of
him."[135-2]

But this solution of the problem does not go far enough. Prayer is
claimed to have a positive effect on the mind other than resignation.
Joyful emotions are its fruits, _spiritual enlightenment_ its reward.
These are more than cheerful acquiescence, nor can the latter come from
objects of sense.

The most eminent teachers agree in banishing material pleasure and
prosperity from holy desires. They are of one mind in warning against
what the world and the flesh can offer, against the pursuit of riches,
power and lust. Many counsel poverty and deliberate renunciation of all
such things. Nor is the happiness they talk of that which the pursuit of
intellectual truth brings. This, indeed, confers joy, of which whoever
has tasted will not hastily return to the fleshpots of the senses, but
it is easy to see that it is not religious. Prayer and veneration have
not a part in it. Great joy is likewise given by the exercise of the
imagination when stirred by art in some of its varied forms, and a joy
more nearly allied to religion than is that of scientific investigation.
But the esthetic emotions are well defined, and are distinctly apart
from those concerned with the religious sentiment. Their most complete
satisfaction rather excludes than encourages pious meditations. That
which prayer ought to seek outside of itself is different from all of
these, its dower must be divine.

We need not look long for it. Though hidden from the wise, it has ever
been familiar to the unlearned. Man has never been in doubt as to what
it is. He has been only too willing to believe he has received it.

In barbarism and civilization, in the old and new worlds, the final
answer to prayer has ever been acknowledged to be _inspiration_,
revelation, the thought of God made clear to the mind of man, the
mystical hypostasis through which the ideas of the human coincide with
those of universal Intelligence. This is what the Pythian priestess, the
Siberian shaman, the Roman sibyl, the Voluspan prophetess, the Indian
medicine-man, all claimed in various degrees along with the Hebrew seers
and the Mahometan teacher.[137-1]

The TRUTH, the last and absolute truth, is what is everywhere recognized
as, if not the only, at least the completest, the highest answer to
prayer. "Where I found the truth, there I found my God, himself the
truth," says St. Augustine; and in a prayer by St. Chrysostom, the
"Golden Mouth," unsurpassed in its grand si