really, as well as ostensibly, the nucleus, the soul, of the matter. All things else are merely corollaries to and deductions from them—matter that is evidently very subordinate. Theirs is a religion of one idea, the idea of God. And the calling up within them of this idea is their prayer. Or we may put this in another way. We may say that prayer is with them the conscious presentation to their minds of certain ideas, and the prostration of their minds before them—namely, the ideas of the different forms of moral perfectness, the idea of intellectual perfectness or complete knowledge, and the idea, belonging to the physical order, of perfect power. Their conception of these ideas is, of course, not identical with ours, but such as their past history, and the existing conditions of Eastern society, enable them to attain to. We can separate this effort of theirs into two parts. First, there is the creation in the mind of these ideas of the several kinds of perfectness; and then there is the effect the holding of them in the mind has on the mind itself. That effect is the production in themselves of a tendency towards making these forms of moral being, such as they have been conceived, instinctive sentiments, and instinctive principles of action. In this view prayer is with the Oriental, the effort by which he both forms the conception of what is good, and actually becomes good; both, of course, in accordance with the measure of what is possible for him. But why, it may be asked, should he do this? All men who have lived in organized societies have done it; though, indeed, the character of the act has not in all been so distinctly moral as it is with the Oriental. Still it has been a natural ladder by which individuals and communities, and mankind generally, have mounted from lower to higher stages of moral being. It has been the natural means by which the moral ideas, which the working of the successive stages of social progress suggested, have been brought into shape, purified, disseminated, and made universal and instinctive. As respects the community everybody understands that its peace, and order, and even that its existence, very much depend on there being a general unanimity in moral ideas and sentiments throughout all its classes and members. And it has always been perceived that the most effectual way of bringing this about is that all should have the same object of worship—that is to say, that the prayers of all should be the same. Formerly, when these things were more studied than they are now, this was regarded as the one paramount way. Fellow-citizens then were those who worshipped the same Gods in the same temples; aliens were those who worshipped other Gods. There could be no citizenship where there was a diversity of prayers; for that gave rise to, and implied, a diversity of moral standards. And with respect to the individual, the spontaneous working of what is within has pretty generally revealed to him that this