The prayers of primitive man which I quoted in my last lecture were in the nature of petitions or requests, as was natural and indeed inevitable in view of the fact that they were preferred on occasions when the tribe was in exceptional distress and required the aid of the gods on whose protection the community relied. But the prayers which I have just quoted are not in their essence petitions or requests, even though in some cases they tend to become so. They are essentially prayers of thanksgiving and the offerings made are thank-offerings. Thus our conception of primitive prayer must be extended to include both mental attitudes--that of thankfulness for past or present blessings as well as the hope of blessings yet to come. And inasmuch as sacrifice is the concomitant of prayer, we must recognise that sacrificial offerings also serve as the expression of both mental attitudes. And we must note that in the regularly recurring form of public or tribal worship with which we are now dealing the dominant feeling to which expression is given is {183} that of thankfulness. The tribe seeks for communion with its god for the purpose of expressing its thanks. Even the savage who simply says, "Here, Tari, I have brought you something to eat," or, still more curtly, "This is yours to eat," is expressing thanks, albeit in savage fashion. And the means which the savage adopts for securing that communion which he seeks to renew regularly with the tribal god is a sacrificial meal, of which the god and his worshippers partake. Throughout the whole ceremony, whether we regard the spoken words or the acts performed, there is no suggestion of magic and no possibility of twisting the ceremony into a piece of magic intended to produce some desired result or to exercise any constraint over the powers to which the ceremony is addressed. The mental attitude is that of thankfulness.