And at this point we may make a further suggestion towards explaining the genesis and the continued maintenance of vocal prayer as a part of religious worship. The practice would seem to be due not merely to ignorance or disregard of the obvious law of cause and effect, by which material phenomena are necessarily controlled, but to less worthy conceptions of the Divine Mind governing all things. The Deity of the Christian and Mohammedan worlds is a Being eternally dissevered from a world which he has by an omnipotent effort evoked from nothingness--a conception now regarded as impossible. Consequently, while God is in his high heaven, surrounded by his court, the world holds on its courses, and is periodically corrected by special interferences, generally said to be due to the intervention of prayer. Thus, the grand historical evolution, which caused the Roman Empire to appear at the close of the three great Eastern Empires, and that monument of human genius itself to ultimately collapse and make way for the nations which now constitute modern Europe, in no wise strikes Augustine, or any orthodox teacher, even of to-day, as the outcome of purely natural forces and influences--the action and reaction of powers wholly human--but as part of a Divine scheme, which was foreordained for the purpose of founding the Christian Church. This, in briefest outline, is the famous argument of "The City of God," the first Christian attempt at a philosophy of history. Everything mapped out by Divine ordinance, and men moved like puppets to accomplish the scheme. Attila the Hun appears at the gates of Rome, in the fifth century, and threatens to sack it, and thereby delay the execution of the plan, and prayer averts the disaster. In all moments of danger, threatened catastrophe, public or private, the doctrine inculcated was recurrence by prayer to the external Deity, who would so modify things by his omnipotent power, as to reconcile the interests of all concerned. I do not think it can be said that such a frame of mind is distinctive of the Protestant of to-day, certainly not of the instructed Protestant, who may acquiesce in the vicarious repetition of certain formulas by his clergyman on Sunday morning, but would certainly not in practice endorse the theory that Divine intervention might be called in at any moment by prayer. But it is the attitude of the Roman and Greek Churches, as it is of the Mohammedan religion, and doubtless of the less educated in the sects of Nonconformity.