"The second thing that stands out prominently in the emotions produced by the disaster is that in moments of urgent need men and women turn for help to something entirely outside themselves.... To those men standing on the top deck with the boats all lowered, and still more when the boats had all left, there came the realization that human resources were exhausted and human avenues of escape closed. With it came the appeal to whatever consciousness each had of a Power that had created the universe. After all, some Power had made the brilliant stars above ... had made each one of the passengers with ability to think and act, with the best proof, after all, of being created--knowledge of their own existence; and now, if at any time, was the time to appeal to that Power. When the boats had left and it was seen the ship was going down rapidly, men stood in groups on the deck engaged in prayer, and later, as some of them lay on the overturned collapsible boat, they repeated together over and over again the Lord's Prayer.... And this was not because it was a habit.... It must have been because each one ... saw laid bare his utter dependence on something that had made him and given him power to think.... Men do practical things in times like that: they would not waste a moment on mere words if those words were not an expression of the most intensely real conviction of which they were capable. Again, like the feeling of heroism, this appeal is innate and intuitive, and it certainly has its foundation on a knowledge--largely concealed, no doubt--of immortality. I think this must be obvious: there could be no other explanation of such a general sinking of all the emotions of the human mind expressed in a thousand different ways by a thousand different people in favour of this single appeal."[97] 97: "The Loss of the _SS. Titanic_: Its Story and Its Lessons," by Lawrence Beasley, B. A. (Cantab.), Scholar of Gonville and Caius College, one of the survivors. Boston, 1912. The instinctive place and biological value of religion in human life, the restlessness and hunger of the soul without religion, show that it is not an excrescence upon human nature. The exclamation of a recent writer seems justified: "The age of scientific materialism is past.... The religious instinct has been adjudged normal."[98] 98: J. B. Carter: "The Religious Life of Ancient Rome," p. 95.