moral effect of prayer is his highest personal concern. He regards it as the advancement of his truest self; for, if he is not a moral being, he cannot tell in what he differs, specifically, from the lower animals; and prayer, he knows it is, which has been the chief means for keeping alive, and nurturing, and bringing into form, his moral being. It gives birth, form, permanence, and vitality to moral aspirations. To dwell for a moment longer on the subject, looking still at the same fact, but now from a somewhat different point of view. The object of their prayer has been the highly compound abstraction of all, but more especially in the moral order, that would, according to their ideas and knowledge, contribute towards the upholding and building up of a human society. We see indications of this elsewhere besides among Orientals. In a democracy wisdom and counsel in the general body of the community are necessary, and so at Athens was worshipped the Goddess of Wisdom. The maintenance and enlargement of Rome depended on the sword, and so the god of Rome was the God of War. The martial spirit and martial virtues were necessary to them. When concord became necessary, a temple was erected to Concord. This also explains the deification of living Egyptian Pharaohs, and of living Roman emperors. Each was in his time the “_præsens deus_” of society. What was done was done by their providence. Their will was the law of society, and its regulative power. Even revealed religion is not exempt from this necessity. When the existence of the Hebrew people depended on the sword, Jehovah was the Lord of Hosts, the God of Battles. He taught the hands to war, and the fingers to fight. He gave them the victory over all their enemies round about. He it was Who made them a peculiar people—that is to say, Who brought about within them the sentiment of national exclusiveness; and Who, in short, made them zealous of all the good works that would maintain society under its existing conditions and circumstances. At the Christian epoch, when the chief hope of the world was in peace and order, He was regarded as the institutor of civil government; and as having made all people of one blood, so that there could be no ground for anything exclusive. As men’s ideas changed, the substance of their prayers changed correspondingly. To deny these facts is to deny both history, and the plain, unmistakable announcements of the Sacred Volume. And to reject the grand, simple, instructive explanation universal history thus gives is to refuse to accept that view of the working of providence in human affairs, which God submits to our consideration, just as He does the order and the mind of the visible material world. It is, in fact, to refuse to be taught of God.