This feeling of dependence, and this consequent sense of obligation, lie at the very foundation of all religion. They lead the mind towards God, and anchor it in the Divine. They prompt man to pray, and inspire him with an instinctive confidence in the efficacy of prayer. So that prayer is natural to man, and necessary to man. Never yet has the traveller found a people on earth without prayer. Races of men have been found without houses, without raiment, without arts and sciences, but never without prayer any more than without speech. Plutarch wrote, eighteen centuries ago, If you go through all the world, you may find cities without walls, without letters, without rulers, without money, without theatres, but never without temples and gods, or without _prayers_, oaths, prophecies, and sacrifices, used to obtain blessings and benefits, or to avert curses and calamities.[117] The naturalness of prayer is admitted even by the modern unbeliever. Gerrit Smith says, "Let us who believe that the religion of reason calls for the religion of nature, remember that the flow of prayer is just as natural as the flow of water; the prayerless man has become an unnatural man."[118] Is man in sorrow or in danger, his most natural and spontaneous refuge is in prayer. The suffering, bewildered, terror-stricken soul turns towards God. "Nature in an agony is no atheist; the soul that knows not where to fly, flies to God." And in the hour of deliverance and joy, a feeling of gratitude pervades the soul--and gratitude, too, not to some blind nature-force, to some unconscious and impersonal power, but gratitude to God. The soul's natural and appropriate language in the hour of deliverance is thanksgiving and praise. [Footnote 117: "Against Kalotes," ch. xxxi.] [Footnote 118: "Religion of Reason."] This universal tendency to recognize a superior Power upon whom we are dependent, and by whose hand our well-being and our destinies are absolutely controlled, has revealed itself even amid the most complicated forms of polytheistic worship. Amid the even and undisturbed flow of every-day life they might be satisfied with the worship of subordinate deities, but in the midst of sudden and unexpected calamities, and of terrible catastrophes, then they cried to the Supreme God.[119] "When alarmed by an earthquake," says Aulus Gellius, "the ancient Romans were accustomed to pray, not to some one of the gods individually, but to God in general, _as to the Unknown_."[120] [Footnote 119: "At critical moments, when the deepest feelings of the human heart are stirred, the old Greeks and Romans seem suddenly to have dropped all mythological ideas, and to have fallen back on the universal language of true religion."--Max Müller, "Science of Language." p. 436.] [Footnote 120: Tholuck, "Nature and Influence of Heathenism," p. 23.]