not only because it helps us to see ourselves as we are, but also because it shares our secrets with another, has great value for organizing the self. In this way we get relief from the misjudgments of others, also, and from the mystery that we are to ourselves, for we lay our case, as it were, before a judge who does not err. Thus prayer has value in that it develops the essentially social form of personal self-realization.

Moreover, where the idea of God has reached high ethical elevation, prayer is a mode of self-assurance of the triumph of the good, with all the reinforcement that comes from such assurance. Confidence in ultimate goodness may support itself upon various thought structures. Many Christians attach their thought of God and of a meaningful world to Jesus as the revealer and worker-out of the divine plan. With him as leader they feel that they cannot fail. Others attach their ethical aspirations directly to God, who may then be thought of as present with the worshiper in these very aspirations. Others think the world-purpose in less sharply personal terms, as the evolution of the cosmos toward a moral life that was not, and now is only beginning to be, but is nevertheless the inmost law of the system. In the last case prayer shades off from conversation toward mere contemplation, yet without failing to identify the individual's own purpose with a world-purpose that is moving toward sure fulfilment. In all these types of selfassurance the individual may do little more than apply to himself by suggestion an idea that is current in the cult with which he is familiar. Yet the idea that is thus applied grows in the process of appropriating it to one's self. It has, in fact, been generated in men in and

✓ through prayer. That is to say, prayer is a process in which faith is generated. It is a mistake to suppose that men assure themselves of the existence and of the character of God by some prayerless method, and then merely exercise this ready-made faith in the act of praying. No, prayer has greater originality than this. Alongside of much traditionalism and vain repetition there is also some launching forth upon voyages of exploration and some discovery of lands firm enough to support men when they carry their heaviest burdens.)

To complete this functional view of prayer we must not fail to secure the evolutionary perspective. If we glance at the remote beginnings, and then at the hither end, of the evolution of prayer, we discover that an immense change has taken place. It is a correlate of the transformed character of the gods, and of the parallel disciplining of men's valuations. In the words of Fosdick, prayer may be considered as dominant desire. But it is also a way of securing domination over desire. It is indeed self-assertion; sometimes it is the making of one's supreme claim, as when life reaches its most tragic crisis; yet it is, even in the same act, submission to an overself. Here, then, is our greater problem as to the function of prayer. It starts as the assertion of any desire; it ends as the organization of one's own desires into a system of desires recognized as superior and then made one's own.

At the beginning the attitude is more that of using the gods for men's ends; at the culmination prayer puts men at the service of God for the correction of human ends, and for the attainment of these corrected ends

I

H. E. Fosdick, The Meaning of Prayer (New York, 1915).

rather than the initial ones. Like everything else in religion, prayer has several lines of development. Every religion has its own characteristic ways of approaching its divinity or divinities, and its own characteristic valuations are expressed thereby. All, however, as we may be sure from our whole study of religious evolution, reflect the notion of society then and there prevailing. In the Christian religion, with its central emphasis upon love, prayer tends to become, wherever the constructive significance of love has not been submerged by ritualism or dogmatism, the affirmation of what may be called social universalism of essentially democratic tendency. On the one hand, the act of praying now becomes highly individual. To be prayed for by a priest is not enough, nor does mechanical participation in common prayer suffice. Whether one prays with others or alone, one is required to pray in one's own spirit, and to do it sincerely. Paradoxical as it may seem, this throwing of the individual back upon himself, with insistence that he here and now express his very self, produces, not individualistic desire, but criticism of desires from a social point of view. Here self-assertion becomes self-overcoming in and through acceptance of the loving will of the Father as one's own. Now, because the Father values so highly every child of his, in prayer to him I must adopt his point of view with respect to my fellows, desiring for each of them full and joyous self-realization. This sort of submission-to a God who values each individual— tends therefore toward the deference for each individual that is the foundation of democracy. Here the function of prayer is that of training men in the attitudes of mind that are fundamental to democratic society.

Finally, prayer has the function of extending one's acquaintance with agreeable persons. Here and there, at least, men enjoy God's companionship just because of what he is, without reference to benefits that he may bestow. This pure friendship sometimes includes the joy of helping the Great Friend. It is true that when philosophy identifies God with some abstract absolute the notion of helping him is ruled out. But religion is different from philosophy. As a rule the gods of religion—and not less the God of Christianity—stand to their worshipers in a relation of mutual give and take. As a primitive group feeds its god in order to make him strong, and rejoices and feasts with him as an invisible guest, so in Christianity God and men stand in mutual need of each other. This must be so if God is love. Men are saved by grace alone, but there is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents; men are called into the family of God, yet only as men fulfil fraternal relations with one another can God have the satisfactions that belong to a father. Thus it is that Christian prayer has to be reciprocal as between God and the worshiper. There is an ancient doctrine that our prayers are inspired in us by God himself, so that he also prays in our prayers. That is to say, at this point each of the two, God and the worshiper, finds himself by identifying his own desire with that of the other.

This is the culmination of the self-and-socius consciousness that makes us persons. The function of prayer at this level, then, is to produce (or, as the case may be, sustain) personal life, which is also social life, as something of ultimate worth.

CHAPTER XIX

THE RELIGIOUS NATURE OF MAN

There is a traditional opinion that man is naturally or "incurably" religious. The sense in which this is true, if it be true at all, may well be the closing problem of this long discussion of the naturalness of religion. That religion lies wholly within the natural psychological order, just as regard for one's family, or seeking to buy at the lowest price, needs no further affirmation. What we still need to consider, however, is the relation of fundamental to accessory. In the natural order some things are merely incidental workings out of something that lies deeper. Affection for offspring is fundamental; the fashions that parents adopt for children's clothing are superficial, but both are natural. Is religion one of the deep and permanent springs of human life, like parental affection, or is it an incidental expression of a nature that can satisfy itself in other ways also?

Before answering this question, two or three other distinctions must be noted. "Man" might be taken to mean either one of three things: each particular man, or the species as a whole, or a type toward which the species is moving. Non-religious individuals here and there might be members of a religious race, just as there are non-musical persons, the peculiarity in each case being due to a particular congenital lack. Again, there could be periods of arrested religiosity in a race the