the individual soul to that subsisting between the
ocean and some individual bay: "the hundred bays and gulfs and creeks
that succeed each other round the island," we read, "_are in the ocean,
and the ocean is in them._" [1] Now let us see what this means. There
may be the most urgent necessity for digging channels to connect a
reservoir with the sea, so that it may be filled with its fulness; but it
would be absurd to speak of opening up or renewing communication between
bay and ocean--a communication whose uninterrupted nature is implied in
the very terms of the image. On such an interpretation of immanence,
prayer in any real sense is either superfluous or impossible; for if no
one hopeth for that which he {195} seeth, neither would any one in his
senses seek to bring to pass a condition of things which is thought to be
already existing. Here we see once more the unbridgeable gulf between
every form of "idealistic Monism"--Eastern or Western--and Christianity;
for while, _e.g._, "the central idea of Indian piety is meditation, the
absorption of the individual in the life-spirit, the experience of
identity with the universality and oneness of the Godhead," on the other
hand "Christianity is the religion of prayer--prayer is its crown and its
pearl." [2]

That is really the crux of the whole matter; prayer must be conceived as
an active intercourse between the worshipper and a Person other than
himself, who is the object of his worship. It is not a soliloquy--what
the Germans expressively call a _Selbstgespraech_, or "self-talk"; it is
not a monologue, but a dialogue; it is not a mere contemplation, but
addressed to Someone who is thought of as willing to listen and able to
answer. As Sabatier has well said, "_Prayer is religion in act; that is,
prayer is real religion_." Wherever men believe in a personal God, as
distinct from an "all-inclusive consciousness of being" of which they are
fleeting expressions--mere surface ripples on an infinite ocean--that
belief will attest itself by the prayerful life. On the other hand, a
prayerless religion is a contradiction in terms; it either has no needs
to express or {196} it will die from lack of self-expression. The
believer will pray from a sense of inner necessity, coupled with the
instinctive assurance that the need of which he is conscious will thus,
and thus only, meet with its satisfaction. "The genuineness of
religion"--to quote Professor William James--"is th