, finally, at
the excitement caused by the publication of the 'Origin of Species;'
and compare it with the calm attendant on the appearance of the far
more outspoken, and, from the old point of view, more impious,
'Descent of Man.'

Thus religion survives-after the r