aries in savage lands make certain; and as the
inhabitants thereof now are, we certainly once were in our ancestors
who dwelt in these northern islands, in the days after the cessation of
the glacial periods. There is not one shred of scientific evidence
available which would help us to the comforting belief that, however it
may be with the Matabele or the Tonga Islanders, the ancestors of
Christian England were anything different. That, then, which is called
the instinct or habit of prayer, had its origin in the ignorance and
superstition of an age which knew nothing of the inviolable reign of
law throughout the infinities of the Divine creation, in an age whose
religious conceptions were as gross as their scientific ideas were
absurd.

Now, the unscientific and unphilosophical taint, which marked the
earliest heavenward cries of terrified man, has clung to the petitions
which he offers up at this hour for material favours and blessings. At
the close of a prolonged drought, the Archbishops of Canterbury and
York compose a prayer for rain, and as a drought cannot last for ever,
rain does eventually come, and the same dignitaries then order a prayer
to be offered up in thanksgiving. But does any one really suppose that
the natural order of the phenomena has been altered at the request of
the clergy by an Almighty mind? It were preposterous, grotesque and
irreverent, in the highest degree to think so. And the proof that it
is preposterous is seen in the fact that prayers are no longer offered
up for the advent or cessation of the effects of phenomena whose causes
have been scientifically determined. Thus, in mediaeval days, man
placed bells high in the steeples of his churches to deafen the demons
who caused the storms of thunder and lightning which destroyed his
property. At this day one may read the inscriptions on the bells which
testify to the belief of the time. But as soon as the lightning rod
was discovered by Franklin, and its absolute ability to conduct the
electric current to the soil, bells were no longer requisitioned as
antidotes to storms, and prayers and litanies ceased to be sung to
petition the Divine clemency against the effects of the weather. In
the same way an outbreak of cholera or diphtheria once sent people in
their thousands to the churches and chapels; now it sends them to the
drains, and while prayers proved but a poor prophylactic against
epidemics, the most pious credulity now places