In the opening chapters of this book we had occasion once or twice to ask ourselves in passing how the new emphasis on the doctrine of Divine immanence was likely to affect the question of prayer; in turning now to a more direct treatment of the latter subject, this is again the first and most important query we shall have to consider. Truth, as we all know, is a "_mean_"--it represents a balance between opposing extremes; what is, however, not always recognised is that the extremes are not necessarily equidistant from the true centre, and there are cases when it is of the greatest importance to discern which of them is nearer and which more remote from the truth. In the present instance we have insisted all along that of the two possible extremes of Deism and Pantheism the former, with its exclusive insistance upon God's transcendence, is not only more intelligible but far more true than the latter, with its one-sided stress on His immanence; for, as we previously expressed it, in the exercise of religion it is the transcendent God {193} with whom we are concerned. In fact, Deism may be a very faulty type of religion, theoretically considered; but Pantheism is religion's practical annihilation. It is not for nothing that in Persia, _e.g._, the name of _Sufi_--in theory a pantheistic believer in the identity of the worshipper with his Deity--signifies in current use not a mystic, but a freethinker! So far as the religious _life_ is concerned, we repeat that Deism is the lesser error and the lesser danger; and nowhere is this more closely brought home to us than when we consider the reality and the meaning of prayer. For however far-off God may be thought to be, it has never been suggested that the voice of prayer is not able to travel across the distance--He may "hear us in heaven, His dwelling-place, and when He heareth, forgive;" but if His presence is so universally diffused that we ourselves form part of it, we shall hardly know to whom or to what to address ourselves in the act of adoration. We can pray to a Deity conceived as solely transcendent, but not to a Deity conceived as solely immanent, _i.e._, as the Sum of Being. A vague "cosmic emotion" differs _toto coelo_ from worship; we cannot worship that which includes us, for if we did we should be indulging in self-worship, and as for prayer, we could no more seriously offer it to the universe than to the atmosphere. This point cannot be too clearly realised. Prayer is the soul's communion with God; but if the soul is an {194} integral constituent of God, a mode or phase of the Divine Being, then this communion, being already an accomplished and unalterable fact, cannot be so much as desired, still less does it need to be brought about by prayer or any other means whatsoever. Nothing could be more instructive in this connection than what is apparently a favourite illustration with those for whom immanence is only a synonym for Monism, and which likens the